Melanie Klein
British Austrian born psychoanalyst (1882-1960) · United Kingdom · Academics · Died at 78
Melanie Klein is read about 478 times a day, in 47 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 7 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 382 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?She argued that infants split the world into good and bad long before they have words for it - and that this pre-verbal fracture shapes every neurosis that follows.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
Melanie Klein 1952
Portrait of Melanie Klein, aged 8-9 years, by Atelier Olga. Wellcome L0017663
Melanie Klein c1890
Melanie Klein, portrait aged 7-8 years, Vienna. Wellcome L0017661
Melanie Klein; carte-de-visite photograph, 1899 Wellcome L0017665
Melanie Klein c1900
Portrait, bust Melanie Klein Wellcome L0017668
Portrait, bust Melanie Klein by C. Pietzner Wellcome L0017667In their own words 1
, Feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother.
Awards
In their orbit
Child: Melitta SchmidebergAbout this person
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. She died in London on 22 September 1960.
Academics from the United Kingdom 6
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