Melanie Klein

General Information Started work as a psychoanalyst during the First World War. Began her work as an extension of Freud's thinking, but gradually diverged on some main points of argument. Though she did claim many successes in new areas their context and their relationship to Freud's innovation are important. Main Theories The Play Technique Developed through her early work with children with speech difficulties in order to allow them to express themselves. Uses a set …

…first attempts to master their own death drive and destructive impulses. They do this by first splitting both their ego and object-representations into good and bad parts and then projecting their destructive impulses onto those bad objects by which they feels persecuted. Failure to leave this position will result in not only paranoid and schizoid disorders but also for obsessional difficulties in which the 'persecuting bad object' is introjected, forming the core of the super-ego.