Customer Reviews

Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (Master Work Series)

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Grosskurth is to be commended on her ability to present a complex view of a woman whose work she clearly idealizes. Melanie Klein emerges as a woman as difficult to grasp as her ideas: At once both a bullish narcissist who required complete fidelity by her students and analysands, and a remarkable pioneer who overcame gender obstacles, anti-semitism, and lay status to become one of the century's most influential psychoanalytic visionaries. This is a must-read account of the life of a woman who was/is personally and professionally both reviled and cultified, and whose insights into the mental life of infants and children remain profoundly controversial. I walked away from my encounter with this book deeply intrigued about the person, the cult, and the ideas of Melanie Klein. My clinical work, I suspect, will be creatively enriched as I further delve into the contents of her vision. As setting a biographical context that goes beyond the linear narration of a life, I recommend this book as a launching point for anyone undertaking the teaching or learning of Kleinian psychoanalysis, or psychoanalytic theory of any persuasion. My only gripe about the book is Grosskurth's seeming need to defend Klein against her critics, rather than trusting the reader to simply appreciate the complexity of this strange, narcissistically fragile, brilliant, and flawed woman.

Although I enjoyed this biography at first, it quickly proved slow-going because the author, Phyllis Grosskurth, lacked a deep emotional perspective on Melanie Klein. I got tired of wading through endless unprocessed details presented by a generally admiring biographer who should have done the emotional number-crunching for me. That said, if I really felt Klein to be that important I would have persevered, but instead I just read the first half carefully and skimmed the rest.

Overall, I found Melanie Klein to be a disturbed and incorrect theorist who was destroyed by her own childhood---a childhood which she spent the rest of her life replicating on those over whom she wielded power. She radically abused and crushed her own children, in various ways, including by psychoanalyzing them. She went so far as to analyze her adolescent son Hans's masturbation fantasies! (Not only does Phyllis Grosskurth fail to criticize this, but she even rather admires it, noting Klein's belief "in complete frankness.") This totally turned me off. Thankfully Klein's daughter Melitta garnered enough strength to break away from her sick mother---and to engage in bitter public debate with her later on. Hans was not so lucky. He ended up living a tortured life and died at age 27 under shadowy circumstances that many considered to be suicide.

Melanie Klein invaded his private world and destroyed his self---all the while claiming to be his greatest proponent. Only a mental health field that is incredibly dissociated could fail to find this shocking, much less still hold her up as a role model, which many still do. (I know many proud "Kleinians.") And Phyllis Grosskurth is not much better than the rest of the field. For instance, Grosskurth tends to side with Klein herself in conveniently blaming Hans's father for the bulk of Hans's problems. Yes, his father was traumatizing, but why wasn't Melanie Klein putting a stop to it, instead of doing nothing and then later profiting from it career-wise by analyzing him?

Needless to say, I am not a Kleinian, and this unsatisfying book made me even less of one.