Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein was born in Vienna on 30 March 1882. She became an Austrian-British psychoanalyst who made child analysis her life's work, eventually becoming the central architect of object relations theory. Klein focused on ambivalence and moral ambiguity as engines of development. She proposed that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy drives the unconscious to split the world into good and bad idealizations. Resolution of that split, she believed, depends on the child's constitution and the quality of nurturing received — and the outcome determines what distresses surface later in life.…