Preludes

Abstract

Melanie Reizes Klein (1882–1960) was one of the most original and challenging psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. She cast her lot with rudimentary life and the chaos of beginnings. In generational terms, she opens the second chapter of Freudian psychoanalysis and does so in such a way that for the rest of her life she would have to argue as to whether she stretched Freud’s views beyond recognition. Her concern, as we glean from the 1941 letter below, was that Freud had not gone far enough. But what is enough when the issue involves Klein’s unsettling contribution: phantasies as entry point, roots, and origin of the inner world of the human condition. The problem, Klein maintained, belonged to human essence or that which gives affecting determination to our human condition. By the end of her life she was still weaving the loose ties of moral psychology to the conveyance, reception, and transformation of human suffering. Her question remained when and why depression for the human begins. As for writing about the work of Melanie Klein, other questions follow: What was Klein like? How did her psychoanalytic work evolve? What did she face in her time? And why did Klein rethink education through a theory of object relations?

Though the enclosed pages were written in connection with technique, you can see my main point which is that Freud’s discovery of the super-ego if not carried further is in danger of losing its essence.

—Melanie Klein, unpublished letter to Ernest Jones, 1941 (cited in Grosskurth 1986, p. 469)