Book description
Love, Guilt and Reparation shows the growth of Melanie Klein`s
work and ideas between 1921 and 1945.
The earlier papers reveal her intense proccupation with the impact
of infant anxieties upon child development. She traces these
influences on criminality and childhood psychosis, symbol formation
and intellectual inhibition and the early development of conscience.
In the final paper on the Oedipus complex, Klein develops her theories
of the earliest infant stages of development, extending Freud`s
analysis of the Oedipus complex and laying a basis for her own
subsequent conceptualising of the paranoid-schizoid position in the
first six months of life.
The volume also contains a foreward by Dr Hanna Segal and
explanatory notes by the Editorial Board of the Melanie Klein Trust.
Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882, the youngest of four
children. At about fourteen she decided to study medicine. With her
brother's help she learnt enough Greek and Latin to pass into the
Gymnasium but her early engagement and subsequent marriage in 1903
brought a halt to her plans. Years later, discovering a booklet on
dreams by Freud, she turned her attentions to psychoanalysis. At this
time she was living in Budapest and began her own analysis with
Ferenczi, who encouraged her interest in the analysis of children. In
1921 she moved to Berlin to continue her work with children, supported
by Dr Karl Abraham, In 1926 she moved to London where she worked and
lived until her death in 1960.
