Melanie Klein

by Phyllis Grosskurth

This volume is a biography of Austrian-born, British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960). Klein devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis. She was a leading innovator in theorizing object relations theory. The author relates Klein's personal conflicts and traumas as a child and mother to the development of her ideas and methods as an analyst. She traces the history of psychoanalysis from Freud to the 1960s as it paralleled Klein's career, and reveals the often vicious and petty debates among British, American and German psychoanalytic societies, focusing on Klein's early support from and, according to the author, eventual betrayal by Ernest Jones; her fierce rivalry with child psychoanalyst Anna Freud; and her tyrannical rule in later years over the British psychoanalytic camp, dubbed "Kleinian."