The Importance of Melanie Klein

The Importance of Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein was a groundbreaking and highly creative psychoanalyst. She was born in 1882 in Vienna but spent most of her life in UK, dying in London in 1960. Her life was fascinating, with many losses and tragedies but even withstanding this she developed psychoanalytic thought from classical Freudian theory into a more relational style. 

Klein was one of the first people to work with early childhood development. Her style and methods of working with children would not stand up today but she was a pioneer in psychoanalysis in her thinking about the child and the mother and the relationship between the two. 

When I first studied Klein, I found her very difficult to understand and appreciate. Later, in my second further training to become a psychotherapist, I read her original writings. I suddenly got her and realised how important she is to my work and my clients. Like all the pioneers in this field, if we take her out of her time and context and just think about her clinical discoveries there are some super useful and relevant aspects of her theory for us today.

Here are just 2 of her theories which I use daily in my work…

The Paranoid-Schizoid Position and the Depressive Position

These positions are times when we think in certain ways or from specific psychological states. The paranoid-schizoid is the more primitive of these two positions. This is when we have a sort of split thinking when we are only able to think in black and white. An example is when we are describing someone to a friend, and we think and talk about this person as being someone who maybe we don’t like. We might think that they are really unpleasant, and we have a fixed mindset about them. This isn’t always accurate but it’s our remembered experience of them and one that we relate to for our own reasons. As well as being attributed to people this paranoid-schizoid thinking can also be about other aspects of our life like our job, our politics, or our home environment. We might love something or someone dearly or alternatively we can’t stand them. Something is either all good or all bad and we can be rather opinionated about our polarised feelings. 

However, if we have moved from the paranoid-schizoid position into the depressive position about something, then we are in a greyer area. We are less sure of ourself and we are now able to acknowledge that nothing is all good or all bad. There is an ambivalence to pretty much everything in life and once we can appreciate that, life becomes much easier to bear. No one deserves being put on a pedestal and no one is 100% evil. We are all a mix of both good and bad depending on what’s going on with whom at the time. 

So, as Klein purports, our aim is to be in the depressive position on most things. It’s a good aim but not a very realistic one because its usual to move between both positions. We can easily revert to the paranoid-schizoid state when something happens that knocks us off kilter so much so that we aren’t able to manage our emotions as well as usual.

That’s ok and it’s understandable, we just need to realise what happened and head back to the depressive position where there is room for doubt and ambivalence and thinking as soon as we can.

Object Relations

The other useful piece of Kleinian theory is object relations. I find Klein’s choice of language confusing and difficult to access here but the meaning behind it is actually the inception/genesis of what has now developed into the very popular and commonly accepted attachment theory.

From her work with babies and young children Klein discovered the importance of the relationship between the baby and its primary care giver, and how our experience of our mother carries more than just memories. Our experience of our mother gives us an active image that also has emotional weight to it. In essence, we carry an emotional blueprint inside us from our early relationships that can affect how we experience other relationships we have later in life.

This is a foundational theory for many models of psychotherapy and counselling which have come after Melanie Klein and acknowledge that if we know what our infant blueprints are we then have the capacity to change them.

Further information

If you are interested in learning more about Klein and her theories, I recommend the School of Life short video which explains more.

Next time I will be exploring some ideas of Donald Winnicott…