Persistent persecutory states of the elderly: Felix Post: Pergamon Press, 1966. v + 100 pp., 25 s

Abstract

This article provides a short biography of the psychoanalyst who has had, after Freud, more impact than any other. It traces her moves from Vienna to Budapest to Berlin and, finally, to London, where she spent most of her professional life. Klein was a founder of one branch of child analysis. She took seriously Freud's hypothesis of the death drives. She also developed an original developmental theory, in which the child's major psychic task is the management of anxiety arising from destructive fantasies and wishes and from virulent envy. In the first, paranoid-schizoid, position, persecutory anxiety is prominent and splitting the major defense. Later, depressive anxiety and the fear of harming the loved object accompany the depressive position. Klein theorized the internal world, and the processes of splitting, projection, and introjection that create that world. Throughout life these are the challenges facing any human being as well as shaping and undermining social formations and processes. The central datum of Kleinian theory is unconscious fantasy.