Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work

Rating:
Summary: A biased, though compelling, account of an intriguing woman
Review: Grosskurth is to be commended on her ability to present a complex view of a woman whose work she clearly idealizes. Melanie Klein emerges as a woman as difficult to grasp as her ideas: At once both a bullish narcissist who required complete fidelity by her students and analysands, and a remarkable pioneer who overcame gender obstacles, anti-semitism, and lay status to become one of the century's most influential psychoanalytic visionaries. This is a must-read account of the life of a woman who was/is personally and professionally both reviled and cultified, and whose insights into the mental life of infants and children remain profoundly controversial. I walked away from my encounter with this book deeply intrigued about the person, the cult, and the ideas of Melanie Klein. My clinical work, I suspect, will be creatively enriched as I further delve into the contents of her vision. As setting a biographical context that goes beyond the linear narration of a life, I recommend this book as a launching point for anyone undertaking the teaching or learning of Kleinian psychoanalysis, or psychoanalytic theory of any persuasion. My only gripe about the book is Grosskurth's seeming need to defend Klein against her critics, rather than trusting the reader to simply appreciate the complexity of this strange, narcissistically fragile, brilliant, and flawed woman.

Rating:
Summary: A biased, though compelling, account of an intriguing woman
Review: Grosskurth is to be commended on her ability to present a complex view of a woman whose work she clearly idealizes. Melanie Klein emerges as a woman as difficult to grasp as her ideas: At once both a bullish narcissist who required complete fidelity by her students and analysands, and a remarkable pioneer who overcame gender obstacles, anti-semitism, and lay status to become one of the century's most influential psychoanalytic visionaries. This is a must-read account of the life of a woman who was/is personally and professionally both reviled and cultified, and whose insights into the mental life of infants and children remain profoundly controversial. I walked away from my encounter with this book deeply intrigued about the person, the cult, and the ideas of Melanie Klein. My clinical work, I suspect, will be creatively enriched as I further delve into the contents of her vision. As setting a biographical context that goes beyond the linear narration of a life, I recommend this book as a launching point for anyone undertaking the teaching or learning of Kleinian psychoanalysis, or psychoanalytic theory of any persuasion. My only gripe about the book is Grosskurth's seeming need to defend Klein against her critics, rather than trusting the reader to simply appreciate the complexity of this strange, narcissistically fragile, brilliant, and flawed woman.

Rating:
Summary: Indispensable Background to Understanding Klein's Work
Review: It can be argued that the theoretical contributions of Melanie Klein are something of a rendevous between the most sublime and absurd aspects of what psychoanalytic thought has had to offer. Klein's thinking set the stage for contemporary object relations theory by pushing beyond Freudian libidinal determinism and seeing the emerging human being as on a vital quest for survival that entailed a precarious balance between aggression and connection. Like Freud, Klein saw this quest as instinctually driven with the specific environmental contingencies a secondary consideration at best. But Klein moves beyond Freud (or picks up where she believes he left off) and introduces an array of concepts only alluded to by Freud. Among them has been the idea of hardwired internal objects and phantasies that the infant brings into its interpersonal world as a template for development; the centrality of the death instinct as the source of aggression, envy, and destruction when developmental conquest is thwarted; the primacy of projective identification in relating to and negotiating through the world of others; and the humanizing influence of gratitude and the depressive position as the developing infant realizes that its survival and the limits of its own omnipotence truly depend upon reciprocal connections with others. These ideas galvanized the British psychoanalytic community (where Klein as a Jew from Vienna emigrated in 1926) toward bold new directions through Klein's own work and her influence on Winnicott, Bion, Fairbarin, among other innovators.

Klein and her views have certainly not been without critics. Her developmental time lines, especially in light of current developmental research, are wildly off and her views on how the developmental enterprise unfolds has been taken to task for its failure to adequately factor in the influence of the actual environment (as Bowlby once reminded Klien, "you know, there is such a thing as a bad mother..."). More heated criticisms have been reserved for Klein's therapeutic method that heavily privileges tenuous circular interpretations that are seen by skeptics as putting the patient (many or most of whom were children) in the position of disputing the interpretation and being then seen as "protesting too much" in the process (i.e., analyst's projective identification on the patient). But the most absurd of all was Klein's political moves within the psychoanalytic community to codify her theory and its clinical training as some sort of canon. The consequence of this was the departure from a supposedly scientific endeavor to that of a religion.

Klein's theory is too valuable to dismiss but too problematic and even hazardous to accept whole cloth. Clinician and layman alike have been left to glean for themselves the gems from the gravel. Nietzsche observed that every man's philosophy stands as a personal memoir. Phyllis Grosskurth's biography of Klein provides a vital insight into the psychological derivations from Klein life that eventually found their way in her theoretical system. In Grosskurth's biography we find an assertively independent woman whose capacity for brilliant perspicacity was often matched by an equally vast capacity for self-deception and illusion. We learn about her narcissistic, neglectful mother who callously meddled in Klein's own later marriage and motherhood. We come to know her invalid, passive-aggressive older brother, Emanuel, who Klein idealized and endured in return her brother's self-serving manipulations. Both her mother and her brother oozed malignant envy whereas her father and her husband both proved remote, ineffectual, and rejecting. Klein's relationship with her own children were remarkably troubled which may have contributed to one son's lifelong depression and possible suicide and her oldest son (who Klein may have "analyzed" herself) to maintain a defensive distance from her. Her daughter, Melitta, went on to become an analyst herself and then set out to counter and humiliate her mother at every opportunity within the psychoanalytic community. For her part, Klein largely disavowed or denied these personal realities, which have instead, found expression through her "insights" into others (her conspicous absense of bad mothering in her theory suggesting something of a "moral defense").

In the able hands of Grosskurth, Klein's life and times reads as a sympathetic tragedy rather than a soap opera. It is clear that Grosskurth maintains an admiration for Klein and her contributions despite her considerable failings. Well written, balanced, and carefully documented, Grosskurth's account of Klein and the psychoanalytic community of her period will undoubtedly disillusion, even scandalize, many readers regarding the merits of psychoanalytic theories and practice. But as any artist or student of human nature knows (who is humble enough to admit it), the most probing and lasting insights have always tended to come from those who have lived through their own afflictions.