Melanie Klein (née Reizes; 30 March 1882 – 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis.

[citation needed] However, her family's loss of wealth – and the pressure on her, as a young woman, to marry and have children – caused her to give up on realizing this wish.

According to Klein, play is symbolic of unconscious material that can be interpreted and analyzed in the same way that dreams and free associations are in adults.

As a divorced woman whose academic qualifications did not even include a bachelor's degree, Klein was a visible iconoclast within a profession dominated by male physicians.

Nevertheless, Klein's early work had a strong influence on the developing theories and techniques of psychoanalysis, particularly in Great Britain.

Amid these so-called 'controversial discussions', the British Psychoanalytical Society split into three separate training divisions: (1) Kleinian, (2) Freudian, and (3) Independent.

By observing and analyzing the play and interactions of children, Klein built on the work of Freud's unconscious mind.

Her dive into the unconscious mind of the infant yielded the findings of the early Oedipus complex, as well as the developmental roots of the superego.

Id, ego, and superego, to be sure, were merely shorthand terms (similar to the instincts) referring to highly complex and mostly uncharted psychodynamic operations.

[8] Klein's work on the importance of observing infants began in 1935 with a public lecture in London on weaning.

While observing children as they played with toys such as dolls, animals, plasticine or pencils and paper, Klein documented their activities and interactions.

After exploring ultra-aggressive fantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young and disturbed children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with the postulated Eros or Thanatos pulsations.

She later developed her ideas about an earlier developmental psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life, which she called the paranoid-schizoid position.

Battles were played out between the two sides, each presenting scientific papers, working out their respective positions and where they differed, during war-time Britain.

A compromise was eventually reached whereby three distinct training groups were formed within the British Psychoanalytical Society, with Anna Freud's influence remaining largely predominant in the US.

The paranoid-schizoid position is characterized by splitting the self and other into dichotomous good and evil with little ability to integrate the two or to recognize the relativity of these terms.

The object and the subject are separated,[13] allowing for a more simplistic approach to addressing the deprived areas of need when used in the clinical setting.

Because of this supposition, Klein's beliefs required her to proclaim that an ego exists from birth, enabling the infant to relate to others early in life (Likierman & Urban, 1999).

In Dorothy Dinnerstein's book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976) (also published in the UK as The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World), drawing from elements of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, particularly as developed by Klein, Dinnerstein argued that sexism and aggression are both inevitable consequences of child-rearing being left exclusively to women.

[14] Klein concluded that the infant's first and major concern is fear of being annihilated by the anger it feels, for example, when it is frustrated by the mother.

There would then be no way out of dealing with these anxieties and creating a more realistic attitude toward both men and women[16][17] This book became a classic of U.S. second-wave feminism and was later translated into seven languages.