Melanie Klein Revisited

Pioneer and Revolutionary in the Psychoanalysis of Young Children

Susan Sherwin-White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781782203339
• eBook ISBN: 9780429916175
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

While much writing has been devoted, predominantly by contemporary Kleinian adult psychoanalysts, to the Kleinian and post Kleinian development of Klein's work, comparatively little has recently been written about the ongoing importance and character of Klein's clinical work for contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy or analysis with very small children (2 - 6 year olds). Little attention now seems to be paid to the revolutionary character of her work from the start (in the early 1920s) with this age group and its challenges, still relevant today, or to her recognition of the importance of mother-infant relations in the period long before World War II brought investigation into and understanding of problems of attachment, separation and loss. This book addresses these issues and re-explores Klein's work in these (and other) areas. This book is concerned primarily with Klein's work with pre-latency children and aims to give these small children more of the voice today that Melanie Klein herself discovered.

CHAPTER ONE

Early background

This chapter aims to give the reader a brief review of relevant biographical data on Melanie Klein’s upbringing, cultural background, education, and life prior to her career in psychoanalysis. It also outlines what might be called the pre-history of child analysis and the reasons behind its slow development.

The sources for Klein’s early childhood and adolescence consist of some surviving family letters, oral tradition (later colleagues’ anecdotes and reported conversations), and some 48 pages of autobiographical notes (PP/KLE/A.50) dictated by Klein, at the age of 77, in November 1959. This chapter uses the latter but first discusses their character and en passant some debateable use of them by Grosskurth, Klein’s only biographer to date (Grosskurth, 1986).

In the catalogue of Klein’s archives, cogently, this item is annotated “dictated incomplete autobiography”, possibly suggesting a title added after Klein’s death and recognizing the incomplete character of the surviving document, which comprises 48 pages of the old 10 × 8 inch typing paper. It is in no way a finished work but selected reminiscences of themes from Klein’s life: family and cultural background, sibling group, education, career in psychoanalysis, marriage, children, divorce, and her professional life and work resettled in England. It is repetitive and rather rambling (possibly the effect of dictation, as well as being “unfinished”). The manuscript comprises clearly selective (and mainly positive) notes on her life, as tends to be characteristic of an autobiographical genre. Associated papers reveal that part of the impetus for recording such matters was from American academics’ requests for information about Klein’s life and career while she was still alive (see O’Shaughnessy, 1987, and below). Grosskurth’s practice of constantly referring to this manuscript as Klein’s Autobiography is rather misleading, implying a finished product and one intended as a sort of official autobiography. Moreover, Grosskurth’s tendency to psychoanalyse her subject, without reliable evidential support, has been open to criticism (see Ingleby, 1987; O’Shaughnessy, 1987; Segal, 1986, p. 50).

Grosskurth (1986, p. 11) is also misleading in her suggestion that for her “autobiography” Klein had a model in Freud’s “Autobiographical Study” (Freud, 1925d [1924]), a paper written for a series on Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstanderstellung (translatable as Contemporary Medicine in Self-Portraits), designed for authors to give an account of their role in the making of contemporary medicine. Freud’s work is not an autobiography but a quite detailed account, primarily—as the series required—of his individual role in the origin and development of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory, listing many key publications. Klein does not do the equivalent, nor does she go into any detail about her theoretical contributions. Rather, she seems to focus on some important influences both in her personal and her professional life and on her achievements. The work is used in this chapter as a reflection of Klein’s own thoughts in old age about some key aspects and pivotal points in her life—inevitably selective, cautious, at times self-critical, politically careful, and, unlike Freud in his “Autobiographical Study” (e.g. Freud, 1925d [1924], p. 9), restrained about any anti-Semitism.

Family matters

Dr Moriz Reizes, Klein’s father, originated from Lemberg (now Lvov), Galicia (then part of the Austro–Hungarian empire, now in the Ukraine). Destined by his parents for a rabbinical career, he rebelled and, instead, studied medicine and qualified as a doctor. He also abandoned the orthodox marriage his parents had arranged for him “to a girl he had never seen”, which was short-lived and dissolved. Born in 1828, he was very much older than Klein’s mother, Libusa Deutsch (born 1852), who was from Warbok (Verbotz) in Slovakia. Klein’s father married Libusa in 1875, when she was 25 “and an extremely beautiful girl”. The couple then moved to Vienna, Klein’s birthplace, from Reizes’ home in Deutsch-Kreutz, a small town then within Hungary and about 70 miles from Vienna (Grosskurth, 1986, p. 6); there he set up a not very successful practice, the income from which his wife supplemented by unconventionally and adventurously opening a plant shop also selling “reptiles” (PP/KLE/A.50, p. 2). Money remained a problem. Her father, as Klein regretted, was elderly when she was born and evidently seemed to find it hard to be playful with her, openly favouring his firstborn child, Emilie, whom he designated his favourite, to Klein’s dismay:

My relation to my father was more complex, partly because he took, so I felt, relatively little interest in me and so often professed that my elder sister was his favourite. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 16]

The relation with my mother was, for some reason, much more vivid than the one with my father. I was the youngest and he was already in his fifties when I was born. He was an old fifty. I have no memories of his ever playing with me and he made it clear that he preferred my elder sister, the firstborn child. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 26]

These references to her father’s favouritism (for a third, see PP/KLE/A.50, p. 8) may emphasize Klein’s hurt rather than lack of editing and may also have contributed to her later awareness in clinical work of the difficulties of favouritism for siblings (see Sherwin-White, 2014, p. 45).

Klein’s mother came from a liberal and cultured Rabbinical family:

I have always been proud of the way in which she acquired her education. Her father was a rabbi in Deutsch-Kreutz. His grandfather was a very outstanding man. He was known all over the district for his knowledge and tolerance, being liberally-minded, quite different from the orthodoxy that characterised my father’s family. He had all the German philosophers on his shelves, unlike the attitude of the bigoted rabbis. There were three daughters, two of whom were beautiful, and they acquired their education by teaching themselves, by reading and I think probably also by discussions with their father. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 3]

This was a model for Klein’s own autodidactism, love of knowledge, and liberalism and a source of her strong dislike of Jewish orthodoxy (PP/KLE/A.50, pp. 4–5). As she notes, “my father came from a very orthodox Polish [Jewish] family” (p. 1); her parents were deeply attached “to the Jewish race”, and Klein notes her endorsement of their attitude, her own detachment from Zionism, and her lack of religious beliefs (pp. 6–7). She also underlines her sympathy with persecuted minorities and states that this may have helped her in her own struggles later as a minority with regard to her own psychoanalytic career and the opposition that it aroused.

Klein understandably missed the special role that a grandmother can play:

As far as my mother’s mother is concerned, I only know her photograph, which shows a lovely, friendly old lady, and I know that I longed for her to be living, because I never had a grandmother, and I knew that this was a nice, kind and pleasant woman. The whole impression I got, in contrast to my father’s family, was one of good family life, very simple in restricted circumstances, but full of interest in knowledge and education. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 4]

Later in life, she offered such a role affectionately to her own grandchildren (see Sherwin-White, 2017).

Klein, however, appreciated her father’s later support for her wish for an education at gymnasium and a career in medicine (p. 13; see below). He was a self-made man whose pursuit of education and culture Klein admired, as she did her mother’s; both presented an example that she was to follow.

Klein’s own sibling group

Klein moved on to describe her sibling group; she was the youngest of a group of four siblings: her eldest sister Emilie (b. 1876), brother Emanuel (b. 1977), and her middle sister Sidonie (b. 1878). As a very young child, she suffered the death (from a form of tuberculosis) of Sidonie—a sister whose support she chose to memorialize in her autobiographical notes:

I was wildly keen on knowledge, deeply ambitious and very hurt by their [her elder siblings’] being so superior to me. Sidonie, lying in bed, took pity on me, and she taught me the principles of counting and reading, which I picked up very quickly. It is quite possible that I idealise her a little, but my feeling is that, had she lived, we would have been the greatest friends and I still have a feeling of gratitude to her for satisfying my mental needs, all the greater because I think she was very ill at the time. She died when I was about 4½ and I have the feeling that I never got over the feelings of grief for her death. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 10]

Klein was also to lose her deeply loved brother, Emanuel, in 1902 (O’Shaughnessy, 1987, p. 133). It remains uncertain how much her personal experience of bereavement, of the conscious and unconscious reactions to the deaths of her two siblings, contributed to her later understanding of the process of mourning, including a surviving child’s feelings of triumph and painful guilt that were to be so well articulated in her future clinical papers. Grosskurth (1986, pp. 250ff), having noted the death in 1939 of Arthur, Klein’s divorced husband, then goes on to postulate that the case of Klein’s patient, Mrs A (Klein, 1940, pp. 355–361), is actually Klein’s disguised account of her own process of mourning the death of her son, Hans. Frank (2009, p. 17n.1) and John Steiner (1993, pp. 35–36, p. 35n.1) accept this, the latter writing that “Klein wrote this paper shortly after she lost her own son in a mountaineering accident, and it is clear that Mrs A of the paper was actually herself” (p. 36 n.1). However, the chronology alone does not work, since Klein’s son Hans—by then an adult—died in 1934, and it is evident that Grosskurth has elided the two deaths. Nevertheless, the account of the early stages of Mrs A’s mourning (she lost her son when he was a schoolboy) indicates how the death also stirred unconscious feelings of triumph she had felt, besides sorrow, when Mrs A’s own brother died (p. 357). In Klein’s case, her brother and sisters were an essential part of her early life and experience from infancy onwards (see Sherwin-White, 2014, p. 32).

Emanuel, like Sidonie, suffered from an incurable illness (a rheumatic heart condition), which, his family knew, would eventually kill him too at a young age. Fear of survival and the familiar difficulties suffered by the healthy siblings of sick ones were challenges for Klein too, and she recognized that as a result of Sidonie’s early death, “I felt that my mother needed me all the more now that Sidonie had gone, and it is probable that some of the spoiling was due to my having to replace that child” (PP/KLE/A.50, pp. 10–11). For Melanie, as the youngest child, the death of Sidonie seems thus to have thrown a shadow over her early childhood, with personal and familial concern whether she would safely reach Sidonie’s age and survive (for clinical exploration of the theme of the replacement child, see M. Reid, 2014, pp. 269–272). Emanuel’s illness and the uncertainty of his survival added further anxiety. Notable, too, is Klein’s choice to comment on her regret, in the cases of Sidonie and Emanuel (PP/KLE/A.50, pp. 11–12, 14), that medicine had not advanced sufficiently to find cures for their various conditions. It is speculative, but not implausible, that this repeated experience fostered Klein’s determination in her own field to pioneer analysis hitherto unavailable for young children with emotional illnesses, and to extend treatment for adult patients too (PP/KLE/A.50, p. 28).

Formal education

Klein enjoyed starting at her local school, a lyceum, “and was very happy there” (p. 24): “I was very ambitious. From the moment that I entered school it was very important to me to get the best possible marks, and that attitude, I remember, I had until I went to gymnasium” (PP/KLE/A.50, p. 36).

While at the lyceum, at “about 14” (PP/KLE/A.50, p. 22), Klein decided that she wanted to go to university and so needed to leave the lyceum and secure admission to the gymnasium, which she did apparently with the help of intensive coaching (including Greek and Latin) from her brother (PP/KLE/A.50). Klein had decided that she wanted to study medicine, like her father and her brother. Emanuel, however, was to interrupt his medical studies to pursue his literary and artistic pursuits and to travel, because, Klein believed, of his knowledge that he would die young—as he in fact did (p. 14).

Klein’s radical ambitiousness as a woman needs emphasis: what has up to now been ignored is that Vienna University admitted women as full students only from 1897, when Klein was 15, and then only for philosophy. Women were admitted to medical school from 1900, just in time for Klein—in theory—to benefit from this historic advance in women’s education in Austria. Both her parents were supportive of the plan, in keeping with their own educationally liberal outlook and belief in the importance of education. Klein alludes to the historic character of her plan for a university education in the notes she wrote in October 1959 for a Chicago doctor on some biographical details. With a different emphasis from the autobiographical notes, Klein wrote (in a two-page manuscript in the same archival bundle): “Between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, I decided to study for the University, which at that time was still regarded as a very advanced step; I attended the only school there which prepared girls for the University” (PP/KLE/A.50).

It is possible that some polemic lies behind Klein’s emphasis on her academic aspirations and study at the level of gymnasium, since in later psychoanalytic conflicts her opponents are said to have talked of her as “an uneducated woman” in an anachronistic and rather sexist slur (see Grosskurth, 1986, p. 14).

By contrast with Klein’s family, Freud and his wife had been conservative in the education of their daughters, all of whom were sent only to a lyceum and none to a gymnasium to prepare for entry to university (see Young-Bruehl, 1988, p. 52). As things turned out, due to a combination of financial pressures and Klein’s engagement and later marriage, she had reluctantly to abandon her ambition to study medicine, although for two years she still studied extra-mural classes in art and history:

I could not continue my studies, because there was not enough time to take a course in medicine, but I went to extra-mural classes in art and history [at Vienna University], feeling all the time that I was missing something terribly, my intended study of medicine and psychiatry. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 24]

Though unable to qualify in medicine herself, Klein and her husband did enable their daughter, Melitta, in due course to get through gymnasium and to study medicine and psychiatry in Berlin, fulfilling an ambition that Klein herself had had to forgo.

Marriage, endings, and beginnings

Klein became engaged to engineer Arthur Klein, her second cousin and a close friend of her brother, at the age of 17; she married him in 1903, the day after her 21st birthday. In this she considered herself immature in retrospect; but she accepted his proposal, albeit at a time of family financial difficulties, and fell in love with him too (p. 23). The marriage was said to be problematic from the start (Segal, 1979, p. 31). Unhappily, it had been preceded by two deaths: that of her father in 1900 and of Emanuel in 1902. Klein’s daughter was born 10 months after the marriage, in January 1904, and Hans three years later, in March 1907:

My first child, Melitta, was born on the 19th January, 1904, and I was very happy with her. I gave her much of my time and attention and she was very attached to me as well as to her nannie, who was a good Slovakian peasant woman. At that time I learnt Slovakian, and spoke it fluently. Melitta was a beautiful easy baby and soon showed herself to be very intelligent. My second child, Hans, was born on the 2nd March 1907, and developed very well. I also fed him, and we found that he was an extremely precocious child. At eighteen months he spoke fluently German, which I had started to speak with him, and Slovakian in such a way that he could turn from speaking with me in German to carrying on the conversation with her [the nanny] in Slovakian. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 40]

Clearly, Klein breastfed both Melitta and Hans (pace Grosskurth, 1986, p. 42).

Family correspondence confirms Klein’s unhappiness, revealing that she suffered from serious bouts of depression, especially during her pregnancy with Hans and its aftermath (Grosskurth, 1986, pp. 48ff). Klein’s husband, Arthur, who was at the start of a successful career, had to travel, and the couple moved from his family home in Rosenberg (now Ruzomberok), then in Hungary, where Klein enjoyed a warm and sustaining relationship with her parents-in-law and Arthur’s siblings, especially his sister Jolan, which was to last.

For the next few years, to 1909, they moved to different positions within the Austro-Hungarian empire, to small and, for Klein, uncongenial provincial towns: Krappitz in Slovakia, now Krapkowice (Poland) and, finally, Hermanetz. Probably because of his awareness of his wife’s extreme unhappiness in these small, culturally confined towns, Arthur did get a transfer to Budapest in about 1909, and the family settled there in 1910 (PP/KLE/A.50, p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD
• Introduction
• 1 Early background
• 2 Controversy and challenges in pioneering the analysis of very young children in the 1920s
• 3 Klein’s early pre-school and young child cases: the invention and development of a technique for child analysis
• 4 Restoring Klein’s concept of reparation in her early work
• 5 The negative transference and young children in analysis: new dimensions
• 6 The early stages of young-child analysis: Grete on the couch
• 7 Rita: the first very young child in psychoanalysis
• 8 Erna and her siblings: young-child analysis in the consulting room
• 9 Klein’s work with parents
• 10 Endings and outcomes
• APPENDIX
• REFERENCES
• INDEX