Klein, Melanie
Klein, Melanie (1882–1960)An Austrian-born, second-generation psychoanalyst, trained under Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest and Karl Abraham in Berlin. She moved to London in 1926 and became a major figure in British and world psychoanalysis, the founder, within the British Psychoanalytic Society, of the Kleinian school.
Her innovations in technique were to analyse young children, substituting play for verbal free-association; to explore the importance of counter-transference—the analyst's feelings about the client; and to undertake the analysis of psychotics. She developed a more elaborate theory of the emotional life of the young baby than did Sigmund Freud. Her argument was that all infants progress through two positions: a paranoid-schizoid position, where bad feelings are projected into the external world, which is then felt to be threatening; and a depressive position, when these feelings are...
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