Learning from sadistic babies
Anthony Storr
MELANIE KLEIN: HER WORLD AND HER WORK by Phyllis Grosskurth
Hodder & Stoughton, £19.95
THE SELECTED MELANIE KLEIN edited by Juliet Mitchell
Peregrine, £4.95
Melanie Klein was a highly controver- sial figure. Although originally claiming that her ideas were merely an extension of those of Freud, her contributions to .pys- choanalytic theory became the focus of such passionate dispute that the British Psychoanalytic Society became, and has remained, divided into separate groups with different programmes of training. Klein was born in Vienna in 1882, the fourth child of a doctor. She originally wanted to study medicine herself, but financial stringency and an early engage- ment, followed by an unfortunate mar- riage, prevented her from realising this ambition. Had she done so, her contribu- tions to psychoanalysis might have been both more firmly based and less controver- sial. As Phyllis Grosskurth remarks, Mela- nie Klein had no grasp of scientific method, and her theories lack any biologic- al foundation.
Klein first read Freud in about 1914, when living in Budapest. She entered analysis with Ferenczi, the Hungarian analyst who had accompanied Freud and Jung on their first trip to America in 1909.
She very soon began to treat children analytically, and, by 1919, was a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. In 1921, she moved to Berlin, where she had further psychoanalytic training with Karl Abraham. She was divorced in about 1925, though she herself claimed it was earlier. In 1926, she moved to England, where she remained, taught and practised until her death in 1960.
Klein's contributions to psychoanalytic theory were originally derived from her analytic work with small children, some of her patients being under three years old. Now that we know that Freud analysed his own daughter, Anna, it will come as no surprise to know that some of Klein's early observations derive from the analysis of her own three children, although, in her writings, she attempted to disguise their identities. Klein believed in prophylactic analysis of 'normal' children, and allowed herself the Utopian fantasy that 'child analysis will become as much a part of every person's upbringing as school educa- tion is now.' Nevertheless, as Phyllis Grosskurth points out, her efforts with her own children were not entirely successful, since all three went on to other analysts, two of them to three other analysts each!
Since small children are not adept at putting fantasies into words, Klein pro- vided them with tiny toys and made inter- pretations of their play. The picture of the early emotional development of the child which Klein constructed diverged from that of Freud, and led to bitter controversy with Anna Freud, whose technique of child analysis took a different and more common-sense direction. It is not surpris- ing that Klein's theories encountered oblo- quy. Freud had shattered the Victorian concept of childhood innocence by his insistence upon infantile sexuality. Klein went much further in attributing violent, sadistic impulses to the new-born baby. Her picture of the infant's inner world was a sombre one. She believed that babies were plagued by frustration, envy and jealousy. Their innate aggression could be modified, but not abolished, by sufficient loving mothering, or, at a later period, by Kleinian analysis. Klein came to think of the neuroses as more or less superficial constructs; defensive overlays masking conflicts of psychotic intensity. Although her theories are not susceptible of scientific proof, since the infant's inner world is not directly observable, it is nevertheless true that she provided a conceptual scheme which illumines our understanding of para- noid states and of severe depression. Her ideas are especially valuable in understand- ing those whom psychiatrists label 'schi- zoid,' whose characteristic dilemma is a passionate need to feel close to others, combined with a fear that such closeness will lead to their own destruction.
As might be expected from her previous biographies of John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, Phyllis Grosskurth has been both conscientious and perceptive. She has discovered a great deal about Melanie Klein which has not been pre- viously published. More particularly, she makes it clear that many of Klein's theories take origin from her own experience of severe depression, as well as from the analysis of her own children. When the dragons who guard the Freud archives finally relent, in the year 2000, I doubt if much fresh information about Mrs Klein will emerge. Phyllis Grosskurth tries hard to be fair to her subject, but the picture which emerges of her is by no means wholly pleasant. Melanie Klein could be generous and kind in private, but her life was marred by a series of disputes of a passionate kind, not only with Anna Freud, but also with her analyst daughter, Melitta, and with some of those who were, initially, her closest supporters. It is clear that she was unable to tolerate disagree- ment, and utterly sure that she was right. Dogmatic certainty is characteristic of prophets and the leaders of esoteric sects. It endows such people with charisma, and attracts to them those in search of a faith who become their disciples. Some of Mrs Klein's followers in Britain have inherited her characteristics, and are notorious for their rigidity, intolerance, and conviction that no other type of analysis plumbs equal depths. Their contempt for other points of view has perpetuated the divisions within the British Psychoanalytic Society.
None of these last remarks apply to Juliet Mitchell, whose introduction to her selection of Mrs Klein's writings is a model of clarity. The selection itself is judicious; and anyone wanting to explore Klein s ideas in her own words could do no better than to start here.
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