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PARTISAN REVIEW
movement , maligned Freud as the male chauvinist
par excellence.
Grosskurth's biography of Melanie Klein comes at a time when her
"baby," namely object-relations theory, has entered the American
psychoanalytic mainstream-along with D. W. Winnicott's play
therapy and W. D . Fairbairn's "inner reality ." As expected, the
reception of the two books has followed party lines : Westkott has
been praised by feminists and ignored by Freudians of all stripes,
while Grosskurth has been hailed by the intellectual public, ignored
or attacked by ego psychologists, and taken to task by certain
feminists and by British analysts, some of whose recollections she
seems to have taken out of context.
In fact, both Karen Horney and Melanie Klein disagreed early
with some of Freud's basic formulations, particularly with the con–
cept of penis envy. Thereby, they attracted the fire of those who
elaborated rather than questioned the increasing weight Freud put
on ego psychology after 1923 . Now, he postulated a distinctive
developmental model for girls and introduced the importance of the
pre-Oedipal phase-when the girl must make the complicated (un–
conscious) transition from loving her mother to loving her father.
(This means she must have resolved this phase upon entering the
Oedipal one). Horney took offfrom this essay in order to elaborate
the significance of male-dominated culture, while Freud went on to
explore its implications for pre-Oedipal experience.
Both Klein and Horney-like all the early psychoana–
lysts- based their theories upon personal experiences, and were at–
tracted to psychoanalysis because it promised escape from male
domination . By better comprehending their own psyches, Horney
and Klein expected to understand the psyche of every woman. Still,
they were products of their milieus : Klein, Jewish, born in Poland,
brought up in Vienna and married in Hungary, studied (and prac–
ticed) psychoanalysis in Berlin before moving to England; Horney,
born in Hamburg to a German mother and a Norwegian father ,
studied medicine and then taught psychoanalysis at the Berlin In–
stitute for Psychoanalysis before moving to America . Both Horney
and Klein were analyzed by Abraham. And both eventually went
beyond the boundaries accepted by the classical Freudians . Accord–
ing to Alix Strachey, another of Abraham's patients , by 1925 Klein
already had "demonstrated absolutely clearly that ... children
(from 2 and 3/4 upwards) were already wrecked by the repression of
their desires and the most appalling
Schuldbewusstsein ."
She im-
