MRS KLEIN - Almeida Theatre

6
A letter from Melitta to her
mother Melanie Klein, 1934
‘I hope you will therefore also allow
me to give you some advice. You do
not take it enough into consideration
that I am very different from you. I
already told you years ago that
nothing causes a worse reaction in
me than trying to force feelings into
me – it is the surest way to kill all
feelings. Unfortunately, you have a
strong tendency towards trying to
enforce your way of viewing, of
feeling, your interests, your friends
etc onto me. I am now grown up and
must be independent; I have my own
life, my husband; I must be allowed
to have interests, friends, feelings
and thoughts which are different or
even contrary to yours. I do not think
that the relationship with her mother,
however good, should be the centre
of her life for an adult woman. I hope
you do not expect from my analysis
that I shall again take an attitude
towards you which is similar to the
one I had until a few years ago. This
was one of neurotic dependence. I
certainly can, with your help, retain a
good and friendly relationship with
you, if you allow me enough freedom,
independence, and dissimilarity, and
if you try to be less sensitive about
several things.
Also, don’t forget that through our
shared profession a difficult situation
is created; this could most certainly
be solved if you treated me like
another colleague and allowed me all
the freedom of thinking and
expression of opinion, as you do the
others.
With love
yours, Melitta’
tendencies of the infantile internal world.
Children are highly sensitive to events in the
family environment, but the reaction to
these occurs through the prism of the
child’s phantasy life. Klein took the view
that children have innately an inner world
which is active in creating the view of the
external world. Babies have both
experiences of great satisfaction, and of
great distress. Klein argued that the
mother’s repeated care in restoring the
infant to a good state puts the infant ‘back
together’ and is experienced by the baby as
its relation with a ‘good breast’. Periods of
disturbance or deprivation are experienced
as a relation with a ‘bad breast’. The infant
can sometimes project some of the feelings
which were in origin his own (for instance
that of biting hunger) into the objects of the
Melanie Klein (right), with one of her sons, and Melitta (left). Courtesy of Wellcome Library,
London, and the Melanie Klein Trust
external world. In these ways the infant’s
world is populated with creatures borne of
the imagination, depicted vividly in Maurice
Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.
The Second Period
In the years 1930-45 Klein developed a
whole new theoretical structure,
suggesting that a major change in the
infant’s mind begins at around 4-5
months. The good and the bad objects of
the baby’s imagination which were once
experienced as entirely separate now begin
to be seen as one – the baby comes to
understand that the figure (the ‘bad
breast’) which is feared is the same as the
good figure (the ‘good breast’) which is
loved. This introduces a whole new set of
feelings including the capacity for concern
and anxiety, lest the mother has been
harmed by the baby’s feelings of rage.
Klein argued that this process involves
mourning – that while at first it may be
ushered in by weaning, versions of it recur
throughout life whenever there is any
significant change or loss. It is intimately
connected with mental growth, with
maturation and with creativity.
The Last Period
In the early 1950s Klein made her last
major contribution: her ideas concerning
the damaging effects of envy in psychic
life. Klein felt that many aspects of
aggressive behaviour, of devaluation and
contempt, were unconscious expressions
of envy. Although destructive envy is much
increased by emotional deprivation and by
bad experiences in life, Klein also felt that
fundamentally it derived from the infant’s
envy of the goodness of the breast. She
thought this was universal and to some
extent constitutional. However, this does
not mean that envy, once understood,
cannot be mitigated.
The Influence of Klein’s ideas
Klein’s work was narrower in its range than
Freud’s. This may be one of the reasons why
Klein’s ideas are much less well known in the
public sphere than those of Freud. However,
for many psychoanalysts her major papers
are profound. They are absolute
psychoanalysis rather in the way that
Beethoven’s late quartets are absolute music.
In the half-century since her death Klein’s
ideas have been extended even beyond the
important new developments they led to in
psychoanalysis, towards an understanding of
group dynamics and society itself.
David Taylor
David Taylor is a training and supervising
psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytic
Society; he is also the clinical director of the
Tavistock Adult Depression Study.