Melanie Klein was a pioneer of child analysis. Though there was work done in child analysis before her, starting with the analysis of Little Hans, and continued by such pioneers as Hug-Hellmuth, followed by Anna Freud, it is Melanie Klein who first evolved the setting and the technique for analyzing children of all ages, and with the minimum of parameters. At the time, other analysts considered children under 7 as unsuitable for analysis, and for older children they considered analytic methods and attitudes inappropriate, and combined it with educational an behavioral approaches. Klein was not only a pioneer in child analysis. Arising out of her work with children, and the discoveries she made in the process, she made a striking contribution to both the theory and the technique of psychoanalysis. These were, and still are, controversial, but in the eyes of many Klein's contribution was the first major new development since Freud. Her work, though not universally accepted, had a great influence both on the psychotherapy of children and on psychoanalysis in general. Her pupils ant the pupils of her pupils continued to develop and expand her work.
Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882. Her father, Dr Moriz Reizes, came from a strictly orthodox Jewish family, and was supposed to become a rabbi. However, he soon rebelled against orthodoxy, studied in secret, and went to the university, becoming first a doctor, then a dentist. He divorced his first wife, and at the age of over 40 he fell deeply in love with, and married, Libusa Deutsch, then aged 25. There were four children of the marriage: Emily, six years older than Melanie, Emmanuel, five years older, and Sidonie, about four years older. Melanie was the youngest. The family had many financial ups-and-downs which affected her childhood. Her relation to her father was not very close. He was well over 50 when she was born and had little patience with the small child. He also frequently and overtly expressed his preference for his eldest daughter, which Melanie naturally deeply resented. On the other hand, she was tremendously impressed and stimulated by her father's intellectual achievements. For instance, he taught himself ten European languages. He was also widely read, and, as Melanie grew older, was always ready to answer her many questions. He died when she was 18.
She had a far closer relation with her mother, whom she remembered as a woman much younger than her father, very beautiful, warm-hearted, courageous, and enterprising. Not only did she keep a shop-an unusual thing for a doctor's wife to do in those days-but, later, when Melanie was finishing school and her father became ailing and somewhat senile, it was her mother who supplemented the family income and kept the family together. She spent the last few years of her life in Melanie Klein's home, which was a great solace to Melanie at a generally unhappy time of her life. Libusa died in 1914. Melanie was deeply moved by the serenity and courage with which her mother approached death after a long-drawn-out illness, and often spoke of it in her old age.
Melanie's upbringing was liberal and easy-going, and she remembered her childhood as mostly serene and happy. Religion played little part in the family life.
Melanie was deeply marked by her relation to Sidonie and Emmanuel, both of whom died tragically young. She saw little of Sidonie, who suffered from scrofula and spent a good deal of her childhood in a hospital, but Melanie remembered vividly the last months of Sidonie's life, which she spent at home. Melanie, the youngest, was at that time often teased by the two elder children, and Sidonie took her under her wing. Sidonie taught her to read and to write. The little girl of 8 was very aware of her approaching death and she told Melanie that she wanted to pass on to her all she knew before dying. She died at the age of 9, when Melanie was about 5. She had a longer-lasting relation with her brother, Emmanuel, and she considered it as being most formative for her. An exceptionally talented young man, who played the piano and wrote essays and poetry, he began to study medicine but abandoned it because of ill-health. When Melanie was 9 or 10, he saw a poem of hers which he liked, and from then on they developed a close friendship which lasted until his death in his mid-20s. When she was 14, Melanie decided that she wanted to go to the university and study medicine. To do that she had to move from the lyceum, which gave only a superficial education, to the gymnasium, which prepared for the mature and the university. It was her brother who coached her in the Greek and Latin needed to pass her entrance examination. As she grew a little older, he introduced her to his circle of friends, a very lively intellectual group in which Melanie blossomed. He was rebellious and fought a great deal with his father. It says something for the intellectual atmosphere of the house that the worst row which Melanie remembered between her father an her brother had to do with their disagreement on the relative merits of Goethe and Schiller, her father screaming with fury that Goethe was a mountebank with scientific pretensions.
Emmanual suffered from a rheumatic heart condition, and he, like Sidonie, was aware of impending death. He once wrote to Melanie that he wished fate would give her as many happy years as the days it was going to deprive him of. He had a great confidence in her talents and always predicted a great future for her. She, on her side, admired him deeply.
The deaths of these two siblings, especially, perhaps, that of Emmanuel, contributed not a little to the lasting streak of depression which was part of Melanie's personality. At the same time, they both stimulated her intellectual interests and gave her a feeling of having almost a duty to seek development and achievement.
It was through her brother that Melanie had met her future husband, Arthur Stephen Klein. Her engagement to him at the age of 19 interfered with her plans to study medicine, as her future husband, an engineer, would have to travel to various factories and could not remain in Vienna. She spent the two years of her engagement studying humanities at Vienna University. All her life she regretted not having studied medicine, believing that if she had had a medical degree her views would have been listened to with more respect. This feeling became particularly acute at the time of her controversy with Edward Glover, a prominent British psychoanalyst. Glover originally supported her work with children an considered it to be a major contribution to psychoanalysis, but when she developed her theories about the origin of psychosis he took great exception to the fact that a lay person with no medical knowledge should talk at all about psychosis.
Melanie married at the age of 21, and for several years lived with her husband in small towns, first in Slovakia, then in Silesia. It was an unhappy time. She missed the intellectual company and stimulation she had enjoyed in Vienna, and the marriage was from the beginning full of problems. She turned to reading and learning languages, but her only true happiness was with her two children, Melitta, born in 1904, and Hans, born in 1907.
Her life changed considerably when in 1910 her husband at last worked in Budapest. There she found the intellectual companionship she wanted and, even more important, it was there that she first encountered Freud's work. In Vienna, although she moved in literary and artistic circles, she had never heard of Freud. In Budapest, she came across Freud's popularizing book On Dreams. Thus began her life-long interest in psychoanalysis. To study psychoanalysis, practice it, contribute to it, became the ruling passion of her life. She sought analysis with Ferenczi, and with his encouragement started to analyze children. In 1917 she was introduced to Freud at a meeting between the Austrian and Hungarian Societies. She read her first paper, "The Development of a Child," to the Hungarian [Psychoanalytic] Society in 1919, and on the strength of that paper became a member of the Budapest Society. She stayed in Budapest until 1919, when her third child, Eric, was five years old. She then separated from her husband, who went to work in Sweden, whilst she spent a year with her parents-in-law in Slovakia. The separation was a prelude to the divorce which occurred in 1922. In 1920, at a psychoanalytic congress in The Hague, Melanie Klein had met Karl Abraham, and was deeply impressed by him. He himself spoke encouragingly of her work in child analysis, which prompted her in 1921 to move to Berlin. There she established a psychoanalytical practice with adults as well as children. She was not satisfied with the results of her analysis with Ferenczi, and in 1924 she persuaded Abraham to take her on as a patient. Abraham was generally averse to analyzing colleagues resident in Berlin, but he was convinced of the importance and the potential of her contribution to psychoanalysis. At the First Congress of German Analysts in 1924, in summing up Mrs Klein's paper on the Erna case, he said "The future of psychoanalysis lies in play techniques." He agreed to make an exception and undertook to analyze her. This analysis was abruptly interrupted by Abraham's death only fourteen months later.
Melanie Klein's relation to each of her two analysts was different. She felt grateful to Ferenczi for the encouragement he gave to her work and she also felt that she derived from his analysis a conviction about the importance of unconscious dynamics. But Ferenczi did not analyze the negative transference and she felt that this analysis gave her no lasting insight. Also, Ferenczi gradually abandoned the analytic technique and devised "active techniques." He gave up the role of the analyst as a neutral interpreter, and actively encouraged, reassured, or directed the patient. This eventually led to a an acute disagreement with Freud. Klein, from the start, opposed those developments as being out of keeping with psychoanalytical principles and she grieved for Ferenczi. For Abraham she had unmitigated gratitude and admiration. The fourteen months' analysis she had with him gave her, she thought, a true understanding of psychoanalysis. His premature death was one of the great losses of her life. But she was determined to continue his work. She started an intense and regular self-analysis which she carried on for many years. Although she took from Ferenczi the concept of introjection, Abraham's work, particularly on melancholia, was the more important influence. She considered herself his pupil and her work a contribution and development of Freud's and Abraham's.
After Abraham's death, life in Berlin became difficult for Melanie Klein. Not only was the loss of Abraham and the interruption of her analysis a deep grief, but also, lacking his support, she found her work in Berlin under constant attack. Anna Freud had started work with children at about the same time as Melanie Klein, but their approach was different and there was considerable controversy and conflict between the two. The Berlin Society in the main followed Anna Freud and considered Mrs Klein's work "unorthodox." In 1925 Klein met Ernest Jones at a conference in Salzburg, where she gave her first paper on the technique of child analysis, a paper which was very controversial. Jones was impressed by this paper and concurred with Abraham's statement that the future of psychoanalysis rested with child analysis. Stimulated by the opinion of Alix Strachey, who had been in analysis with Abraham in Berlin, and of Joan Riviere, who from the beginning took an interest in Melanie Klein's work, Jones invited Klein to give some lectures on child analysis in England. So in 1925, in the house of Dr Adrian Stephen, she gave six lectures which formed the basis of the initial part of The Psvcho-Analysis of Children, her first book. The three weeks in which she gave these lectures she considered one of the happiest times of her life.
In 1927 Melanie Klein established herself in England, where she was to remain until she died. This was a decision that she never regretted. Though she had difficulties, and there were controversies in the British Psycho-Analytic Society, unavoidable in view of the revolutionary nature of her work, she felt that by-and-large she had had a better reception and more support in the British Society than she would have found anywhere else. She also became deeply attached to England as the country of her adoption. She brought with her youngest son, Eric, then 13, and a few years later Melitta, who had married Dr Walter Schmideberg, also came to London. Both were doctors and practicing psychoanalysts. Her eldest son, Hans, following his father's footsteps, became an engineer and remained in Berlin.
Melanie Klein's work with children started when she was in analysis with Ferenczi. The first child she analyzed was her youngest son, Eric. Noticing his intellectual inhibitions, and lack of curiosity, she first tried to give him a psychoanalytic upbringing, then very much in vogue. She soon realized that this was not effective against the boy's resistance and inhibitions, and she started to analyze him, following the example of Little Hans's father. Her fist paper, "The Development of a Child" (1921), is based on this experience.
In those days, analyzing one's own children was common. In fact Freud wrote that maybe only a father could analyze a child. Both Jung and Freud analyzed their daughters. It is partly Klein's own work, and understanding of the complex nature of the transference, that made it clear that children should not be analyzed by relatives any more than adults are. Her youngest patient she analyzed at her own home to begin with, and using her own toys. But she very quickly realized that in order to do truly analytical work one must give children a truly analytical setting, corresponding to that of the adult setting.
Between 1919 and 1925 she established the principles of the setting for and technique of child analysis. As it stands now, those principles are applied to all those who continue her work. The setting and the technique are as follows.
First, the setting. The child, like the adult, has a strictly defined time, regular fifty-minute sessions five times a week. The room is adapted for the children's needs: it has running water, suitable working table and chairs, no extra furniture that could be damaged, available cleaning materials etc., shared by all children. Each child also has his or her own box or drawer containing his own individual toys.
Klein's stroke of genius was the understanding of the significance of the child's play. The idea of play with children was not entirely new. Hug-Hellmuth occasionally used play and wrote about it. So did Anna Freud. No analyst, however, before Klein, had seen that understanding the play could be the basis of a technique which rendered possible the analysis of a child. Melanie Klein writes:
Not only did Klein understand the importance of play, but, and D.W. Winnicott considered it her greatest contribution, she intuitively used very small toys, which lend themselves particularly well to represent the internal world. Klein used the child's play, his or her behavior, as well as verbal communications, as more or less equivalent to an adult's free associations. Her interpretative technique was based, as with the adult, predominantly on the transference, and by transference I do not mean here-and-now interpretations, but suitable links being made between the here-and-now, the child's inner world of phantasies, and its links with external reality, present and past. Klein used no educational methods, gave no instructions, nor reassurances. This approach to child analysis was very new; at variance with the prevalent psychoanalytical ethos in relation to children; very controversial; and, to begin with, under great attack. The prevalent analytic view was that strict analytic technique was not applicable to children, for various reasons. For instance, that the children's ego was too fragile; that there could be no true transference because, in Anna Freud's words, the "first edition", the attachment to the parents, was still not out of date. Eventually a basic controversy developed between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein on the whole basis and technique of child analysis.
This became clear, and came to a head, in 1927, in her discussion with Anna Freud in the Symposium on Child Analysis. To the argument that children are not analyzable, Klein answers that you cannot analyze unless you preserve the psychoanalytical setting, and she therefore considers that if you use educational, and other behavioral, methods, then the children are unanalyzable because they are not confronted with the analytical attitude and setting. As to the transference, her experience was that the transference also develops in an adequate setting. And the first edition being out of date does not affect it, since the transference is not a one-to-one transference of the attitude to the real parents, but is a projection on to the analyst of internal figures, internalized in the past and distorted by projections. In contrast to the current view that small children have a weak and unformed superego, she had discovered in the analysis of small children that, on the contrary, the superego of a young child is terrifying, based on early persecutory experiences and phantasies. So that in the analysis of children, as in that of adults, it was not a question of strengthening the superego, as Anna Freud advocated, by educational methods or otherwise, but on the contrary of modifying its severity and thereby helping its integration. She therefore put strong emphasis on analyzing the negative transference as well as the positive one, in contrast to the prevalent culture, in which it was considered that a long preparatory period is needed with the child, in which a positive transference is fostered in order to form a therapeutic alliance. Klein found that the therapeutic alliance arises out of the relief obtained by analyzing the negative as well as the positive transference, an that using any methods to court a positive transference falsifies the process. Whilst most analysts considered at that time that children under 7 were unanalyzable, and children over 7 had to be treated in a special way, she found that children under 7 were accessible to analysis-her youngest patient being 2-and-three-quarters. And it is those early analyses which gave her insight into the existence of an early severe superego. Far from thinking that the child's ego was too fragile to stand analysis, Klein thought that relieving a child's anxieties, and analyzing the terrifying figures in his or her unconscious, promoted the growth and strength of the ego.
The analysis of small children gave her insight into the extent to which the child's mind was dominated by unconscious phantasies, and the existence in the child's mind of a complex internal world of internal objects, formed by both projection and introjection. This insight into the child's inner life enabled her to recognize also the inner world still existing in the adult. Where Freud discovered the child in the adult, through her analysis to begin with of children Klein discovered the infant in the child, and therefore in the depth of the unconscious of the adult.
In psychoanalytical work, technique and theory are intertwined. It was Freud's theory of child development that prompted Melanie Klein to develop a technique based on Freudian theory. But in turn her discoveries influenced her technique. For instance, the technique led to the discovery of the richness of the child's symbolism in play, but the theoretical understanding had an influence on her technique. Her work with children confirmed first-hand some of Freud's views of childhood, which were in a way theoretical since they were based mainly on the analysis of adults. She had first-hand evidence confirming Freud's hypothesis of infantile sexuality, oral, anal, and genital libidinal trends; the existence of an internal superego figure; etc. But she gradually came to differ from Freud's view on several points. For instance, on the timing of the Oedipus complex she found evidence that the Oedipus complex existed in very small children and had pregenital as well as genital features. She also came to disagree with the view that the superego came relatively late in development and was an "heir to the Oedipus complex." She suggested that the superego had its roots in the earliest experiences in the first oral phase. She also differed with Freud in the area of female sexuality, and the status of the phallic phase. She found no evidence of any phase in which the child would have no notion of the vagina. She considered the phallic structure as a defensive structure against the intolerable fact of different generations, genders, and parental sexuality, a phallic mother from that point of view being a defensive structure against an awareness of parental intercourse.
But, more broadly, she extended Freud's view of phantasy. She considered phantasy to exist from the beginning, as well as object relationships both in reality and in phantasy. And she attributed greater weight to those early relationships as being formative of the basic personality structure. She saw the genital Oedipus complex as being the final stage of a very long and complex story of evolution of object relationships; but also that certain mechanisms, like projection and introjection which, according to Freud, come later than repression, Klein observed as being powerful and very primitive. In fact, the only discovery of Klein that Freud referred to in a favorable way was in a footnote, in which he says he agrees with Klein and the English school that the superego does not reflect real severity of parents, but is distorted by projections.
The emphasis that Klein puts on phantasy, and the way she expanded Freud's concept, is inevitably accompanied by an extension of his concept of unconscious symbolism, since phantasy expresses itself in symbolic forms. Jones sees symbolism as appearing when sublimation fails. Freud wavers on the issue. Klein considered that symbolism is part-and-parcel of sublimation, as well as of pathology if things go wrong.
From the beginning of her work she paid a great deal of attention to the epistemophilic instinct and inhibitions of curiosity and intellectual development. In a way that is the way she started-with Eric's intellectual inhibitions. In her work with children, amply illustrated in her work on intellectual inhibitions, she came to the view that the major source of inhibition is the vicissitudes of the relation of the child to its mother's body. The child wants to explore its mother's body, but this exploration is full of anxiety because it is so ambivalent. The child therefore displaces its curiosity onto the external world, which symbolizes its mother's body.
In 1930 Klein wrote a seminal paper on "The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego." This paper is significant in many ways. It is the first analysis of an autistic child (he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, as at that time the syndrome of autism had not yet been described). It is also basic in relation to the understanding of symbol formation and its role in cognitive development. In that paper Klein describes the little boy who in his phantasy made such a sadistic attack on the inside of his mother's body that it became an object of horror and such paralyzing anxiety that it could not be symbolized in the external world. All symbol-formation came to a stop, and with it all the interest in the world. This work of Klein's opened the whole area pursued later by others, of the relation between inner processes and cognitive development, and the whole area of inhibition or deformation in the development of the capacity to symbolize-central to the understanding particularly of psychosis.
The differences that developed between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein about the technique of child analysis went well beyond the problems created by analyzing children. It became apparent that those differences were linked to quite fundamental disagreements about both child development and analytical technique. After 1925, when Melanie Klein came to London there developed a distinctive difference between what had become the Vienna School and the English School of psychoanalysis. In order to clarify the theoretical differences, and try to bring the two developments of Freud closer together, Ernest Jones arranged a series of exchange lectures between Vienna and London. The controversies came to a head when a large number of Viennese analysts, including Freud himself, came to London just before the Second World War. And they culminated in a series of controversial discussions held in the British Society during the War. The aim of the discussion was to clarify the position of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein respectively and try to find both a common ground and areas of disagreement.
By the time of the discussions, Melanie Klein had developed her ideas much further. She had already formulated her concept of the depressive position, which became the cornerstone of her understanding of psychic life.
Her early work led her to certain clinical discoveries. For instance, she saw that the splitting appears very early as a mechanism in the child's mind, and that the mechanisms of projection and introjection accompanying the splitting result in the creation of a very complex internal world, even in a very small child. She saw the importance of early part-object relationships, already noticed by Abraham but never deeply investigated. As I have said, she had described both an earlier concept of the Oedipus complex and the roots of an early, very savage, superego connected with part-object introjections. But it was only with her description of the depressive position that Klein's early discoveries could be brought together to give a picture of the child's mental development.
Two papers on the subject, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States" (1935) and "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States" (1940) introduced the concept, relating both to the normal development of infants and to pathological development. To summarize the view she propounds in these papers: Melanie Klein considers that there is a crucial step in the infant's development when he recognizes his mother as what she termed a "whole object." This is the time the baby starts recognizing his mother and sees her as a real, separate, person. With that recognition there is a fundamental change in the whole mental attitude of the child. Omnipotence diminishes; and there is a recognition of one's dependence on another human being, seen as a proper person. The egocentric, narcissistic attitude, in which the infant conceives of objects in relation to himself being good for one or persecuting to one, gives way to the relationship to another person seen as having her own feelings, problems, and relations to other people as well as oneself. Towards that person, on whom he depends completely, the infant experiences acute ambivalence. When splitting diminishes he recognizes that he loves and hates one and the same person. With that recognition goes guilt about the hatred and fear of losing the object through one's own aggression. This becomes the basis of a different kind of superego than the savage, hated, and hateful, figure on the part-object level. This situation leads to feeling of pining for the lost object, of the capacity to mourn the loss, and is the basis of normal mourning. But as the situation is full of pain and anxiety of loss it also can mobilize powerful manic defenses. But alongside these, another mechanism develops which cannot be properly called a mechanism of defense, since it is not based on denial of the problem, characteristic of defenses, but on the recognition of a problem and a new way of dealing with it: that is reparation. According to Klein, reparative impulses play a large part in good human relationships and are also the basis of all sublimation.
It is also implicit in Klein's definition of the depressive position that the Oedipus complex should start at the same time; since in this whole world associated with recognizing mother as a whole object, a relation to father is recognized for what it is. So both the ambivalent attacks on mother and the reparative impulses towards her are soon extended to the parental couple in an Oedipal constellation.
The Controversial Discussions centered mainly on the different views about early object relationships and the status of phantasy. Klein's view of phantasy was conceptualized and very clearly described by Susan Isaacs in her paper "The Nature and Function of Phantasy," still a classic in psychoanalytic literature. The tone of the controversies was unfortunately generally hostile and embittered, since the opponents of Melanie Klein wanted to establish that she was not a Freudian analyst and that her theories and techniques were incompatible with Freud's. Melanie Klein, on the contrary, considered that her developments sprang directly from Freud and continued his work.
In her introduction to New Developments in Psycho-Analysis, which contains the main Kleinian papers presented at the Controversies, Joan Rivi?re makes the point that both sides quoted Freud amply, but that the quotations of Anna Freud's followers were mainly from Freud before 1920, whilst those of the Kleinian papers were from Freud after 1920. And indeed it is so: Klein's work is very much rooted in Freud's structural theory of mind, with the importance it gives to the internal object, the superego; and in his emphasis on the conflict between love and hate, after he introduced the concept of the death instinct.
By that time, however, that those papers were published in New Developments, a new paper was added by Klein, "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms." Her theory went a step further from the time that Controversial Discussions took place. When Klein spoke of the depressive position, it was not clear how she visualized what went on before, though she described the complex relationships to internal part-objects. But it was only with her paper on "Schizoid Mechanisms" that she gave a more coherent view of infantile development. She calls the phase preceding the depressive position the paranoid-schizoid position. In her view, the infant, from the moment of birth, is faced with both the impact of reality and the conflict within, between the life and death instincts. In the new situation of being confronted with needs and desires, and phantasies of wish-fulfilling part-objects, the infant has two conflicting reactions. One is libidinal to search for the object of satisfaction-and is the basis of love and libidinal desires. The second, described by Freud as the death instinct, is the wish to annihilate those desires, that is, both oneself and the desired object. Freud says that the infant deals with the death instinct by deflecting it outwards. In Klein's view this deflection is a project into the object, creating a bad object, full pf projected hate: hateful and hated.
So, emerging into the chaos produced by birth, the infant organizes its world by splitting love from hate and creating good and bad objects, to correspond to the hateful and loved parts of the personality. This situation gives rise to acute paranoid anxieties. The infant's aim is to acquire, possess, unite with, an ideal object, and this is under constant threat by what the infant perceives as bad objects attacking both the ideal breast and the loving self. There are many defenses against such paranoid fears, such as idealization, denial, reinforcement of splitting, and others. Fragmentation plays a large role.
In that paper, Klein describes a new mechanism, that of projective identification. Projection is a mechanism, but, as Susan Isaacs made clear in her paper, "On Phantasy," the mechanism is an abstraction in the observer's mind. In the subject's mind a mechanism is a phantasy. Projective identification occupies only a few lines in the generally very short paper. Yet it is one of Klein's most seminal clinical concepts, and one almost universally accepted by analysts of various schools of thought. Projective identification is a phantasy of projecting the whole, or a part of, oneself into another object, taking possession of it, and attributing to the object one's own characteristics. The motives for projective identification are varied, like the wish to possess an ideal object and fuse with it; or getting into the bad object to attack or take over its assumed power; and many others; in particular it abolishes separateness. And this mechanism continues in the depressive position, and much of what Klein had described earlier about the relation to the mother's body can be linked with projective identification. For instance, in the case of Dick, he attacked in his phantasy his mother's body, but he also projected into her things felt as an evil part of himself, so that he could not explore any further and had to withdraw all his interest from her. Thus his symbol-formation was in fact impeded by projective identification. (Later work, for instance, my own "Notes on Symbol-Formation," turns in the direction of showing that symbolism based on projective identification leads to concretization and inability to think, whilst symbolism, which evolves in the depressive position, is linked with relinquishing the object and reconstructing it in phantasy in a reparative way. It is a precipitate of mourning.
Klein's paper "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms" gives a stimulus to psychoanalytic work with psychotics. Soon after its publication, Rosenfeld and I published papers on analysis of schizophrenics, soon to be followed by W. Bion.
Klein speaks of "positions" rather than phases of development, to emphasize that she is speaking not only of a fixation to a libidinal zone, but of a whole way of organizing one's inner world and personality, and the way one perceives and relates to the real external world beginning with a recognition of a separate mother. Also, the depressive position is never completely achieved, and one's mental live oscillates between the two positions, pathology being often linked with regressing from the depressive position and falling back into a paranoid-schizoid organization.
One could think that with the formulation of the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive position Klein had completed a cogent and coherent theory of mental growth and development: extending, in some way changing, but not incompatible with any of Freud's work.
However, there was yet another discovery to come, in the last years of her life. This is the discovery of the crucial importance of primitive envy, and this has become extremely controversial, even amongst some who agreed with Klein's theory of the two positions. It seems that the thought that envy could be early and primary, and directed from the start at the maternal breast, under the aegis of the death instinct, was an idea hard to tolerate. Envy is very connected with the pathology of the paranoid-schizoid position. Hatred attacks the bad object, but envy is directed at the ideal object, and interferes with the original splitting which enables the infant to have an ideal object, which is the basis of what in the depressive position becomes a more integrated good-and-bad object. Since it is the ideal object that is attacked in envy, it leads to a constant confusion between what is good and what is bad, and endless, often psychotic, confusional states. In the depressive position, excessive envy makes reparation very difficult, both because of the magnitude of the guilt, and because the object, once repaired, becomes again an object of envious attacks.
Since Klein, a great deal of work has been done by her pupils and followers on the transition between the paranoid and the depressive position, and the important role that is played in its pathology by the factor of envy.
[Paper written by Dr Hanna Segal for the Romanian edition of The Writings of Melanie Klein in four volumes. Reprinted with permission of Esf Publishers, Binghamton, New York.]