Who was Melanie Klein?
Mrs. Klein nee Reizes, was born in Vienna in 1882, the youngest of four children. At the age of 14 she decided to study medicine. However at the age of 32 she became fascinated by psychoanalysis after having read Freud’s work about dreams. Psychoanalysis then became her main interest and her writings cover a period from 1919 until her death in 1960. Her work was to revolutionise psychoanalytic thinking. This was particularly so because the focus turned to work with very young children and the gradual development in understanding of the impact of the very earliest emotional experience of the infant on child development and later life. She maintained the principles of classical psychoanalysis, but considered the child’s use of play to be the natural, symbolic way in which children expressed their inner worlds —-comparable to the way in which adults use free association. It could be said that Freud discovered the dynamic child within the adult and that Mrs. Klein discovered the infant i
