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As Hannah Segal observed in 1999 (Pick & Roper, 1999):
LR: Was it difficult to work with Klein? What was it like to work with her?
HS: … working with her, which I did later, was not difficult at all. She didn't have any side or pretentiousness. She was extremely open to new ideas. She would only get fierce if one undermined her basic concepts derived from her discoveries, then she got very fierce.
Yes, very fierce, couldn't/wouldn't hear. As Winnicott complained in 1956 (Newman, 1995):
My trouble when I start to speak to Melanie about her statement of early infancy is that I feel as if I were talking about colour to the colour-blind … It is a matter of great grief to me that I cannot get Melanie to take up the point or to see that there is a point to be discussed. (Donald Winnicott to Joan Riviere, p. 181)
Winnicott, you will recall, was a paediatrician before he trained with Klein as a psychoanalyst. He did know a thing or two about children and early infancy.
[Psychoanalysis] is not concerned with the real world, nor with the child's or adult's adaptation to the real world, nor with sickness or health nor virtue or vice. It is concerned simply and solely with the imaginings of the childish mind, the phantasised pleasures and dreaded retributions. (Riviere 1927, p. 377)
Freud did not like it (Paskauskas, 1993):
In this symposium, such an otherwise clever person as Riviere lets herself get carried away by theoretical assumptions which run counter to everything we know and believe and which indicate a new path to the derealization of analysis. (Sigmund Freud to Ernest Jones, 23 September 1927)