Melanie Klein

She gave each child a box of toys, kept it between sessions, and read what happened to it as seriously as an analyst reads a dream.

Melanie Klein had no medical degree and no psychology degree. She passed her gymnasium entrance examinations at sixteen with psychiatry in mind, got engaged at seventeen, and that was the end of that. She came to psychoanalysis in 1914 as a patient, in the middle of a war, in a city that was not her own.

Nearly thirty years later, a substantial part of British psychoanalysis was meeting formally, session after session, to decide whether her work counted as psychoanalysis at all.

What she proposed is still the most uncomfortable idea in the field's history. Not that childhood shapes us - everyone agreed about that - but that from the very beginning the infant is already loving, already hating, already frightened of what its own hatred might have done, and already managing that predicament by splitting the world into a good side and a bad side. She called the two organisations of this inner life the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and chose the word position over stage because she did not think anybody ever finished with them.

Inside:

• The play technique as she actually practised it, and the analogy with free association she offered as a clinical proposition rather than a proven equivalence
• Splitting, projection, internal objects, unconscious phantasy, envy, gratitude and reparation - each defined as she defined it, and separated from what the words have come to mean
• The Controversial Discussions of 1942-44: eleven formal meetings, Anna Freud and Edward Glover against Klein, Klein's own daughter against her mother, and a settlement in which nobody won
• What is credited to Klein and belongs to other people - containment is Bion's, symbolic equation is Segal's, the work on destructive narcissism is Rosenfeld's, and it was Susan Isaacs who wrote the systematic statement of unconscious phantasy
• The criticisms given their full weight: that the account of infancy is inferred backwards from older children in analysis, that the system is very difficult to falsify, and that it leaves too little room for things that actually happened
• The ethics, stated plainly - she analysed her own son, her patients included children of two and three, and none of that is made acceptable by being early

Also here: the sister who died when Klein was four and whom she was still grieving at seventy-seven; the brother who died in Genoa at twenty-five; the son killed when a mountain path gave way; the daughter who attacked her from the floor of her own professional society and did not come to her funeral; and the ten-year-old boy she analysed in a borrowed Girl Guides' hut in Perthshire, both of them sent north away from the bombing.

This is not a defence of Klein and it is not a takedown. Her explanations of why may not survive. Her observation - that the mind is not naturally at peace with itself, and that maturity is measured by what you can hold together rather than by what you have resolved - has been harder to dislodge.

Written for the general reader, not the seminar room. Verified sources, no invented scenes, and the criticism given its due.

Part of Pioneers of Human Behaviour - gateway books on the minds that shaped us.