Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 329 The tone Stevens adopted in his later poetry was a crucial development in his mythology of self, and in his life as a man. This meditative voice is his ultimate persona . The wistful superman of "The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain," as he moves rocks and trees around and picks his way among the clouds, finally recognizes in the potent abstraction of his own poetry "his unique and solitary home." In seeing the thrust of a militantly private man's work as that of "transcending biography," Milton Bates is able to go to the core of the interest Stevens's life and art have for us. Frank J. Lepkowski Oakland University Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 515 pp. $12.50. Because women were the insiders and men the outsiders in Melanie Klein's life, it is understandable that her biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, sees Klein best, and most sympathetically, through other women's eyes. Women were Klein's best friends, her confidantes, allies, and collaborators. Her closest friend as a young woman was Klara Vagó who gave Klein the tenderness and love which she did not get from either her parents or husband. As she matured, it was again women who helped expand her horizons . For example, Alix Strachey played a vital role in introducing her to England, and Strachey's description of Klein and the hat she was to wear when first addressing the British Psycho-Analytic Society gives a precise portrait of a little appreciated psychoanalytic pioneer: It's a vasty, voluminous affair in bright yellow with a huge brim and a cluster, a whole garden, of mixed flowers. . . . The total effect is that of an overblown tearose . . . . She looks like a whore run mad—or, no—she really is Cleopatra ... for through it all, there's something very handsome and attractive in her face. She's a dotty woman. But there's no doubt whatever that her mind is stored with things of thrilling interest. And she's a nice character (p. 136). In England from the thirties to the fifties, Melanie Klein revolutionized psychoanalysis by pushing its frontiers further backward in time to the very beginnings of human psychological development. In her work on the infant's phantasy world of beloved and persecuting internal figures, of envy, greed, jealousy and hate, and of devastating emotional turmoil, women such as Joan Riviere and Paula Heimann were her closest coworkers. Finally, in her political struggles to maintain her position and power within the psychoanalytic movement, it was these same women who were her allies. Klein was a tenacious advocate of herself and her own theories; in fact, like other great analysts including both Freud and Jung, she was an embodiment of her own theories . Just as classical psychoanalysis works wonders in explaining Freud's life, and analytical psychology provides a fine understanding of Jung's development, so Kleinian psychoanalysis, focused as it is on mother-child disharmony, provides deep insights into Klein's relations with her mother, her daughter, her closest women friends, and ultimately with herself. Grosskurth says that Klein's heresy against psychoanalysis was that in her work "the mother was replacing the father as the seat of neuroses" (p. 116). As men were at the periphery of her personal and professional life, so they were in her theories. Nothing could have been a greater apostasy; Freud, himself, had declared that the child's 330 biography Vol. 11, No. 4 greatest need was for a father's protection. Klein insisted that the infant's initial bond with the mother was of far greater importance in human destiny than children's less intimate interactions with their fathers. While most psychoanalysts seemed comfortable in accepting Freud's role as patriarch and the centrality of the father in psychoanalytic theory, they were not willing to tolerate the ascendancy of a woman. Klein's work met with blatantly sexist criticism; for example, a male analyst, John Padel, moaned that, " 'This is a system which, used unmodified, could imprison both patient and analyst in a matriarch world' " (p. 270). One woman with some power was, at least in...