Melanie Klein

This chapter explores the importance of early paranoid and schizoid anxieties and mechanisms. For the schizoid mechanisms imply a dispersal of emotions including anxiety, but these dispersed elements still exist in the patient. Such patients have a certain form of latent anxiety; it is kept latent by the particular method of dispersal. For if persecutory fear, and correspondingly schizoid mechanisms, are too strong, the ego is not capable of working through the depressive position. This forces the ego to regress to the paranoid-schizoid position and reinforces the earlier persecutory fears and schizoid phenomena. As regards normal personality, it may be said that the course of ego-development and object-relations depends on the degree to which an optimal balance between introjection and projection in the early stages of development can be achieved. As a consequence, introjection may then be felt as a forceful entry from the outside into the inside, in retribution for violent projection.

Freud has little to say about dim and shadowy era of earliest infancy. It was Melanie Klein, one of the greatest of Freud's disciples, whose pioneering investigations illuminated the baby's most primitive fantasies. The small baby, dominated by overpowering feelings of love and hate towards the mother, projects them outwards and introjects what it perceives of her, Overwhelmed, it splits itself and its mother into Good and Bad. Later, the baby has to reassemble the mother and come to terms with its own ambivalent emotions - an extremely painful process which underlies depression in adults. These developments preceding the Oedipus complex were discovered by Klein using her revolutionary play technique and are at the heart of her system. This collection of her writings is edited and introduced by one of Britain's feminist thinkers, the author of Psychoanalysis and Feminism and herself a practising psychoanalyst. It shows how much Klein has to offer: in understanding and treating psychotics, in revising Freud's ideas about female sexuality, in showing how fantasy operates in everyday life.

A perfect introduction to Melanie Klein's modern neuroscientific research. Melanie Klein's writings, particularly on infant development and psychosis, have been crucial both to theoretical work and to clinical practice. Envy and Gratitude collects her writings from 1946 until her death in 1960, including two papers published posthumously. Klein's major paper, 'Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms', introduces the concept of the paranoid-schizoid position, in which the infant ego splits, projects and introjects its objects - most particularly the mother - during the first few months of life. Envy and Gratitude, her last major work, introduces her theory of primary envy.