Women's Intellectual Contributions to the Study of Mind and Society

Students, as part of an advanced seminar, examined and wrote about the lives of these women, their intellectual contributions, and the unique impact and special problems that being female had on their careers.

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Melanie Klein

EARLY LIFE

Melanie Klein was born on March 30, 1882 in Vienna as a fourth and youngest child to Dr. Moriz Reisez and Libusa Deutch (Segal, 1979). Her father, Dr. Reisez, was an inspiration to Melanie in her early childhood. He was from an Orthodox Jewish family, who made him become a rabbi and marry a girl he never met, all against his will (Segal, 1979). He rebelled against his family and his religion and went to the medical school and fell deeply into love with Libusa Deutch. He inspired Melanie not just to study medicine but also to be a strong and independent individual. Melanie was also inspired by her mother who opened a shop of exotic plants and animals to help support the family. They were a very liberal and intellectual family and all four children were provided with proper education. Melanie was not close to her oldest sister, but was very close to her brother and other sister who were helping her with her studies (Segal, 1979). Both of them died at very young age. Her sister died when Melanie was only five years old. This was a beginning of a long suffering depression for Melanie.

When Melanie was fourteen years old, she decided to study medicine (Segal, 1979). Melanie was very close to her brother at this time and it was through him that she met her future husband, Arthur Stephen Klein. They got engaged when Melanie was nineteen and this interfered with her plans to study medicine (Segal, 1979). He was an engineer and his work requested from him to constantly travel. So instead going to medical school, Melanie decided to study art and history at the Vienna University and travel with her husband when necessary (Segal, 1979). Also, her brother died around this time and his death contributed to lasting streak of depression which was part of Melanie's personality (Segal, 1979).

Two years later, at the age of twenty one, the couple got married and several times moved to small towns, first in Slovakia and then in Silesia (Segal, 1979). This was very unhappy time to Melanie. She found her happiness with two of her child. In 1904, Melanie had her first child, a daughter named Melitta, and in 1907 she had her second child, a son named Hans (Sayers, 1991).

EARLY CAREER

In 1910, while still living in Budapest, Slovakia, Melanie came across a book On Dreams by Freud and became interested in his work (Segal, 1979). This combined with her sessions with Dr. Ferenzci (a famous psychoanalyst) began her lifelong interest in psychoanalysis (Segal, 1979). The encouragement from Dr. Ferenzci to practice psychoanalysis with children and her initial meeting with Freud in 1917 inspired her first paper "The Development of a Child" (1919) (Segal, 1979). Her work was often criticized since she never attained a medical degree.

In 1920, Melanie Klein met Karl Abraham and became very impressed with his work (Segal, 1979). The feeling was mutual. Abraham encouraged her to further develop her work on child psychoanalysis of children and to move to Berlin, Germany (Segal, 1979). She was also a close friend and a patient of his. While living in Berlin, Melanie Klein established her own psychoanalytic practice with children and adults as well (Sayers, 1991). Around this time she also had her third child and soon after divorced from her husband (Segal, 1979). His constant absence from home has driven the couple apart.

Klein's work continued to be criticized because of her lack of education, especially by Anna Freud (Segal, 1979). In 1925 Melanie Klein wrote her first book, The Psychoanalysis of Children and by then was well known among the psychoanalysts (Sayers, 1991). Unfortunately, the harsh critiques and the death of Karl Abraham forced her to move to England. In 1927, she was a well accepted member of British Psychoanalytic Society, where she would remind for the rest of her life (Sayers, 1991). Two of her children came with her and her oldest child, daughter Melitta, was also practicing psychoanalysis (Segal, 1979).

LATER CAREER AND THE MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The Child Play Technique

By the time Melanie Klein moved to England in 1927, her work on child analysis (which she called play analysis) was fully worked out and well accepted (Segal, 1979). Unlike, Freud who explained child's development as a three stage process and is based on instincts, she believed that child development is being shaped from the beginning by internalization of our relation with others and that superego develops in infancy (Sayers, 1991). Melanie Klein believed that the child's play techniques and other nonverbal behaviors can tell us a lot about the child. She wrote:

In their play, children represent symbolically phantasies, wishes and experiences. Here they are employing the same language, the same archaic, philogenetically acquired mode of expressions as we are familiar with from dreams. We can only fully understand it if we approach it by the method Freud has evolved for unraveling dreams. Symbolism is only a part of it; if we want rightly to comprehend children's play in connection with their whole behavior during the analytic hour we must take into account not only the symbolism which often appears so clearly in their games but also all the means of representation and the mechanisms employed in dreamwork, and we must bear in mind the necessity of examining the whole nexus of phenomena (Segal, 1979, p. 31)..

Klein's major rival was Anna Freud, who just like her father believed that women could not be analyzed; she believed that children can not be analyzed. Despite all the critiques Melanie Klein continued with her work. In 1923, Klein's play technique was fully established (Segal, 1979). Segal (1979) describes the classis Klein's psychoanalytic setting as follows: child had one fifty minutes session per day, five days a week, it contained simply furniture, each individual child would have his or her own box of toys (usually consisting of little houses, men and women, farms and animals, and play material (ex. Scissors, paper, pencils, etc), and water because she believed it played a significant role in some phases of psychoanalysis (Segal, 1979). Melanie Klein also suggested that the toys should not have any indications on a gender, a role, function, etc. She believed that toys should not be dictating and they should not suggest the theme of the play (Segal, 1979). She wanted the children's play to be controlled by children and not the toys they are playing with. This would not be possible if the child played with a toy that contains some meaning to it or is supposed to represent a specific character. Even her daughter Melitta, who was also a psychoanalyst, disagreed with Klein's play technique therapy. Melitta thought that her mother's work was too much influenced by Klein's own behavior (Sayers, 1991).

The Depressive Position

Melanie Klein had reached the peak of her depression when in 1933 her eldest son Hans died in an accident (Segal, 1979). The deaths of many of her close family members and her own depressive state had influenced her to further investigate the concept of depression. Klein's most provident work on depression is her paper titled "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States" (Segal, 1979). In this paper she defined a manic-depressive child as someone who fails to feel secure in their inner world in childhood and therefore is not able to overcome this infantile depression in adulthood (Segal, 1979). In another paper, also significant work titled "The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxiety", Klein claimed the Oedipus Complex to be a part of the depressive position (Segal, 1984). Her work continued to be criticized, especially by Anna Freud. The critiques have reached their peak when during the war, the Freud family moved to England (Segal, 1979). After presenting her work on the depressive position, even some of her supporters from the British Psychoanalytic Society (among which was Klein's daughter Melitta) turned their back on Klein (Segal, 1979). After all the world indeed was not ready for this incredible woman. However, a lot of significant analysts stayed faithful to Melanie Klein. After war, there were two significant groups of psychoanalysts, Freudians and Kleinians, even though a lot of Klein's work was based on Freud's later work (Segal, 1979).

The Paranoid-Schizoid Position

After the long postwar debate, Klein had written her most significant paper Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms, where she claimed that the infantile development is dominated by anxiety and schizoid mechanisms (Segal, 1979). Out of all of her work, this one was probably the one that was most opposing to Freud's ideas.

Other significant works include "Envy and Gratitude" (1957), "On the Developmental Functioning" (1958), and "Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy" (1959), and "Narrative of Child's Psychoanalysis" (1961). Most of her work, along with other famous analysts work, has been collected in a book titled New Directions in Psychoanalysis (1955) (Segal, 1979).

CONCLUSION

Melanie Klein has left a significant impact on the further development of psychoanalysis. Her work was incredible and her impact was strong as Freud's, but we still do not see her name mentioned often. Despite not having a degree and being a woman, there were still people who followed her and respected her and her work. Her child's play technique is still used around the world (Sayers, 1991). She suffered form depression, but she was not embarrassed to share it with others and try to find a cure. She was a mother who loved her children and she had developed a technique to better understand them and give them a better life. Her warmth and vitality had remained with her until her death in 1960 as a result or hemorrhaging after an unknown surgery (Segal,

REFERENCE:

Sayers, J. (1991). Mothers of psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Segal, H. (1979). Melanie Klein. New York: The Viking Press.


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