Melanie Klein

In 1925 Melanie Klein learned English from Alix Strachey in preparation for delivering papers in England: “I’ve taken the plunge & am to teach Melanie English—anyhow the Fachdepartment. For this purpose I propose going thro’ Little Hans … with her; she is to read him aloud, & then we are to discuss him in English.”¹

The distinguished Londoner was impressed by her student’s understanding of the English language, but because Klein’s accent was horrible, the two of them decided that she should continue her studies with a formal teacher.

From the moment Klein moved to England in 1926, she formulated her thoughts in English, although she often returned to her mother tongue so she could remain in contact with her emotions and share them with other people. When her son Hans died, for example, Klein poured out her feelings to Paula Heimann in German.² It is also likely that the dreams she had about her son’s death, which revived many painful memories—her father’s preference for Emilie, Sidonie’s early death, her cruel loss of Emanuel for which she continued to feel pangs of guilt, her resurgent anguish about her mother’s death, her ambivalent feelings toward her husband, Arthur, her despondency following Abraham’s death, and her troubled relationship with Kloetzel—were in German. The Psychoanalysis of Children, published in German around the same time, was translated into English by James Strachey with the assistance of Alix Strachey, Edward Glover, and Joan Riviere, and then was revised a good deal for the official version of her complete works. Although Melanie’s mastery of English improved (during the war, her correspondence with Winnicott was peppered with idiomatic English expressions)—Melanie relied on her anglophone friends when she began to write in English. During the 1930s she received considerable help from Joan Riviere, who substantially corrected and revised her work. She later turned to her secretary, Lola Brook, a Lithuanian Jew married to an Englishman who would serve, from 1944, as Klein’s trusted confidante and indispensable collaborator. Brook read, among other works, Klein’s “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant” with great interest, and she made as many suggestions about style as about the organization of the material. In response, the author thanked her in a footnote.³ Finally, The Psychoanalysis of Children would have never seen the light of day without the help of Elliot Jacques, who became the secretary of the Melanie Klein Trust and who oversaw the publication of her complete works. In every instance, it must be added, the indefatigable Melanie Klein wrote about—and rewrote about—her sessions with her patients, modified her comments and her clinical conclusions, and gradually refined in writing the development of her thought, which is reflected in her archives.

We should also add that Klein’s later works are filled with quotations from English literature that are sophisticated to the point of appearing “forced,” though they still remain relevant today. And we should further point out that Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, who translated The Psychoanalysis of Children into French, considered Melanie’s French to be good enough for her to communicate very easily with him as she supervised his translation. At the same time, however, this linguistic cosmopolitanism did not prevent Melanie from remaining “Germanic to the end,” as her biographer put it.⁴

Was German her mother tongue? In some ways it was. In fact, Libussa’s later letters show that German did not come easily to her.⁵ We recall that both mother and daughter were proud that Moriz Reizes, the husband and father, spoke ten languages,⁶ no matter how mediocre a doctor he was! But what was Melanie’s mother tongue?

Matricide emerges when someone abandons his mother tongue. It was already in play with Melanie’s parents, and even more deeply in the migratory fate of those European Jewish families that possessed every language and no language, except Yiddish for some of them, a language that Melanie did not want to learn⁷ or even to hear spoken around her. In the aftermath of parental desire, particularly her mother’s, Melanie chose to immerse herself in German language and culture, which served as her first symbolic rebirth and a cultural deliverance of the self. Her second break with the past, the one that drove her to Great Britain, accelerated her flight—which became increasingly higher and stronger. In order to contemplate this old memory known as an unconscious and to give a name to the fantasy, must one listen to it from a distance, that is, from another place that can only represent a sort of foreignness? Is such a flight perhaps a way of protecting oneself from the memory by abandoning it over there, combined with ineffable childhood sensations in an unfamiliar primitive code? Is it less frightening to hear what is far away through the clarity of a mind armed with so many secondary, mediatized, “estranged” initiations into the archaic and forgotten world of motherhood?

One might read into that fate of being a stranger—a fate through which Melanie Klein’s Jewishness was crystallized and disguised as well as nurtured—the elaboration of an old splitting, an ever painful matricide, and an endemic psyche. Because Melanie Klein was able to get in touch with this dynamic, and because she experienced it as being a source of both destruction and salvation, she was able to develop a theory that resonates more directly and more incisively than does Freudian theory with the very splitting that betrays comparable matricides experienced by us all, not only by many intellectuals but, at the end of the second millennium, by ever-growing groups of people.⁸

Human beings are less “identities” than journeys, as they are always in transit between a memory that is repressed to varying degrees and a conscience that dominates to varying degrees, as Freud was patient enough to explain to us. Freud developed what some have called his personal novel when he proposed that, ever since the glaciation that stacked psychoses onto neuroses, homo religiosus has survived in the modern people that we are by journeying surreptitiously into our psychic structures, dreams, and symptoms.

One could imagine that the Freudian vision has been influenced by the renewed loss of a settled way of life that humanity experienced during the twentieth century. Technology and politics have increasingly detached us from our natural habitats and have turned us into nomads once again. To persecuted political exiles are added the migrants of the global economy and the navigators who use satellite television or the Internet. Along with the questioning of authority, the law, and values—which has been interpreted as an attack on the role of the father—the loss of habitat that characterizes our fate undermines the original place, assaults maternal support, and threatens to destroy identity itself.

Sensitive poets and frightened curators have thus made an ode to preserving this place by returning to the origin, the ecology of the habitat, and the protection of the homeland. All of these seek to preserve the possibility of entering into a stable abode, a reliable arrangement, and a primordial, religious meditation on the human experience that is contingent on a space that knows how to space itself out.⁹ How can we not understand them, how can we not accompany them when we know that the destruction of this first source of security—the anchoring of our identities, the primary possession of our objects of desire and hatred—which consists of language and the management of a household, would deprive of us what is, for the time being, the ultimate sign of humanity: the possibility to sublimate, and then to symbolize, the biological cauldron?

Other people, Melanie Klein among them, take a different approach to preserving the possibility that we can make sense. Their own goal it to familiarize themselves with the locus of pain itself, that is, with the original uprooting—not to repress it in an effort to hastily rebuild their habitat, but to “inhabit” the dehabitation and the primordial separation—provided the verb to inhabit is not too placid to describe the auscultation of the original wound that Klein the psychoanalyst engaged in. Our Melanie was a nomad of sorts: Vienna, Rosenberg, Krappitz, Budapest, Berlin, and London, with several addresses in Berlin and five different homes in London. Her son Eric claimed never to have had a home of his own. And yet this woman enjoyed changing residences, though she decorated them in an ever more luxurious manner. Two contradictory tendencies in Klein’s wandering ways penetrated the places she lived as well as her own thinking: first, an opening that threw her off balance and that resonated with the loss of the self; and second, a closing that engulfed and counterbalanced danger. On the one hand, the work of a death drive confronted head-on, and on the other hand, the establishment of such rigid structures as a theory, a school of thought, and a bourgeois household. At the same time, the dominant chord was one of the greatest possible expression, a permanent unleashing, and a timeless “nonspace.” At that point, however, what can we use to lead us past the cruelty that we suffer and that we maneuver?

Melanie Klein discovered at least two possible solutions. First, she trusted the memory of prelanguage: the secret of lost time can be regained through analytic insight and through projective identification with the patient. “If I were you,” she says, and then she follows through on her suggestion. Second, she assimilated a new language: at first the language of the fathers Freud-Ferenczi-Abraham, and also the language of the British, and why not, since they appreciated her and welcomed her: is their civilization not an empire, even an Empire, in light of the globalization now under way? In the end, that is how she created her own code. Having made her way into a world of knowledge, systems, and sharing, she appropriated it, broke new ground in it, and created a body of work that she protected through politics. It is easy to poke fun at the elderly woman, who, as London was being demolished by bombs, could think only of her vurk—in German-English, of course. In the end, though, we also respect her.

It is possible to speak of Melanie Klein’s existence, which had estrangement at its very core. The foreign language was its visible side—English, obviously, but, even more fundamentally, psychoanalysis itself as a system with the ideolect of “Kleinian theory” its crowning glory. We see Melanie the clinician who descended “over there,” by way of her phantasy, to the wordless place of inhibited, psychotic, and autistic childhood, and we also see Klein the head of school of thought who spoke, schematized, and supervised her underlings. The latter Melanie gave rise to her condensed formulations and her dense writings, which are peppered with well-defined concepts that argue patiently, circularly, and repetitively—but that often engage in flashes of insight whose substance is forced upon us without any forewarning and thus does not stem from the airing of words and rhetorical strategies. It was the journey, then, that joined the two faces of Klein. If we forget that fact, and when she forgets that fact (which happened rarely, if ever), we see only the “madwoman” or the “doctrinaire.”

Is it also possible to speak of Klein’s text? We read Freud like a body of work that is rooted, as hers is, in the very flesh of language. But Melanie did not partake of the memory of the German language; rather, she was a member of a different class of thinkers who worked in an international laboratory and expressed themselves in a universal code. Were these thinkers mutants destined to disappear or were they endowed with a foreignness that gestured toward their chosen language (in this case, English)? Did they simply seek to facilitate the tasks assigned to the intellect so they might be better equipped to deal with borderline states and impossibilities? In the eyes of our psychoanalyst, this linguistic estrangement, which is in every respect a foreign way of thinking, may well have seemed paradoxical: is it not the case that the unconscious is structured in the light of a mother tongue (just as, for the Fabien of Green’s If I Were You, the baker’s face reappears in the light of the church candles)?¹⁰ We believe the answer is yes, and Melanie never stopped conveying as much through the sieve of her first language: she returned to German when she engaged in vigorous debates and theoretical formulations.

According to what Klein told us, moreover, she often combined various languages—for her, every language was a foreign language as if it were a dream, as Freud taught her: do you remember the “petits fours/petits frou/kleine Frou” from which she derived Frau Klein?¹¹ It is because the mother tongue, from the perspective of the place where Melanie situated herself—from the nonplace where she situated herself—is from the outset a foreign language. There is a foreign aspect to what is familiar, a maternal uncanniness that lurks beneath. Is it possible to hear the mother’s mother, to go where there is no more “there,” no more “she” or “place,” nothing but sensory chaos, overload, dismantling, a clinging intimacy, and a catastrophic being? Is it possible to move toward a ruthless love of the mutual stimulation that takes place between mother and baby, the prepsychic realm that would became our latest myth, eventually our last myth? Psychoanalysts are like fish who avoid “depths,” Melanie quipped to Jones.¹² Klein, on the other, hand, loved depths—particularly those beneath the mother!

Klein’s thought bore the effects of this exploration, of this journey to the nonplace that took her thought apart before putting it back together. On the face of it, Klein’s writings include reports of “case studies” that are exhaustive, even oversimplified, and that are accompanied with ready-made, almost forced, interpretations. Her writings became increasingly systematic with time, encouraged as she was by disciples who capitalized on the ease of subscribing to a school of thought, to use it to their advantage, and to pull it in the wrong direction. At the same time, however, the artifice that she constructs crumbles without warning, and we are struck by the truths that shine through. Out of the cumbersome quality of her writings arises an appreciable degree of care that is able to nurse the wound into a new, sensitive skin—and without succumbing to complacency.

Melanie’s reasoning itself displays a trace of that skin: she has often been criticized for her ambiguous concepts, which are both things and representations, positive and negative, and which lead nowhere, for no sooner have they articulated a possibility than they turn around and argue its opposite. Is the introjected object a thing or an image? Is the fantasy a sublimation of the drive or a defense against the drive? Does the depressive position indicate a nostalgia for the part object or its ceding to the whole object? Does the depressive position give in to manic defenses that have been present since the schizophrenic position, or does it spawn reparation? Klein’s detractors have taken pains to point out, in addition to her abandonment of Freud’s Oedipus complex for the sake of “internalized objects”¹³ and other clear divergences from his work, her troublesome method of thinking. Marjorie Brierley, for example, takes issue with the Kleinians’ endorsement of a “bodily” and “imagined” form of knowledge, which Brierley finds astonishingly subjective and incompatible with “true science.”¹⁴

“A mental mechanism modeled on and corresponding to bodily experience is an imagined action, a mode of imaginary behaviour patterned on foregoing actual behaviour.”¹⁵

Glover, who was far more uncompromising, frankly reached the point of ridiculousness: “Unless one is at pains to correct this ‘hop, skip and jump’ method, disciplined argumentation is impossible.”¹⁶

So was Melanie unscientific? Her detractors said as much in her time, and even today, American professors desperate for attention would have called her an “impostor” had they known her.

In truth, as Jacqueline Rose has suggested,¹⁷ Klein in no way set out a linear form of thinking to describe the linear development of the child or the unconscious. Klein’s logic does not function as a “causal sequence” from point A to point B, but as a circular effort. Projective identification is perhaps the most important crystallization of “negativity,” which forms a “vicious circle” in the words of Joan Riviere, who shows how projective identification allows the child to experience the relationship between cause and effect:

“You don’t come and help, and you hate me, because I am angry and devour you; yet I must hate you and devour you to make you help.” This revengeful hate which cannot be gratified increases tension further; and the thwarting breast is endowed with all the ruthlessness and intemperate absoluteness of the infant’s own sensations.¹⁸

Riviere, who was cognizant of the uniqueness of this logical process, and who was even proud to have been involved in its discovery and its therapeutic and theoretical application, sang its praises and sought out its protagonists. In truth, though, is anyone really capable of going down such a path?

With this talk of “mothers” and “gifted intuitive” people,¹⁹ a group to which Klein’s disciples decidedly believed she belonged, who “are not scientists, and are almost as inarticulate as babies themselves,”²⁰ the ironic teasing plugs the wound inflicted by Klein’s detractors, although these women also partook of the negativity brought about by the emotional expression of the baby. Indeed, their logic is no more incomprehensible than is “a foreign language”²¹—it guides us toward the inner workings of an individual’s life, “to a period not previously explored.”²² The unconscious that Melanie pursues, then, is a stranger: her work exposes us to its radical estrangement, as Joan Riviere pointed out: is it not because the unconscious shows us that we are strangers to ourselves that we hold a grudge against it?

One can endorse Joan Riviere’s exegesis while parting company with the amateurish enthusiasm she displays when likening Melanie’s bold interventions to the “beacon” that is Freudian thought. In truth, Klein’s penchant for sharp thinking, which is undisputed, was paired with a perpetual return of the negative and to the negative that functions as a sort of black hole at the center of her systematization, and that renders her altogether different from a “beacon.” The “black hole” of autism, as Frances Tustin would later describe it. The “black hole” of the fantasy, caught forever in the snares of projective identification. The “black hole” of the archaic internalized object, destined to be abandoned, with the onset of depression and the “black sun” of melancholia, in order, through reparation to work toward a veritable translation of ill-being into veritable symbols. Klein’s systems are inherently disrupted through the permanency of the interpretative imaginary, which is nothing less than the intrusion of the negative into reasoning itself: it is the negative of the drive, and then the negation of that first negation, constructed as a formulation that is itself always negative, that always sees the worst—that is, as a transference and countertransference that is exposed without having any recourse to the fantasy of destructiveness and death. Klein’s analysand Clare Winnicott, Donald Winnicott’s wife, pointed out that Melanie, as an analyst, emphasized “the destructive side” of things,²³ and that it was very hard for her to accept love and reparation.²⁴ Were Clare’s observations a transference effect, or were they the “black hole” of Klein’s negativity, which generated dazzling insights but which also hindered them?

The dread of what lies at the origin became, for the stranger and the translator of those origins that Melanie Klein was, a courageous coexistence with the negative. The fate of the negative, which is less dialectic in Klein than in Freud, brings her closer to the limits of what is human, and her journey to these resistances is articulated in a line of thinking that appears less graceful but that in truth is very audacious. And this continues until the pulse of the origins to be lost, the pulse of the maternal to be betrayed, and the pulse of the habitat to be abandoned to allow for a free life by way of an exile into the symbolic—that new stranger who is perpetually chosen and conquered—are defensively transformed into a war among women. With nothing to latch onto, emotions became ruthless: witness those exchanged between Melanie and Melitta. In the wake of the mourning of the father, that is, of Freud himself as was the case during the Great Controversial Discussions, analytic thought turned out all the better for it. But the danger still remains: flirting with psychosis can lead to a hysterical psychodrama, and The Oresteia can collapse into sorcery and into skirmishes among women.

What we still need to do, then, is return to the laboratory: beneath the depths of the Kleinian code persists her rigorous and relentlessness witnessing of experience. It is incumbent upon us to revitalize its boldness, hesitations, and confessions in order to discern in the warfare led by “mother Klein” the brilliant insights offered by the foreigner. A foreigner who she still remains today in the contemporary analytic movement. Because we are forced to confront the “new maladies of the soul” (borderlines, psychosomatics, substance abusers, vandals, and so forth) when we ignore listening and speech, we end up returning to Klein’s children and students and realize how much her work faced indescribable suffering. We absolutely must return to these dense pages—so we can do better than she did. Melanie is there to be surpassed, like a mother, like a real mother…. She was so different from the “real” mothers who hold you back, and from the real mother who she was herself.

Melanie gave birth to a daughter on January 19, 1904—less than one year after she married Arthur on March 31, 1903. As if it weren’t enough to give her daughter the last name Klein—“Little”—Melanie chose the first name “Melitta” for her—“Little Melanie.” This doubly diminutive little girl thus had cause for complaint from the beginning, but she decided to wait for the right time to articulate it. When her parents argued, she apparently took her mother’s side—a wise choice it turns out, since Melanie, who suffered from the iron rule of Libussa, was always leaving her behind for travels and cures. In the mother’s absence, it was the grandmother who looked after the little girl. Libussa was devoted and attentive, but she nevertheless preferred the younger boy, Hans. She suggested to Melitta that her mother was only “an emotional cripple, so ill that she had to desert her daughter.”²⁵

Still, things went relatively well until the 1930s. By that point Melitta had turned into an intelligent young woman who accompanied her mother to psychoanalytical meetings in Berlin and who had completed her studies in medicine. Her mother was still unknown and, lacking any advanced degree, felt the scorn of the medical establishment. Was she jealous of her daughter? Melanie’s biographers have wondered as much, particularly after Melitta’s 1924 marriage to the very distinguished Walter Schmideberg, the son of a rich and assimilated Jewish family, educated by Jesuits (like the “better” side of Melanie’s own family). Not only did Schmideberg become a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army, but by developing an interest first in the occult, and then in psychoanalysis, he befriended the rich and talented Max Eitingon, who introduced him in turn to Freud. Schmideberg even helped the Freud family financially during their difficult days in wartime Vienna. Could one imagine a more eligible bachelor? But Papa Arthur was opposed to the notion of a marriage to a man fourteen years Melitta’s senior, a man rumored to be given to alcohol or other drugs. This disagreement set in motion a father-daughter conflict into motion.

Melitta’s entrée into the psychoanalytic world was both sudden and brilliant. It appears that she was analyzed by her mother when she was a child.²⁶ She subsequently underwent a training analysis with Eitingon, then with Karen Horney, and, once in London, with Ella Sharpe and finally Edward Glover. She earned her diploma at the University of Berlin in 1927 and then left for London, where she wrote her thesis on “The History of Homeopathy in Hungary,” which she submitted in 1928. Was Melitta dependent on her mother, relying on her presence so she could carry out her own work? We should note, however, that Melitta dedicated the finished thesis to her father.²⁷ Beginning in 1930, Melitta regularly took part in the meetings of the British Psycho-Analytic Society and even delivered papers there (and we know that Melanie mentions her daughter’s work in The Psychoanalysis of Children).²⁸ In 1932 Melanie saw triumph: her first book was published in England, where it was warmly received. Troubles soon began, however. With Walter’s arrival in England, the Schmidebergs bought an apartment, and Melitta increasingly asserted her independence. Her analysis with Edward Glover had pointed her in that direction—a letter, most likely from 1934, communicates what appears in hindsight to have been a declaration of war against her mother.

You do not take it enough into consideration that I am very different from you…. I do not think that the relationship with her mother, however good, should be the centre of her life for an adult woman…. [The attitude towards you which] I had until a few years ago … was one of neurotic dependence.²⁹

The war between the two women was made public in October 1933, when Melitta Schmideberg was elected a member of the British Institute: in her membership paper, “The Play-Analysis of a Three-Year-Old Girl,” she attributed the digestive difficulties of her patient Viviane not to “constitutional factors” (as Melanie Klein’s theory would have it) but to the attitude of a mother who had subjected her to an excessively strict toilet training. Upon the death of her brother Hans in 1934, Melitta spoke of suicide—and hinted that, as with any suicide, the responsibility for it could be traced to difficulties with the family, to idealization and disappointment. The daughter’s vendetta, encouraged by Glover, soon escalated to the point of disturbing other members of the society. Some uncomfortable scenes followed. Melitta shouted rude remarks at Melanie: “Where is the father in your work?” It was a guerrilla war fought with sarcastic asides, indiscretions, and accusations dating back to Melitta’s early childhood and to the Kleins’ family life.

To make matters worse, in 1938 Melitta went so far as to accuse the Kleinians of committing plagiarism—in a collective work called The Bringing Up of Children, which was edited by John Rickman and which included a paper by Melanie on weaning. A committee made up of Jones, Brierley, and Payne investigated the complaint and found it utterly baseless. Melitta’s accusations, still backed by Glover, eventually took on the form of a theoretical debate: the two protesters criticized the Kleinians’ positions and accused them of breaking with Freudian orthodoxy. Yet beneath the legitimate facade of scholarly debate lurked a virulent settling of scores. Glover was far too attached to his analysand—and perhaps saw her as an opportunity to replace his own daughter (who suffered from Down’s syndrome) with a true accomplice. He walked alongside Melitta during an international congress.³⁰ Melanie generally refrained from commenting on such excesses, and left to her followers the task of waging the theoretical battle—although she always remained behind the scenes to pull strings and to suggest the most promising tactics.³¹ She suggested, without ever pressing the issue, that her daughter’s aggressiveness could be attributed to psychic difficulties rather than to simple theoretical opposition: “And there is even one very obvious fact which I feel quite sure should not be mentioned, nor even hinted at by any of us, and that is Melitta’s illness.”³²

And what illness would that be? A schizoid state? After proving herself highly critical of Anna Freud’s works, and even attacking Freud directly in a comment on a colleague’s book, Melitta tried to bond with her just as the differences between the Anna Freudians and the Kleinians had reached the level of an all-out conflict. She paid a visit to Freud when he arrived in London on June 6, 1939. Melanie, who had sent the master a letter of welcome, was not received and was limited to attending Freud’s funeral at the end of September. Melitta participated in a meeting with Anna Freud and her partisans and then lent her “caustic” and “sarcastic” tone to the multiple controversies against her mother.³³ She accused the entire British Society of hostility toward Anna Freud,³⁴ but Anna harbored no illusions about the true psychological basis for Melitta’s attacks.

During the Controversial Discussions, Melitta refrained from aligning herself with Anna Freud.³⁵ Her hostility toward her mother, as both a person and an analyst, appears to have been the primary motivator here, a motivation tainted with venom but one that nevertheless sparked a fundamental debate about psychoanalysis.

In the end, Melitta incurred the disapproval of many members of the British Psycho-Analytic Society, including even some of the Independents, who themselves were hardly blind followers of Melanie. Evan Rosenfeld, a friend of the Freuds’ who had entered into analysis with Melanie Klein, recalled the painful atmosphere that so shocked all who experienced it: “I could only see something quite terrible and very un-English happening, and that was a daughter hitting her mother with words and this mother being very composed.”³⁶

After Glover resigned in 1944, Melitta left the British Society for all practical purposes (although she did not formally resign until 1962). In 1945 she departed for the United States, where she worked with delinquent adolescents, adopting an approach that recalled psychiatry and social work more than psychoanalysis She was in London again, however, on the day of her mother’s cremation: Melitta gave a lecture “wearing flamboyant red boots”³⁷—an unmistakable sign, if any were needed, that the two had never reconciled. As for Melanie, she bequeathed the following to her daughter Melitta:

My gold flexible bracelet which was given to me by her paternal grandmother, the single stone diamond ring given to me by my late husband, my gold necklace with garnets and the brooch which goes with the said necklace, both of which I received as a present on my 75th birthday and I have no other bequest to my said daughter because she is otherwise well provided for and by her technical qualifications able to provide for herself.³⁸

In summary, Melitta’s important role in Melanie’s story is beyond dispute. The matriarch insinuated her daughter into the family connection, her descent from her father’s family, and even the professional tribute that was paid to her on her seventy-fifth birthday. But her bitterness quietly permeated her references to “my said daughter,” who is “well provided for” and possesses so many “technical qualifications,” unlike the said mother …

Although Glover had fanned the flames of the mother-daughter quarrel, he tried to be objective: the daughter was less energetic than the mother, he conceded. Melitta was his analysand, but “she had been to a dozen analysts before that” (!); “it was largely by Dr. Schmideberg’s instigation that these debates continued”; and finally, “I think they were both, herself and her daughter, prejudiced. On the other hand, Dr. Schmideberg, her daughter, made a very good fight for her spiritual liberty, and she had some of that slightly desperate character which made her come right out in the open.”³⁹

Like mother, like daughter—or not exactly? Melanie remained implacable: Glover was a “bad analyst,” “crooked and unscrupulous,”⁴⁰ but could she really be impartial on the subject?

Whether we consider all of this in terms of ego or primary object, of inside or of outside, it was projective identification and envy that prevailed—and spared no one in their path. Melanie was forced to live out the proof of her own theories.

A 1988 play by Nicholas Wright, Mrs. Klein, exposed a large audience to the analyst’s quarrels with her biological daughter and with her symbolic daughters. The story takes place in London in 1934, and the play dramatizes the day and the night in which Melanie Klein was unable to attend her son’s burial.⁴¹ Melitta writes Melanie that it was most likely Melanie herself who caused her son’s death (a possible suicide). Melanie never reads the letter. Melitta is cast aside for a third woman: a newcomer, Paula, who enters into analysis with Mrs. Klein at the end of the play. That initiates the process of mourning for the son, which in some ways is also a mourning for the daughter. Guilt and depression permeate the drama—which is nevertheless dominated by the power of Mrs. Klein: nothing, absolutely nothing, can distract her from her determination to pursue her work, her vurk.⁴²

There are no men in this female hell. Mrs. Klein’s son is dead, and the three women’s past or present husbands—all of whom are either tyrants or sensualists—neither understand their wives nor appreciate the importance of psychoanalysis. The theater exaggerates and caricatures, communicating a folklike Kleinian universe that serves only to reinforce the myths that even the most scrupulous biographers cannot avoid.

“Insensitive,”⁴³ “ruthless”⁴⁴ with infidels, requiring “undivided loyalty”⁴⁵—and let us not forget “paranoid” and “depressive”—Melanie rigidly defended her thought and pounced upon the slightest divergence or the smallest hint of personal or intellectual autonomy. Phyllis Grosskurth’s biography traces the details of the numerous seductions, often followed by disagreements, that punctuated Melanie Klein’s life and that remained bound up with her analytic career. I will discuss only the most significant of these relationships—those she had with her three favored disciples: Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and Joan Riviere.

Heimann is the play’s “Paula,” the person who replaces the daughter in Melanie’s heart and who becomes the confidante of her depression, then her analysand, and finally her symbolic daughter, a talented collaborator.⁴⁶ Shortly before Paula died in 1983, she confessed that she had been so “seduced”⁴⁷ by Melanie that she had decided to enter into analysis with her. The rivalry between disciple and daughter rose to new heights when Paula joined Melitta’s husband, Walter Schmideberg, in Switzerland, where they established themselves permanently—but continued to receive visits from the daughter of Paula’s analyst. What an odd trio they formed: Paula-Melitta-Walter!⁴⁸ Heimann’s official break with Melanie was in 1955, when she discovered the theory of breast envy, but it is possible that she was one of the examples Melanie gave of excessive envy.⁴⁹ Was the envy on Paula’s part? Melanie described her to Hanna Segal as being the “too destructive” patient. Or was the envy on Melanie’s part, as a response to Paula’s autonomous thinking? Is Melanie referring to herself when she invokes in Envy and Gratitude a putative patient who had borne an intense love toward her sister that was mixed with “paranoid and schizoid feelings”? Envious or not, Melanie Klein dismissed Paula Heimann from the Melanie Klein Trust Fund in 1955, informing her that she had lost confidence in her.⁵⁰

Susan Isaacs was among the group—Edward Glover, Sylvia Payne, John Rickman, Joan Riviere, Ella Sharpe, the Stracheys—who had attended Melanie’s 1925 lectures in London. A brilliant child psychologist and the director of studies in psychology at the University of London, Isaacs became the first principal of the Malting House School, the experimental school in Cambridge. She was won over by Klein’s ideas, which she elaborated upon with great skill.⁵¹ Analyzed by Otto Rank and Joan Riviere, Isaacs was particularly supportive of Melanie during the war, when the party chief was staying in Cambridge near her daughter-in-law and grandson—but she also sustained her by preparing several ripostes during the Controversial Discussions. Throughout their lengthy correspondence, Melanie tried hard to respect Susan Isaacs’s independence while guiding her with authority. Isaacs claimed to be convinced that it was Melanie, and not Anna, who was the true successor to Freudian thought.⁵² Yet it was Paula Heimann who reported Melanie’s “malicious remarks”⁵³ regarding Isaacs to Pearl King. Was the spite Melanie’s—or Paula’s?

Joan Riviere, too, did not escape the Kleinian freeze. Riviere, a product of the English intellectual haute bourgeoisie who was analyzed by Jones and by Freud himself, the first lay analyst in the British Society, and the translator of Freud, remained fascinated by Melanie. Riviere saw Klein as frustrated and as perhaps stuck in a permanent dream state, but she also perceived that Klein possessed “le feu sacré.”⁵⁴ Freud admired Riviere’s intelligence and probably her aplomb as well, but in his correspondence with Jones, he attacked “the theoretical statements of Mrs. Riviere,” rather than those of Melanie herself, whom he pursued through her disciple. Loyal among loyalists, Riviere analyzed Isaacs and Winnicott and wrote the “General Introduction” to Developments in Psychoanalysis. She was skeptical, however, of “borderline cases,” as Melanie defined them, and she did not wish to analyze them. Still, her reserve did not prevent her from being a highly nuanced theorist on the subject of the “negative therapeutic reaction.”⁵⁵

Was this subtle theorizing what made Melanie turn spiteful and injudicious toward Riviere as well (again according to the words of Paula Heimann)?⁵⁶ Klein, a theorist of envy, was by all accounts prone to envy herself—an envy toward her mother, her sisters, her sister-in-law, Anna Freud, Marie Bonaparte, Helene Deutsch (she once said to Tom Main, who saw her home one evening, “I think my work will last, don’t you? I’ve done better than Helene Deutsch, haven’t I?”).⁵⁷ At the end of her life, had she reached the conclusion that envy among women was unanalyzable? Could she have said such a thing, in her own slow, heavily accented voice with the hearty laugh that she had acquired over the years? Is female envy unanalyzable, as she asserted with respect to the orthodox Jew and the practicing Catholic?⁵⁸ Some of her most devoted followers would refute such a pessimistic hypothesis. Among those who remained loyal to her, the most tenacious and the most useful was Hanna Segal. An analysand, then a scrupulous exegete of Klein’s work, Segal never failed to deepen Klein’s thought, though she consistently sustained an interpretive spirit free from accommodation. The artist Felix Topolski, who created a sketch of Melanie Klein, remembered the psychoanalyst’s arrogance and the rosy complexion of a Viennese woman fond of creamy pastries and conscious of her sex-appeal: Topolski gave Klein the look of a satiated vulture, which took her friends aback. Segal disagreed: for her, the drawing represented the very satisfied expression that Melanie assumed after an exceptionally effective interpretation.⁵⁹ Hanna Segal, or the passage through envy: she succeeded where Paula Heimann had failed.

However brilliant the male analysts of the British Society—Bion, Jones, Glover, Rickman, Strachey, Winnicott, to cite only a few—may have been, one has the impression that during this era, the era of Melanie, the destiny of psychoanalysis was decided in a matriarchal universe. R. D. Laing found the Kleinians “humorless”—that is to say “communist.”⁶⁰ Rickman quarreled with them, Bion was entreated with tears to cite his debt to the party chief, and Winnicott passed into the group of “Independents,” distancing himself to the point of “coolness.” But the female psychoanalysts, already active in other countries, found themselves in England at the center of impassioned theoretical debates. Newly arrived in a psychoanalytic world that was itself new and full of innovation, they would inevitably fall into excess. The return of repression—here the repression of the feminine—did not come without violence. Beginning with Melanie, were these women acting out the psychodrama of incestuous mother-daughter relationships, or one of unconscious feminine homosexuality?⁶¹ Were they theorists of the primal object exposed to a primary sadism, not recognizing the place of the phallus as capable by itself of severing or cultivating the “drives” and the “objects”: how could they possibly escape it?

Yet we should be careful not to jump to conclusions here. The “open, Sesame” that was the Kleinians’ “internal object” was followed by the omnipotence of the “phallus,” which Lacan’s successors presumed was capable of clarifying all misunderstandings and of resolving all the dramas of the passions. It is more difficult to engage the clinical and historical details of the conflicts in question. Concrete experimental investigation is much more complex—and also more risky. And—for Melanie, in any event—such investigation invited an unsympathetic scrutiny of her closest relatives.

Analytical technique gleaned at least one nonnegotiable principle from all of this: the line between personal friendships and analytical ties should not be crossed. Otherwise, such “promiscuities” reinforce the passions that are uncovered on the couch and that have no place in worldly or social relationships intended to be more or less civilized. As an explorer of the intolerable, psychoanalysis is—and must—remain “outside the world” as it is “outside time.” Might a masculine authority, whether paternal or phallic, have protected the psychoanalytic universe of the Kleinians, sparing it these psychodramas among women? Perhaps, but only through repression. The fierceness of certain reactions toward Melanie, or from Melanie, might have been avoided. What this public unveiling accomplished, however, was to highlight the real objects of the Kleinian inquiry: maternal dependence and matricide.

In fact, beyond the various confrontations among the paranoid-schizoid positions that were latent in these women to varying degrees, it was Melanie’s theoretical ambition itself that was revealed in all its unbearable radicalism. Is it possible to reach the limits of primal repression, the point at which the symbolic character of human nature collapses into chaos? The analyst’s heartfelt anguish is so clearly necessary, in the voyage to this estrangement, that few among us can tolerate it: few indeed are the analysts who possess enough of an ability to sublimate so they can “dive in” without “drowning.”

It should be noted that women joined Melanie Klein in taking this risk en masse. And women also counted among her most prudent adversaries, as we have seen: femininity in itself guarantees nothing. What mattered, for Klein, is the way that femininity is thought and lived. Besides, Freudian psychoanalysis today encounters so much resistance and is so seldom received and accepted, certain media popularizations notwithstanding, that Klein’s breakthroughs remain—with the exception of a clinical circle specializing in the treatment of psychosis and childhood—totally unknown. Our “Valkyrie,” as her enemies were prone to calling her, emerges as an explorer returning from a journey to the end of night. Melanie Klein ripped off the veil of a culture based on the sacred conversation between mother and child, if not indeed on the Pietà itself, and she allowed us to glimpse the underside of our civilization. The Oresteia—indeed, the whole Greek cosmogonic theogony, founded as it is on thwarted couples, which animated pre-Socratic thought and in particular the work of Heraclitus⁶²—points the way toward the heart of the modern world, where it encounters new psychoanalytic revelations about our latent psychoses and depressions, revelations that will be forever deemed Kleinian ones.

If it is true, as Freud believed, that the son by himself can sometimes close his anxious gap with woman and can position himself as the unique object of indestructible love,⁶³ there is no doubt that the gap between mother and daughter is never satisfactorily filled. Melanie Klein took on the challenge of descending into that abyss. After reading her and trying to understand her, we should no longer feel the need to go as far as she did. We are so sure to go beyond her, are we not, simply by virtue of having just read her …