You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Melanie Klein was nearing the end of her life when, aged seventy-seven, she worked on her autobiography. By then it was many years since her birth in 1882 in Vienna and since the start, in the early 1920s, of her pioneering work in child psychoanalysis and her formulations concerning the pre-genital origins of the Oedipus complex in love- and hate-driven fantasies about the mother's sexual coupling with the father. She had followed this, after settling in 1926 in London, by defending her play technique against its criticism by Anna Freud, and then by developing an innovative theory about symbol-formation and its disruption, and about the infantile origins of depression and defending against it with mania or paranoia.
Following the arrival of the Freuds in London in 1938 Klein and her followers debated in controversial discussions in the British Psycho-Analytical Society (BPAS) her theory that unconscious fantasy begins at birth. These discussions were followed by the BPAS introducing three separate trainings - Freudian, Kleinian and independent. In the post-war period, Klein developed a theory of the paranoid-schizoid position and the related defence of projective identification; these, together with her theory of the infantile depressive position, were adopted by her immediate