Melanie Klein

Not surprisingly, the biography of Melanie Klein¹ reveals that the childhood experienced by this discoverer of the “object-mother” and of matricide was dominated by the imposing figure of her own mother, Libussa Deutsch.

Libussa, a black-haired beauty, intelligent and well educated, came from a family of learned and tolerant rabbis in Slovakia. She played the piano and learned French; her brother Hermann, who became a successful lawyer and who played an important role in the life of the Reizes family, attended a Jesuit school. At twenty-four years of age, Libussa met Moriz Reizes in Vienna and then married him. Moriz, a Polish Jew from a rigidly orthodox family in Galicia and a man twenty-four years her senior, was a general practitioner, a rather unimpressive one at that, who worked in Deutsch-Kreutz, a small Hungarian border town about seventy miles from the couple’s home in Vienna. Libussa and Moriz’s union, a poor match because of their differences in age, status, and culture (Libussa’s family, wealthier and better educated than Moriz’s, was also dominated by a “pattern of matriarchy”²), does not appear to have been a marriage of love.

In Klein’s brief Autobiography, which was written between 1953 and 1959 (and which remains the unpublished property of the Melanie Klein Trust), the psychoanalyst offers a vision of her life that is dramatically modified, if not idealized. She claims to have been fascinated by the scholarly atmosphere that pervaded the Deutsch family and to have admired her father’s independent thinking that enabled him to defy the Hasidim and to embark on the study of medicine, and she also remained in awe of his command of ten languages! At the same time, Klein described her “revulsion” toward the ritual kaftan worn by her father’s sister, and she did not hide her “scorn” for the Yiddish spoken by the Slovakian Jews on her mother’s side of the family.

Libussa and Moriz had three children—Emilie, Emanuel, and Sidonie—before moving to Vienna and giving birth to Melanie. Emilie, Moriz’s favorite, was envied by her youngest sister; Emanuel was the genius of the family and was close to Melanie; and Sidonie, the best-looking of the children and her mother’s favorite, died of tuberculosis when she was eight years old and Melanie only four: “I remember that I felt that my mother needed me all the more now that Sidonie was gone, and it is probable that some of the spoiling was due to my having to replace that child.”³

A “beautiful Jewish princess,” Melanie appears to have been given much love during her childhood, and she became the favorite of her mother’s brother and of Libussa herself after Sidonie’s death.⁴ On the other hand, Melanie admitted that she never understood her father because of his age, but also, most likely, because of his modest social status. Moriz served as a medical consultant in a music hall, a position that he loathed, as did his wife, who appears to have been unsatisfied with his predicament. The family’s financial woes forced Libussa to open a shop, a rather odd pursuit for the wife of a doctor. She sold plants as well as reptiles, which resonates with what Klein later considered to be the fantasy of the mother’s body, teeming with horrible “bad objects” that are anal or phallic. None of this inhibited our heroine, who said she was “absolutely never shy” and who claimed to have been “fired by ambition”: she intended to study medicine (like her father) and, more curiously, to specialize in psychiatry—a most unusual goal for a girl, let alone a Jewish one! Propelled by a genuine intellectual fervor, Melanie made her brother into her “confidant,” her “friend,” and her “teacher,” and she grew at his side, which filled the young man with pride.⁵

Although Melanie was an assimilated Jew and never subscribed to Zionism, she felt deeply Jewish, as did her family, and she acknowledged that she had been acutely aware of her marginality in a Catholic Vienna that did not refrain from persecuting the Jewish minority. Melanie’s family maintained Jewish ritual celebrations; she recalled that they celebrated Passover and the Day of Atonement, although she added that she could have never lived in Israel. Significantly, Klein remembered her mother’s own recollection of a student with whom she had apparently been in love and who declared, on his deathbed, “I shall die very soon and I repeat that I do not believe in any god.”⁶ In that sense, it is entirely inaccurate to assert, as some have done, that psychoanalysis took the place of this absent god to whom Melanie was “converted” as were so many other secular Jews before her. On the contrary, it was by accompanying the catastrophe of meaning as reflected in psychoanalytic experience that Melanie Klein, like some others, was able to articulate the fundamentals of nihilism and of religious belief and depression as well as reparation in an effort to deconstruct them all.

The “strong incestuous overtones”⁷ that imbued the Reizes family were particularly pronounced in the relationship between Melanie and Emanuel. Emanuel, stricken with heart disease that stemmed from a childhood bout of scarlet fever, knew his days were numbered. Accordingly, he abandoned medical school for a life devoted to literature and travel. Ill and in debt, he explored Italy while keeping up a correspondence up with his mother and his sister, who responded with letters of her own that were replete with amorous sentiments and sexual connotations. It was this desperate relationship between twin souls, one in which brother and sister sought a passion that exceeded the bounds of friendship, that provided a backdrop for … Melanie’s subsequent marriage.

Melanie was seventeen years old in 1899, when she met Arthur Stevan Klein, a second cousin on Libussa’s side and a friend of Emanuel’s. Arthur, for his part, was twenty-one years old and was a student of chemical engineering at the prestigious Swiss Federal Technical High School in Zurich. Libussa considered him to be a good match and perhaps even the most promising of Klein’s suitors, and Emanuel was more impressed by him than was Melanie herself. Klein would later attribute her marriage less to love than to the pull of Arthur’s “passionate temperament.”

The following year, Melanie’s father, Moriz Reizes, died of pneumonia. What the family considered “senility” was a form of degeneration that was likely due to a case of Alzheimer’s disease that had been festering for years. Emanuel later died in Genoa, the victim of heart failure—unless, that is, he killed himself accidentally.⁸

Still overwhelmed by the mourning for her brother that shook her to her very foundations, Melanie got married on March 31, 1903, the day after her twenty-first birthday. According to a patently autobiographical story that she wrote later on (around 1913), she apparently felt nothing but disgust for sex. Her revulsion was probably linked to her feeling of having betrayed her brother, Emanuel. As her heroine, Anna, puts it, “And does it therefore have to be like this, that motherhood begins with disgust?”⁹

Arthur, who soon became unfaithful, went on frequent business trips and gradually began to distance himself from Melanie. At first the young woman occupied herself with publishing her brother’s writings; in her Autobiography she expresses her thanks to Arthur for having helped her … retrieve Emanuel’s manuscripts! Although Melanie believed that this marriage is what “made [her] unhappy” and that Emanuel himself may have realized that she was “doing the wrong thing”¹⁰ by marrying her cousin, she remained close to her in-laws.

The Kleins were assimilated Jews: Arthur’s father, Jakob Klein, who was merely a nominal member of the synagogue, managed the local bank and served as the mayor of Rosenberg (a small town with a population of about eight thousand in what was then the Hungarian province of Liptau) and as a senator for the town. Arthur attended a Jesuit school, as did Melanie’s maternal uncle. The newlyweds settled in Rosenberg before Melanie gave birth—in 1904, and after feeling “miserably nauseated”—to her first child, Melitta, who unfortunately was not a boy as Libussa had wished (!)¹¹ Hans was born in 1907, and Erich in 1914.

The entire existence of the new Klein family was subject to the iron rule of Libussa. A possessive and abusive mother, Libussa sent letters offering advice before she eventually moved in with the young couple, asked for financial assistance, and even accompanied them in their travels to Italy. She deemed her daughter to be immature and neurasthenic and overwhelmed her with supervision to the point of taking the place of … “Frau Klein”: “Libussa wanted to have a very special place in her daughter’s life, and she proposed a curiously oblique way in which Melanie could communicate with her so that Arthur would not read the letter: simply by addressing it to Frau Melanie Klein.” Under these conditions, Arthur became “difficult” and suffered from “nerves” and stomach complaints. Melanie’s own illnesses were only aggravated in turn, as she suffered from “irritability,” “depressive exhaustion,” and a “paralyzing depression.”¹² This atmosphere took its greatest toll on little Melitta: her grandmother favored Hans, and drummed into her the image of her mother as an “emotional cripple” who had to be separated from her husband as long as possible and then dispatched to treatments and various vacations and holidays: “Libussa wanted Melanie out of the way. She tried to create situations in which husband and wife saw each other as seldom as possible…. It infuriated her to think that Arthur was making private plans with his wife, and in subtle ways she discouraged him from writing to her.”¹³

Melanie first tried to escape this hell by forming friendships with other women. She grew close to her husband’s sister, Jolan Klein-Vágó, who impressed her with her stability and her warm sensitivity, and to Klara Vágó, the sister of Jolan’s husband, Gyula. She was extremely jealous, on the other hand, of her sister Emilie’s emotional depth and sexual freedom—or at least of what she considered to be such. We will encounter this same passion for the female in Klein’s subsequent psychoanalytic theories, as well as in the professional skirmishes she had with her female disciples and adversaries.

As might be expected, Melanie’s emotional difficulties were accompanied with spiritual doubts and religious crises. The much admired Jolan became a devout Roman Catholic, as did the other members of the Vágó family. At that point Melanie spent a good deal of time with Klara Vágó, with whom she apparently had a “relationship,” as evidenced, in the opinion of Klein’s biographer, by an affectionate poem Klein dedicated to her in 1920.¹⁴ As a child, Melanie the Jew had been influenced by Catholicism, and she admitted feeling guilt over it. One could wonder, however, if that guilt did not emerge much later. Critics like to point out the similarities between certain features of Klein’s theory and such Catholic notions as original sin, the Immaculate Conception, or expiation. In any event, through the impetus of Arthur Klein and with Melanie’s consent, the Klein family converted to Christianity and joined the Unitarian Church, which they found easier to accept because it rejected the dogma of the Holy Trinity. And they had all of their children baptized.

As a result—and under the threat of Nazi persecution—Erich Klein moved to England, where he became Eric Clyne. None of these machinations kept Melanie Klein from remaining acutely aware of her Jewish origin and writing the following in her Autobiography:

I have always hated that some Jews, quite irrespective of their religious principles, were ashamed of their Jewish origin, and, whenever the question arose, I was glad to confirm my own Jewish origin, though I am afraid that I have no religious beliefs whatever…. Who knows! This might have given me the strength always to be a minority about my scientific work and not to mind, and to be quite willing to stand up against a majority for which I had some contempt, which at no time has been mitigated by tolerance.¹⁵

Arthur’s work forced the family to move to Budapest in 1910. Although the year 1912 saw some happier times, the marriage between Arthur and Melanie continued to deteriorate during 1913 and 1914—around the time that Erich was born and Libussa died—as evidenced not only by Melanie’s letters to her mother but also by the writings she composed between 1913 and 1920 as a way to hide from her depression. In these thirty poems, four stories, and an array of sketches and prose fragments,¹⁶ it is easy to detect the desire for a life filled with sexual satisfaction. Melanie’s style was influenced by erotic expressionist poetry, but also by the “stream-of-consciousness narrative” favored by Arthur Schnitzler and James Joyce,¹⁷ as can be seen, for example, in her story of a woman who wakes up from a deep coma after a suicide attempt—and who is modeled after Emanuel’s former lover! Melanie also exposed her hostile feelings toward Arthur, which are clearly fused with her unconscious hatred for her mother. At the same time, even in Melanie’s Autobiography, she protected herself against any aggression toward her mother and persisted in idealizing her image of her: “My relation to my mother has been one of the great standbys of my life. I loved her deeply, admired her beauty, her intellect, her deep wish for knowledge, no doubt with some of the envy which exists in every daughter.”¹⁸

Not surprisingly, Arthur received far less attention. While Melanie conserved nearly all of her letters from her mother and her brother, she retained only one letter from her husband.¹⁹ Arthur Klein left for Sweden in 1917 and remained there until 1937, after getting remarried and then divorced. He died in Switzerland in 1939.²⁰ The Kleins themselves had divorced in 1923—though Melanie oddly reported the date as being 1922. Was it so she could draw a veil over her private life and divert attention instead to the other events that would enliven her existence?

Around 1913 Klein entered into analysis with Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest—her third analysis, this one the product of a concerted effort to be reborn! In 1920 she mustered up the courage to move away from Budapest and Rosenberg, leaving Melitta and Hans behind, and took up residence with Erich in Berlin, not far from the home of Karl Abraham, with whom she would continue her analysis.

Some letters written a few years later by Alix Strachey, another patient of Abraham’s, portray a woman transformed. Melanie brought Alix one evening to a masked ball sponsored by a group of Socialists. The elegant British woman from the snobbish Bloomsbury group was disconcerted, to say the least: Melanie danced “like an elephant” and was “a kind of Cleopatra—terrifically ‘décolleté,’” although she is “really a very good sort.”²¹ Another evening, during a performance of Così fan Tutte at the opera, Melanie subjected Alix to a nonstop “flood of conversation!” “A bit too simple & breezy for me,” Alix declared, but she is “an engaging character all the same.”²² From the beginning of their friendship, Alix acknowledged being “immensely impressed”²³ by Melanie’s competence and knowledge, and she admired her psychoanalytic creativity.

Released from her familial obligations, Melanie enrolled in a dancing class, where she met a journalist at the Berliner Tageblatt named Chezkel Zvi Kloetzel. Kloetzel was married; he bore a likeness to Emmanuel … and so she became romantically involved with him and bestowed on him the secret name of … Hans, the name of Melanie’s older son. Her pocket diary, as well as her rambling, marked-up letters, reveal the depths of her passion—but also a deep-seated depression, the hidden force behind their relationship. Klein’s lover took the affair less seriously than she did, and he informed her rather bluntly that he had decided to split with her.²⁴ As her biographer put it, Melanie was “an intelligent woman who was capable of losing her head.”²⁵ Still, Melanie apparently exerted a strong sexual power over Kloetzel, as he continued to visit her periodically from the time she moved to London in 1926. Unable to find work in England, he emigrated in 1933 to Palestine, where he became a features editor at the Jerusalem Post.²⁶ Melanie never saw him again, and he died in 1952.²⁷

The turning point in the first part of Melanie Klein’s life, which we have just retraced in brief, began with her marital crisis between 1913 and 1914 and concluded with Libussa’s death. From the moment the couple moved to Budapest, Arthur was engaged in a business relationship with Sándor Ferenczi’s brother. Melanie, who suffered from an acute depression that would only get worse upon the death of her mother, entered into analysis with Ferenczi, most likely in 1912, and pursued it until 1919. She read Freud’s “On Dreams”²⁸ in 1914, and familiarized herself with early psychoanalysis and with its free-thinking and impassioned pioneers. Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) was the most renowned analyst in Hungary, and Freud soon came to refer to him as “my dear son.” Among “the early Christians in the catacombs,”²⁹ as Sándor Rádo, one of Freud’s first disciples, called them, Ferenczi was an exceptionally talented and devoted practitioner. Along with Jung, Ferenczi joined the founder of psychoanalysis on his 1909 trip to America to introduce the Freudian discovery to the New Continent. Ernest Jones (1879–1958) and Géza Roheim (1891–1951) did their respective analyses with him.

Highly attuned to archaic and regressive stages and unusually innovative in his mode of listening and analytic technique, Ferenczi was a proponent of an “active”³⁰ technique that endorsed an intrusive and seductive closeness with the patient that Freud would subsequently criticize harshly. Ferenczi, for his part, criticized Freud for failing to analyze transference. In addition to imitating certain features of Ferenczi’s style, Melanie Klein borrowed some of the concepts he set forth in 1913, such as the “introjection stage” (which Ferenczi believed was the stage of omnipotence) and the “projection stage” (or the reality stage). At the same time, she appropriated Ferenczi’s ideas in her own original way and modified them substantially. After Freud published his case study of Little Hans, which analyzed a child (“Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy”³¹), Ferenczi deepened our understanding of this new branch of psychoanalysis in his own 1913 case study entitled “A Little Chanticleer,” which concluded that the young neurotic Arpád suffered from a phobia about cocks because he had been reprimanded for masturbating. Two of Ferenczi’s analysands—the Polish Eugenia Sokolnicka, who worked in France, and Melanie Klein—devoted themselves to child analysis.³² In a June 26, 1919, letter to Freud, Ferenczi informed him that “[a] woman, Frau Klein (not a medical doctor), who recently made some very good observations with children, after she had been taught by me for several years,”³³ was to become the assistant to Anton von Freund, the wealthy brewer who generously endowed both the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society and Freud’s publisher, the Verlag.

In her Autobiography, Klein herself paints the clearest picture of her early experiences with psychoanalysis under the auspices of Ferenczi:

During this analysis with Ferenczi, he drew my attention to my great gift for understanding children and my interest in them, and he very much encouraged my idea of devoting myself to analysis, particularly child-analysis. I had, of course, three children of my own at the time…. I had not found … that education … could cover the whole understanding of the personality and therefore have the influence one might wish it to have. I had always the feelings that behind was something with which I could not come to grips.³⁴

The first time Klein presented a case of child analysis to the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society was in 1919, and her work was published the following year as “Der Familienroman in statu nascendi.” The paper earned her a membership into the society—and without any supervision being required. Klein’s study used the first name Fritz as it recounted the analysis of Klein’s own son Erich, whom she had observed since he was three years old (which was not an unusual practice at the time), while her other two children were raised primarily by Libussa. I will return to the scandal that erupted over her decision to follow Erich as well as to its advantages and disadvantages—her observations of her son did not escape scrutiny, and she would eventually push the whole matter under the rug: “My first patient was a five-year-old boy. I referred to him under the name ‘Fritz’ in my earliest published papers.”³⁵

From that point on Klein’s colleagues pointed out that her approach differed from that of Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth, the well-known child analyst from the early days of psychoanalysis, just as her approach was different from Anna Freud’s because Klein distinguished the analytic experience from parental and educational influences. The previous year, Melanie Klein had met Freud during the Fifth Psychoanalytic Congress, which was held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on September 28 and 29, 1918. Relaxed, creative, and independent, the society was enjoying a short-lived period of exuberance. At fifteen years of age, Melitta herself was permitted to attend the meeting.

The First World War disrupted Europe and everyone’s fate. Arthur was called to service and returned from the war with a wound to his leg. The couple went through the motions of being married, and little more. The defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the downfall of Count Michael Karolyi’s government led to the rise of a dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary under Béla Kun. Unlike the Stalinists, who declared psychoanalysis to be a deviant science, the Bolsheviks appointed Ferenczi to be a university professor of psychoanalysis! When the counterrevolution broke out and the Red Terror was followed by an anti-Semitic White Terror, however, Géza Róheim and Ferenczi were dismissed from their positions and subjected to death threats. Arthur Klein, who could longer continue in his profession, left to find work in Sweden. And Melanie met up with Karl Abraham in Berlin.

Karl Abraham (1877–1925) is one of the great names from the early years of psychoanalysis. At the time it appeared as though he would be Freud’s successor, although Freud was not fond of his detached personality. In 1910 Abraham founded the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. He replaced Ferenczi as a mentor to Melanie, who at thirty-eight years of age had just begun to reveal a rich creativity that had previously remained inhibited. It is easy to see the extent to which Abraham—who developed more thoroughly than Freud the theory of the pregenital stages as well as the thesis of the death drive³⁶—influenced Klein’s work. In fact, just as Klein borrowed from Ferenczi the idea that nervous tics are a substitute for masturbation, explaining that it was essential to understand “the object relations on which it is based,”³⁷ so she discussed the anal-sadistic relations that Abraham had described in his study of the anal character. From that perspective, Klein’s case study of the young Lisa (who, according to an unproved hypothesis, was really Klein’s daughter, Melitta) concludes that it is the analyst who fulfills the function of primary object and who begins to analyze transference as well as the homosexual relationship.

Did Klein use her children as “guinea pigs?”³⁸ Erich disguised as Fritz, Hans as Felix, and Melitta as Lisa? Under the influence of Abraham, Melanie refined her ability to expose her “case studies” more clearly than before as much as she refined the subtleties of her play technique. She became an associate member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in 1922, and won full membership in 1923.

In 1922 Klein delivered a paper to the Seventh Psychoanalytic Congress in Berlin, which was the last such congress that Freud would attend. Although Freud was most likely absent during Klein’s presentation, he must have heard at least something of what she said—and he must have been displeased that Klein challenged his notion of the Oedipus conflict and offered her own notion of an early anal fixation in the baby that gives rise to inhibitions. At the same time, it was Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) that inspired Klein to modify his early theory: she was more receptive than were other analysts to the hypothesis of a death drive in the baby that responded to his fear of being destroyed—whereas Freud believed that the baby is wholly unfamiliar with death. And yet, by considering the drive to be more psychological than biological, Klein added that the death drive manifests itself only through its relation to an object. Abraham’s work inspired Klein’s own work on this subject,³⁹ and Melanie paid tribute to him in turn in her Autobiography:

Abraham, who discovered the first anal phase …, came near to the conception of the internal objects. His work on the oral impulses and phantasies goes beyond F’s work. It did not by any means go as far as my own…. I should say that A. represents the link between my own work and F.’s…. [My analysis] came to an end when Abraham fell very ill in the summer of 1925 and died at Christmas of that year; a great pain to me and a very painful situation to come through.⁴⁰

It took little time for Klein’s bold innovations to encounter opposition with the first incident occurring during Abraham’s lifetime. At the International Congress at Salzburg in 1924, where Klein questioned when the Oedipus complex emerges, emphasized the role of the mother as opposed to the father in the organization of the neuroses, and described sexuality in terms of orality, her remarks drew strong objections. That did not keep her, however, from applying her views to a case study of Erna entitled “An Obsessional Neurosis in a Six-Year-Old Girl,”⁴¹ in which she revealed the little girl’s constitutionally strong oral and anal-sadistic predisposition, early Oedipus conflict, early and cruel superego, and homosexuality. Abraham had put Klein in contact with Nelly Wollfheim, a child therapist who ran a kindergarten in Berlin where Klein met little Erna. Wollfheim, who served as Klein’s secretary for ten years before the two of them parted ways, was the first person to be at once impressed and intimidated by Klein’s talent and confidence. Was Klein not projecting onto her own patients her devouring, even sadistic, character, which served as her best weapon for staking out a place and thriving in a hostile, suspicious environment?

After Abraham died, Klein’s detractors made no bones about their position: they derided the acclaim she had found in Berlin, they emphasized her lack of advanced training, and they drew attention to the inherent paradox of this woman who wanted to be a master, not to mention a child analyst! The assassination of Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth by her nephew, who had been a patient of hers, only encouraged the prevailing hostility to the psychoanalysis of children. Otto Rank’s notion of the birth trauma—which posits that the separation from the uterus is a prototype of anxiety—resonates with Klein’s view that guilt does not result solely from the late manifestation of the oedipal triangle but begins to take shape in the oral stage because of the child’s ambivalent relationship to the breast. For the most loyal Freudians, such a notion proved Klein a dangerous dissenter.

Ernest Jones (1879–1958), on the other hand, got wind of Klein’s talents through James Strachey, who was himself intrigued by Alix’s letters, and invited Melanie in July 1925 to deliver a series of six lectures—in English!—on child analysis. Alix Strachey, who translated the lectures, knew that Klein was considered in certain quarters to be “quite sound in practice, but feebleminded about theory.”⁴² To put it bluntly, Melanie Klein’s cause was already widely misunderstood across the Channel by the time she left for England! Not to mention the problems brought on by Melanie’s atrocious accent, Alix’s English lessons notwithstanding, and her ugly hats: “By the way, Mélanie showed me a hat she’s bought to lecture in London & knock her audience—& by God it will! It’s a vastly, voluminous affair in bright yellow, with a huge brim & an enormous cluster, a whole garden, of mixed flowers somewhere up the back, side, or front—The total effect is that of an overblown tea-rose with a slightly rouge’d core (her phiz); & the ψ’s will shudder.”⁴³

In the end, however, Melanie’s presentation allayed all fears and exceeded all hopes. Frau Klein, soberly attired, described her analysis of children—that most English of themes!—by way of play—that most sensitive and empirical of techniques!—and made “an extraordinarily deep impression on all of us and won the highest praise both by her personality and her work,”⁴⁴ as Jones wrote Freud on July 17, 1925. At the time the British Psycho-Analytical Society had only twenty-seven members and twenty-seven associates, but the level of interest in Klein’s lectures was such that their location had to be moved to the drawing room of Karin and Adrian Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s older brother) at 50 Gordon Square. Melanie’s triumphant entrée into London, then, occurred under the auspices of the Bloomsbury group. Immediately thereafter, Jones invited Klein to spend a year in England analyzing his own children. Say goodbye to Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna! Onward to London!

In London, Melanie lived the life of a luxurious nomad, moving from one temporary quarter to the next. The London Clinic for Psycho-Analysis had opened on Freud’s birthday, May 6, 1926. The young British Psycho-Analytical Society was dynamic, unencumbered, almost brazen in its efforts to acquire knowledge in an attempt to innovate more effectively, and infused with an old-fashioned penchant for democracy and an avant-garde taste for eccentric people, perhaps even Jewish ones. Its founder (in 1913) and director was Ernest Jones, a Welshman from a middle-class background. Jones had enjoyed a brilliant career as a medical student and was fascinated by Freud’s early work: he immediately set out to learn German so he could read Freud in the original. When Jones was later accused of using indecent language with some of his child patients, he sought refuge in Toronto and then quickly returned to London to devote himself to psychoanalysis in Great Britain and abroad. Appreciated by Freud because he was a “Gentile”—a trait rarely seen among Freud’s disciples, particularly during the tumultuous time of his schism with Jung—this complex and highly diplomatic man later became Freud’s biographer. Although Jones was rather faint at heart, he absorbed Melanie’s innovative theories while remaining loyal to Freud and Anna Freud—and thus succeeded in attending to both the shepherd and his flock. The relationship between Freud and Jones was always “one of wary fencing,”⁴⁵ but Jones was nevertheless the one who sent Klein to London to dispense her analytic wisdom to Mrs. Jones as well as to their two children, Mervyn and Gwenith (the daughter died a tragic death in 1928).

Melanie’s renown spread far and wide, so much so that Ferenczi, during his 1927 visit to London, wrote Freud about his consternation upon discovering the “domineering influence”⁴⁶ that Frau Melanie Klein exerted upon the British group. From that point on, Melanie Klein’s life and the fate of her work became one: the conflict with Anna Freud, her rift with her daughter, Melitta, the loyalties and disloyalties of her female disciples, and the Great Controversial Discussions of the British Psycho-Analytical Society during the Second World War all affected the spirit of Klein’s work as well as the varying degrees to which it was accepted. And so did the history of the century. In Klein’s view, the emigration of Jewish psychoanalysts to England or the United States and the worldwide dissemination of psychoanalysis were no doubt related to her painstaking work in modifying the Freudian talking cure. Klein fought tooth and nail in the name of her vurk, as she called it in a strong German accent (“my other child—work”).⁴⁷ For these reasons, her clinical practice and theoretical approach form the basis of my discussions of her, as I trace her journey until it reaches September 22, 1960, the day she passed away in London, conquered by illness, anemia, and old age at seventy-eight years of age.

Sensing that the end was near, Klein tried to rekindle her Jewish faith and sent for a rabbi. In the end, though, when faced with the complexity that such a plan would entail, she changed her mind and attributed her wish to a flight of sentimental whim. The elated grandmother who adored Diana, Hazel, and especially Michael,⁴⁸ the children of her son Eric and of Judy, had not taken on any young patients since the 1940s, but she continued to treat adults in training analyses and continued to supervise as well. She enjoyed spending her evenings attending concerts and plays. Her bursts of laughter during scientific conferences greatly amused her colleagues. Even though some of them always retained their doubts about her seriousness and her commitment, others idealized her and called her the “most impressive woman”⁴⁹ that had ever lived. During her cremation ceremony, Rosalind Tureck, a newfound, affectionate friend, soberly performed the andante from Bach’s Sonata in D Minor.

For the moment, why don’t we conjure up the image bequeathed to us by Melanie’s faithful exegete, Hanna Segal, as she describes the way she walked: “Her shoulders were a bit forward, so was her head, and she walked with rather small steps, giving an impression of great attentiveness. Her head was a bit forward. Now I think this way of walking … belonged to the consulting room and waiting room. That’s how she wanted to meet one. I don’t think she was like that outside when she held herself much straighter and she didn’t have the same sort of attentive posture.”⁵⁰