Melanie Klein : HER WORLD AND HER WORK by Phyllis Grosskurth (Knopf: $25; 497 pp.)

The public has been witness in recent years to the not always edifying spectacle of psychoanalysts fighting among themselves over who possesses the true theory and over related questions about training people to become psychoanalysts. More than 40 years ago, right after Freud’s death, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud (Freud’s youngest child), both specialists in treating children, were the major antagonists of a ferocious and prolonged struggle within the British Psychoanalytic Society about many of these issues. The quarrel threatened to split the British Society apart; at one point, Anna Freud actually resigned from the Training Committee. A rather sorrowful account of the sharp exchanges between the Kleinians and the Anna Freudians has only recently been published by Riccardo Steiner, himself a psychoanalyst, in the 1985 International Review of Psychoanalysis. The various papers presented by the two schools are called, with characteristic British understatement, the “Controversial Discussions of 1942-1944.” This biography of Melanie Klein, with its special emphasis on her world and her work, is thus very timely.

Grosskurth tells us that “few professional women have been subjected to as much distilled malice . . . as Klein endured” and that the biography is an “effort to set the record straight.” The book is very carefully researched; it is based on Klein’s unpublished autobiography and on many lengthy interviews with people who were witnesses to the times, including Klein’s child-patients, now grown up. It shows an obvious immersion in the published writings of Klein and her followers as well as the more orthodox ideas of Anna Freud and her followers. Grosskurth, who teaches at the University of Toronto, tells us that the one restriction on her sources came from the refusal of Dr. Kurt Eissler, the secretary of the Sigmund Freud Archives (and a close associate of Anna Freud) to open the correspondence between Freud and Karl Abraham (an analyst of Klein) and between Freud and Joan Riviere, a supporter of Klein. Some old wounds seem to remain open for a very long time.

Without mitigating the evidence of Klein’s personal shortcomings, which included a close-mindedness and dogmatism about her own work that was very similar to Anna Freud’s insistent “protection” of her father’s work, Grosskurth has succeeded in creating a sympathetic description of an obscure Hungarian Jewish woman, the daughter of an unsuccessful dentist, who spontaneously fell in love with Freud’s work in 1914 from reading it, and proceeded to spend the rest of her life trying to deepen and extend it. The two principal antagonists were thus fiercely dedicated to the same revered “father-figure,” Freud.

Grosskurth vividly re-creates both the historical circumstances and the personalities of the participants in the historic struggle. She describes, for example, how Klein was “queenly”; people thought of her as taller than she was. Anna Freud, in contrast, was “diffident” or, as one unfriendly observer put it, “shrinking into the limelight.” Grosskurth describes, also, how the students felt--as if the “parents were quarreling by post.”

It was not until 1946 that a “ladies’ agreement” was worked out between the opposing sides according to which there were to be three tracks of study, one Kleinian; another (Anna) Freudian; and a third non-aligned or independent. Ironically, a three-track model is in use today at New York University’s prestigious Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, designed by psychologists. The two main tracks, however, are now called the Freudian and the Interpersonal-Humanistic. This second track, which includes the thinking of Horney, Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan, would probably have been total anathema to both the Kleinians and the Freudians at the time.

Compared to the titanic battles in which she was professionally involved, Klein’s personal life seems relatively unspectacular. She was the youngest of four children and knew herself to be her mother’s favorite. “I was never shy,” she said. Her father, who had broken with his family’s Orthodox Jewish beliefs to study medicine, and whom she much admired, favored one of her two elder sisters. With this sister, Emilie, she was never on really good terms. Two of Melanie’s siblings died--a beloved middle sister, of tuberculosis at age 12, and an almost incestuously adoring and adored brother, Emmanuel, who died of respiratory disease in his early 20s. After her brother’s death, Melanie insisted in arranging for the private publication of his poems. As Grosskurth points out, the themes of envy, hate and reparation about which Klein wrote were familiar themes in her personal life.

During the early years of her marriage, in which she had three children, she had a number of depressive breakdowns, some of which she spent in sanitoria. During these separations from her husband and children, Melanie’s mother kept the household going. Her marriage ended in divorce; afterward there seems to have been an unsatisfactory love affair with a married man who ultimately returned to his wife. After this affair, her work became her life.

In 1914, in the midst of her depressive episodes, she became acquainted with Freud’s work, and she also consulted Sandor Ferenczi, an analyst practicing in Budapest who was an especial favorite of Freud’s. (Ernest Jones on Freud’s advice, took a training analysis with Ferenczi and then returned to England where he founded the British Psychoanalytic Society.) By 1918, when the Fifth Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Budapest, with Freud reading a paper, and Anna Freud in attendance, Klein was already practicing child analysis. Ferenczi had encouraged her to work with children, since this was deemed suitable for women. (Anna Freud was also encouraged to work with children, and for the same reason.) By 1919, Klein had obtained membership in the Budapest Society by presenting a child analytic case, which was, in fact, the analysis of her own youngest son, Erich. The path from being a patient to becoming an analyst was much easier in 1919 than it is now--and there are some who wonder whether there is any evidence of an increase in benefit to the patients from the increased length and rigor of training.

Klein was so zealous a believer that she thought children should be analyzed for prophylactic reasons, to prevent their growing up neurotic. Klein apparently analyzed all three of her own children, and concealed this fact in her publications. Grosskurth tells us that the English Kleinians expressed shock and dismay when she informed them about this, but one analyst, a non-Kleinian, said, that to be fair, everybody was doing it at the time. That Freud had analyzed his daughter, Anna, was obviously something of a precedent. In any case, the effects were apparently not prophylactic. Erich, now Eric Clyne, had many additional analyses; Hans died young in a mysterious mountain accident, and Melitta Schmideberg, who became a medical psychoanalyst, not only spearheaded the attacks on her mother within the British Society, but gave a lecture sporting “red boots” on the day of her mother’s funeral.

By the early ‘20s, the Communist revolution in Hungary and its brutal suppression by a Fascist government, pushed Klein to move to Berlin, where she sought a second analysis with Abraham, another of Freud’s favorites. In Berlin, she wrote prolifically, and her writings attracted the attention not only of Jones, but of Alix Strachey and other established English analysts. Encouraged by Jones, she decided to move to England where she mastered a new language and established herself again as a successful analyst. She was the analyst Jones chose for his two children and for his wife.

Her work, however, had begun to attract the unfavorable notice of Anna Freud. For several years, Jones had succeeded in patching up some very sticky quarrels, in which Freud, although clearly uncomfortable in his role as arbiter, nevertheless came down squarely on the side of his daughter. It was with the arrival of the refugees from Hitler in 1939, followed shortly by the death of Freud, that the quarreling could not be contained. Anna Freud and the many newcomers were now competitors for the same turf. As one outspoken supporter of Klein (Glover) put it, the balance of power was in Klein’s hands. No wonder the rhetoric escalated. With Freud dead, both women appealed even more loudly to his authority, Klein for his support for new ideas and Anna Freud for his support of the bedrock. So deeply were the participants involved in the struggle that on at least one occasion they had to be reminded by the sound of falling bombs that air raids were occurring. They moved to the basement and continued talking.

Grosskurth’s biography is valuable for its glimpse of the scientific emptiness within which the debates raged. For example, John Bowlby, the British psychoanalyst, whose work in developing our knowledge about the infant-mother attachment system led to an enormous amount of research that is now in the mainstream of psychology, was originally a Kleinian. That is, he was analyzed by Joan Riviere, a supporter of Klein. But he stopped being a Kleinian after a while. When he presented his first observations on young children separated from their mothers, the Kleinians organized an attack upon his presentation. Anna Freud also disapproved of it. She argued that since he had not collected his data from psychoanalysis, his work could not be called psychoanalytic! As Bowlby is quoted as saying, neither Anna Freud nor Melanie Klein really understood science. This failure to submit disputes to the arbitration of evidence still plagues psychoanalysis, although it is slowly being redressed. Grosskurth’s biography of a creative woman who was obviously hampered by her lack of grounding in research is a rich historical source that can perhaps help psychoanalysis to remember rather than to relive its past.