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cording to Grosskurth, "Anna Freud was an expositor of her father's
ideas, but only of those ideas which could be scrutinized in clearly
lit, well-ventilated places . Sin, cruelty, suffering she shunned . The
witches of the night ride on broomsticks and converse with the
powers of darkness in Klein's work, but a Viennese spinster creates a
tidy, reasonable world vigorously sweeping away the cobwebs."
Klein considered herself Freud's spiritual daughter, "a Freud–
ian, but not an Anna Freudian." Unlike the ego psychologists who
more or less ignored Freud's notions of love and death instincts,
Klein explored them and held that the loss of love object and mourn–
ing reactivate the most threatening anxieties of earliest infancy.
From her observations she inferred that children "introject" good and
bad objects, and that depressive and paranoid states result from the
internalization of bad ones. She concluded not only that children
need "good-enough mothering," but that psychosis as well as
neurosis might be amenable to psychoanalytic treatment. And she
held that envy, jealousy, and greed evolve from the earliest condi–
tions of nurturing. Klein's child therapy, therefore, was aimed at in–
tegrating split-off envy; at getting even three-year old patients to talk
about their sexual and aggressive thoughts.
Klein's insights into "object relations" increasingly influenced
British psychoanalysis, not least because by insisting on remaining
within the British Psychoanalytical Society she had access to can–
didates. There, she had to "live with" (though rarely talk to) Anna
Freud. Their students, however, who were exposed to the doctrines
of both women, benefited from the intellectual stimulation. In recent
years, most explicitly through the work of Otto Kernberg, Kleinian
psychoanalysis has been infiltrating American classical psycho–
analysis as well.
During her entire life Melanie Klein was embattled. After a
difficult childhood and an unhappy marriage , she left her husband at
a time when divorce was rare; she was an extraordinary person but
always regretted that she had not attended medical school ; her
daughter Melitta Schmiedeberg who became a (medical) member of
the British Psychoanalytical Society took public positions against her
and "demonstrated" the mother-daughter rivalries of Klein's theories
to excess. And some of Klein's followers, such as Paula Heimann,
Winnicott, and Joan Riviere left her-or were discarded-when
developing their own theoretical viewpoints.
Unlike Horney, who left the classical fold and thus remained
outside the prestigious International Psychoanalytic Association,
