Melanie Klein

About the author

Born in Vienna in 1882, Melanie Klein became one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Working primarily in Britain, she pioneered child analysis and was the central architect of object relations theory. Klein argued that pre-verbal infants experience existential anxiety that drives the formation of the unconscious, splitting the world into idealized good and bad objects.

How a child resolves that split — shaped by innate constitution and the quality of nurturing received — she believed, could determine the psychological distresses encountered throughout adult life. She died in London in 1960.