Melanie Klein

Background

Melanie Klein, born in Vienna in 1882, was an influential woman psychoanalyst whose work            has had a lasting impression on the field today. By the time of her death of cancer in 1960, she had become a well-known figure in the world of psychology for her impact on developmental psychology. Though she originally had aspired to attend medical school, economic difficulties experienced by her family held her back. At the age of 21, she married for the first time and began a family which would later amount to three children. In 1910 she moved with her family to Budapest, having suffered from depression caused by a less than perfect relationship with her mother. While in Budapest she began studying psychoanalysis with Sandor Ferenczi, who encouraged her to attempt to psychoanalyze her own three children. Klein had to develop her own technique for this, because up until this point no one else had yet attempted to analyze children. The techniques that she created for this purpose are still used today, and much credit should be given to Klein as both a successful woman thinker as well a psychologist.

Melanie Klein developed a form of psychoanalysis called object relations theory, which states that the relationship between mothers and infants is the center of personality development. She developed a “play technique”, in which a child’s playful activities can be taken as symbols of unconscious thoughts and desires. In her technique, play activities are viewed and interpreted in ways which mirror the dream and free association interpretations that are used in the analysis of adults. Klein is thus credited for being the first psychologist to recognize that play is a meaningful activity for children, and this finding directly lead to the development of play therapy. She would spend the rest of her life developing such theories, and creating an entirely new school of psychoanalytic thought. She personally trained many of the first people who embraced her ideas and the concept of the “play technique”. Interestingly enough, Klein was the first psychoanalyst to diverge from Freud’s idea of psychological development while remaining a part of the psychoanalytic movement. Her work on the relationships between mourning and primitive defense mechanisms lead to her coming up with two fundamental developmental stages: the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive position. In direct conflict with the stages of development as described by Freud, Klein’s theories were subject to much debate. In the end, it was agreed that two schools of psychoanalytic thought would now be taught: Freudianism and Kleinianism.

Psychology of Women

Late in Klein’s life she experienced a falling out with one of her children, daughter Melitta. Her final studies and work included such themes of gratitude, envy, and reparation of the mother-infant relationship, and seem to reflect her search for answers to issues in her own life. Having experienced life as both a daughter and a mother, she was inspired to continue to develop her ideas further. Klein’s belief and emphasis on the role of the mother-child experience in an infant’s life has continued to have major influence on modern psychology today. In relation to the psychology of women, Klein’s research stressed the importance of the child’s relationship with his/her mother in reducing anxieties, depression, and fear in children.

http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/klein.html

http://www.apadivisions.org/division-35/about/heritage/melanie-klein-biography.aspx.

http://www.feministvoices.com/melanie-klein/

Background

Karen Horney (pronounced Horn-eye) was born Karen Danielson in Blankenese, Germany on September 16, 1885 to Berndt and Clotilde (Sonni) Danielson. Berndt was a Norwegian sea captain and was a strict and religious man. Sonni, many years his junior, was a freethinker, well-educated and from a prominent family.  Karen’s mother and older brother Berndt encouraged her to get an education and in 1906, she became one of the first women to attend a German university. At university, she studied medicine. In 1909, Karen married Oskar Horney, who by some accounts was a social scientist and other accounts, a lawyer. She gave birth to the first of three daughters in 1910 and graduated with a medical degree in 1911. 

Prompted by her pain over her mother’s death in 1911, Karen entered psychoanalysis with Karl Abraham, a disciple of Freud.  It is said that she spent more than 500 hours in analysis with him.  Her experience sparked her interest in psychoanalysis and she studied it with Abraham from 1913-1915.  In 1920, Karen helped to found the Policlinic and Berlin Psychoanalytic Society.  There she designed and directed therapeutic programs, taught, treated patients, wrote and conducted research.  In 1926, she separated from Oskar, taking her children.

Karen first supported Freudian psychoanalytic theory but as she soon diverged from the traditional. She became interested in feminine psychology and female psychosexual development and believed many of his theories to be wrong. She differed from “traditional” psychoanalytic thought in areas such as female development, death instinct, and the basis of personality. While Freud initially was supportive of Karen’s work, he began to grow cold to her around 1931. That isolation, coupled with the rise of the Nazi party, caused Karen to immigrate to the United States in 1932. There, she helped found the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and two years later, she moved to New York City to join the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.  In New York, she began to do work on neurosis and self-analysis and in 1937, she and Oskar were divorced.  In 1941, Karen left (or was expelled due to her diverging views from traditional psychoanalysis) the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and formed the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. She continued to teach (notably at the New School for Social Research), write several books, treat patients and founded the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, of which she was the editor.  Karen Horney died on December 4, 1952 in New York City after a brief illness.  She is buried in Ardsley, New York. After her death, the Karen Horney Foundation was formed and the Karen Horney Clinic was opened in New York City in 1955.  The clinic provides accessible mental healthcare to the public.

Work on Psychology of Women

Karen Horney’s interest in the psychology of women started soon after her introduction to psychoanalysis.  At first, she embraced Freudian psychoanalysis and even wrote a paper which she delivered in 1922 called “On the Genesis of the Castration Complex”.  This paper supported the concepts of penis envy and the castration complex in women.  Very soon afterward however, her views began to deviate from those of Freud. 

Karen then theorized that if penis envy did exist, it was a result of girls’ treatment of them by the parents and not, as Freud proposed, an innate feeling of inferiority.  In fact, she birthed (pun intended) the concept of “womb envy”, men’s envy of women’s ability to get pregnant, nurse and mother babies. She believed that it was this envy that caused men to claim that they were the superior gender in other arenas, like providing for the family or physical prowess. 

Karen objected to male bias that permeated psychoanalysis. In opposition to Freud’s emphasis on the importance of the relationship of daughters to fathers in psychosexual development, Karen identified the mother-daughter relationship as being paramount in a girl’s sexual and psychological development. 

Between 1923 and 1935, Karen wrote thirteen important papers on feminine psychology.  These papers covered such topics as motherhood, masochism, marital difficulties, masculinity complexes in women and the aforementioned envy of women. These papers were published together in 1967 under the title Feminine Psychology.

References

http://www.aipnyc.org/pdf/biography.pdf

http://www.britannica.com/print/topic/272054

Hyde, Janet Shibley. (2006). Theoretical Perspectives, Half the Human Experience The Psychology of Women (pp. 38-39). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/horney.html

Posted by Sarah Fisher