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By Hanna Segal. New York: Viking Press, 1980, 194 pp., $5.95 (paperback).
Melanie Klein was a pupil and follower of Freud. Through her work, at first mainly with children, she extended the area of knowledge and understanding opened up by Freud and she came to some new formulations which in certain ways developed Freud's ideas, and in other ways differed from his
(p. 1). Thus, simply and straightforwardly, Segal, one of Klein's many eminent analysands and colleagues, begins her warm and lucid account of her subject's life and work. The author demonstrates that knowledge of the person and her formative influences illuminate the understanding of the evolution of her ideas.
Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882, the youngest of four children in a Jewish family with a tradition of learning. Her father rebelled against the narrowness of Polish-Jewish Talmudic orthodoxy. Instead of becoming a rabbi, he became first an unsuccessful doctor and then a successful dentist. He died when Melanie was eighteen. At fourteen Melanie Klein decided she too wanted to study medicine, an aspiration thwarted when she became engaged to and then married an engineer whose work required travel. Klein was ever to regret the loss of her opportunity to study medicine, a regret made more poignant when in later years she was severely reproached by Edward Glover for daring to investigate psychoses which he considered were the