Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work

Hugh Follett was a social worker living in Stoney Creek, Ontario.

Phyllis Grosskurth, winner of the Governor-General’s Award in 1965 for her biography of Havelock Ellis, teaches in the English department of the University of Toronto. This meticulous, exhaustive chronicle of the turbulent life of one of child psychology’s least recognized pioneers adds lustre to her international reputation as a biographer.

Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882. To escape from a family life full of personality conflicts and money troubles, she resorted to an ill-suited marriage and motherhood, neither of which satisfied her creative potential. She sank into invalidism and depression, unrelieved until in 1914 she happened to read Sigmund Freud’s paper “On Dreams” (published in 1901), which struck a resounding chord. Immediately she began analysis with Sandor Ferenczi, a brilliant Hungarian who encouraged her to study child behavior. Practically, but most improperly from an ethical standpoint, she sometimes used her own two sons and daughter as subjects, merely changing their names in the papers she presented before various psychoanalytic bodies in Europe and in England, where she went to live permanently in 1926.

Klein’s most important contributions to child analysis were her efforts to release children from the burdens of guilt and shame they bore for feeling hatred and anger toward the most important and beloved people in their lives, their parents. In case after case, she observed an immediate reduction in anxiety in disturbed children after these feelings were brought out into the open through play therapy. Even the redoubtable Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund, herself a specialist in child analysis, was not able to reconcile herself to the realization that emotions of such ferocity could exist in tiny children to the extent that Klein could. Klein also did important work with two other concepts, the “death instinct” and the Oedipus complex.

Klein’s methods were constantly under attack. Grosskurth points out that “her critics often described her as ‘intuitive’ rather than ‘scientific,’ and sometimes ‘deductive’ rather than ‘inductive,’ but the distinction is far more complex than that” (p. 195). One very skeptical colleague, Dr. David Slight, was forced to concede that, “she opened my mind” (p. 190).

Klein’s personal life was tumultuous. One of its sad ironies was that relations between her and her own children were strange and strained. Her brilliant daughter Melitta eventually became one of her most implacable professional enemies. In private and public life Klein provoked extreme reactions, whether admiring or condemnatory.

Klein’s secretiveness and confusing habit of romanticizing the facts of her life in her writings make her a difficult subject for the biographer. The twists and turns of her complex and paradoxical nature have been most ably explored in this comprehensive work.