Melanie Klein (1882–1960) changed the psychoanalytic understanding of love more than almost any analyst after Freud. Freud described love mainly in terms of libido (sexual energy) and the choice of a partner. Klein placed it inside the baby's relationship with the people it depends on, and the love and hatred this dependence stirs up. For Klein, love is never simply given; it has to be achieved, again and again, despite our destructive impulses. In its mature form, it rests on the ability to feel guilt, to care about the other person and to want to repair harm.
This article is part of the Psychoanalysis of Love series. Following the article on Freud, it explains Klein's main ideas and what they mean for adult love and couples.
Background: from Budapest to London
Born in Vienna, Klein came to psychoanalysis in Budapest through Sándor Ferenczi, and later continued her own analysis with Karl Abraham in Berlin. She began analysing young children, using their play as the equivalent of an adult's free associations. In 1926 she moved to London at the invitation of Ernest Jones.
Her play technique brought her into conflict with Anna Freud, who was developing child analysis in Vienna differently:
- Anna Freud gave the analyst a partly educational role and doubted that young children formed a full transference (the transfer of feelings from earlier relationships onto the analyst).
- Klein interpreted children's anxieties and aggressive phantasies directly, treating play as a form of unconscious communication.
After the Freuds settled in London in 1938, the disagreement led to the "Controversial Discussions" of the British Psychoanalytical Society (1941–1945), which ended in a compromise allowing Kleinian, Anna Freudian and Independent analysts to work side by side.
The inner world: internal objects and phantasy
Two ideas lie behind everything Klein said about love.
The first is the idea of internal objects. In psychoanalysis, "object" simply means a person we relate to, or the image of that person in our mind. From the beginning of life, Klein argued, the baby not only relates to real people outside but also takes in, or introjects, its experiences of them, and builds an inner world of figures who feel loving, nourishing, attacking or damaged. These are not accurate copies of the parents but are coloured by the baby's own feelings, so that a mother who is briefly absent may be experienced inside as cruel.
The second idea is unconscious phantasy. Kleinian writers spell it with "ph" to separate it from ordinary, conscious daydreaming. Susan Isaacs (1948), who presented the Kleinian case during the Controversial Discussions, described phantasy as the mental expression of instinct. Every impulse and bodily sensation comes with an unconscious story about someone, such as being fed, being robbed or attacking. So love and hate are always love and hate for someone.
For adult love, this means that we meet a partner partly through the inner figures we bring, so whether they seem generous or withholding depends in part on this inner world.
The paranoid-schizoid position: all good or all bad
Klein described two basic "positions": typical patterns of anxiety, defence and ways of relating to others. She chose the word "position" rather than "stage" because both patterns remain available to us throughout life.
The earlier one, which dominates the first months of life, is the paranoid-schizoid position. Klein took the term "schizoid" from Fairbairn and developed the idea in her 1946 paper "Notes on some schizoid mechanisms".
- Its main anxiety is persecutory: a fear that the self will be attacked and destroyed.
- Its main defence is splitting: keeping loving and hating experiences strictly apart.
In phantasy, the baby creates an ideal "good breast" that satisfies and a persecuting "bad breast" that frustrates. This protects love by keeping something good safe from hatred.
Two further mechanisms go with splitting. Idealisation exaggerates the goodness of the good object as a protection against fear. The bad object, onto which the baby pushes (projects) its own aggression, becomes a persecutor. The more extreme the idealisation, the more frightening the persecutor tends to be.
In adult love, this can be seen in the early phase of infatuation. The partner seems flawless, and the relationship promises to make up for every earlier disappointment. It is just as clear in the sudden reversal after a frustration. The partner who was perfect yesterday becomes cold, selfish or cruel, and their earlier goodness now seems to have been an illusion. These swings are especially marked in splitting in borderline personality disorder, but for Klein they are a universal human potential rather than a disorder.
Projective identification: how partners carry each other's feelings
In the same 1946 paper, Klein introduced projective identification. This is an unconscious phantasy in which parts of the self, usually unwanted or dangerous parts, are split off and placed in another person. That person is then felt to contain them, and may be controlled or attacked as a result. Wilfred Bion later extended the idea to communication: the person on the receiving end may actually feel what is projected, in the way a mother feels her baby's distress and, by holding it (containing it), gives it back in a more bearable form.
This has proved one of the most useful Kleinian ideas for understanding couples. Henry Dicks, in Marital Tensions (1967), drew on object relations theory to describe how partners may unconsciously choose each other partly because each can carry disowned parts of the other. For example:
- one partner may hold all the anxiety in the relationship while the other appears calm
- one may express all the anger while the other stays reasonable
- one may be the "needy" one and the other the self-sufficient one
Such arrangements can be stable, but each partner loses access to part of themselves, and arguments often centre on the very qualities that have been placed in the other. This tradition informs much psychoanalytic couple therapy.
The depressive position: loving and hating the same person
In two papers, "A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states" (1935) and "Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states" (1940), Klein described a second pattern: the depressive position. She dated it from around the middle of the first year of life.
As perception and memory develop, the baby begins to realise that the mother who satisfies and the mother who frustrates are the same person. The split begins to close, and the baby must face a difficult fact: it hates the person it loves.
This brings a new kind of anxiety: fear no longer mainly for oneself, but for the loved person, who in phantasy may have been damaged by one's own attacks. Klein saw the guilt and sadness that follow not as signs of illness but as the foundation of concern for others.
Out of guilt grows the wish to make reparation: to restore, in phantasy and in reality, the person one fears one has harmed. Successful repair strengthens confidence in one's own goodness and in the loved person's ability to survive, and allows the other to be loved as a whole person.
Klein also described manic defences against this painful awareness: denying that one depends on anyone, control, triumph and contempt. Contempt lowers the value of what one needs and might lose. When guilt is unbearable rather than a spur to repair, it may turn into harsh, persecuting self-blame or into these defences instead (see also taking control of guilt).
"Love, Guilt and Reparation" (1937)
Klein's most direct writing on adult love is the essay "Love, Guilt and Reparation", published with Joan Riviere's "Hate, Greed and Aggression" in the short book Love, Hate and Reparation (1937). Originally given as public lectures, it applies the depressive position to ordinary life.
Klein suggests that early relationships with parents and siblings influence the partners we choose. People may be:
- seeking qualities that recall a loved figure
- seeking what they missed
- looking for someone through whom earlier hurts, real or imagined, may be put right
A satisfying love relationship, in her account, depends on the ability to identify with the partner without losing one's own identity, an ability that comes from the same source as reparation.
She extends the wish to repair to parenthood, friendship, creative work and concern for society. Her essential point is that love is not the absence of hate. It is love that has survived the knowledge of one's own hostility and has responded to it with concern.
Envy and gratitude: spoiling what is good
In her last major work, Envy and Gratitude (1957), Klein proposed that some people's ability to love is undermined by a particularly destructive form of aggression, which she called primary envy. She separated envy from two related feelings:
- Jealousy involves three people: the fear of losing a loved person to a rival.
- Greed is an endless wish to take more than the other person can or wants to give.
- Envy involves two people and is directed at the good object itself. It is the angry wish to spoil what is good precisely because it is good and belongs to someone else.
Envy is especially damaging because it attacks the very source of help. Someone dominated by envy may find it hard to accept care, because receiving it confirms that the other has something valuable. Kindness may be met with suspicion or quiet put-downs. Envy also confuses good and bad, making a stable good inner figure hard to establish.
The counterpart of envy is gratitude. For Klein, gratitude comes from the ability to take in and enjoy a good experience, and to feel that it came from someone good. It strengthens the good inner figure and, with it, trust. In adult relationships, the ability to receive what a partner offers, to admit that one depends on them, and to feel grateful rather than humiliated by that dependence, is closely linked to the capacity for lasting love. Envy helps explain why some people spoil relationships that are going well.
From idealisation to disappointment, and beyond
Together, Klein's ideas explain a familiar pattern: the cycle of idealisation and devaluation. The partner is first experienced as ideal, promising a love without frustration. No real person can meet this demand, so disappointment follows and the split may simply reverse. Envy or contempt may deepen the devaluation, and the cycle may repeat with the same partner or a new one.
From a Kleinian point of view, the alternative is not a love without disappointment. It is a love in which disappointment can be tolerated. Moving towards the depressive position means:
- recognising that the partner who frustrates is the same person who is loved
- bearing the guilt and sadness this brings
- responding through repair rather than rejection or contempt
Otto Kernberg, discussed later in the series, built on these ideas in his account of mature love and its pathologies, combining them with ego psychology.
Criticisms and limitations
Klein's theory has been criticised in several ways:
- Too much in the infant's mind. Anna Freud and her colleagues objected that Klein credited babies in the first months of life with highly complex mental activity, such as elaborate phantasies about the inside of the mother's body. Later infant research, such as Daniel Stern's (1985), offered a picture centred more on perception and interaction. Kleinians reply that they describe unconscious meaning rather than conscious thinking.
- Too little weight on the environment. Winnicott, who was strongly influenced by Klein, and Bowlby, who was supervised by her, both came to feel that she gave too little weight to how parents actually behave and to real experiences of separation and loss.
- Innate envy. Inborn envy has been particularly contested for attributing too much to temperament and too little to deprivation. Fairbairn traced attachment to bad objects to the failures of real caregivers rather than to the death instinct.
Contemporary Kleinians focus more on countertransference (the therapist's own emotional responses), Bion's containment and the movement between positions within a session, but splitting, projective identification and the depressive position have become part of the shared language of psychodynamic thought.
Why Klein's ideas matter in therapy
Klein's ideas can help make sense of several difficulties often brought to psychotherapy:
- repeatedly idealising a partner and then feeling bitterly let down (splitting)
- a lasting sense that the partner is hostile or persecuting (projecting hostile inner figures)
- fixed roles in a couple, such as the anxious one and the calm one (mutual projective identification)
- finding it hard to accept care (envy)
- paralysing guilt or contempt (difficulty in reaching the depressive position)
In therapy informed by Klein, these patterns are not only talked about but also noticed as they appear in the relationship with the therapist, who may be idealised, devalued, or felt to be envied or envious. The aim is to help the person bring split-off feelings together, recognise projections and take them back, and develop a stronger good inner figure. Attention to defence mechanisms is central to this work.
Conclusion
Klein offered a view of love that is neither romantic nor cynical. In her account, love is rooted in the baby's earliest dependence and is always accompanied by hate, envy and fear. Its mature form does not deny these feelings but brings them together: the other is seen as a whole person, and harm, whether real or imagined, is met with concern and the wish to repair rather than with flight or contempt. Her ideas still help explain why love is so often idealised, attacked and lost, and how it can be kept alive.
When cycles of idealisation and disappointment, or recurring conflict in close relationships, become a source of distress, psychodynamic psychotherapy can provide a setting to understand them; online sessions can be arranged here.
References
- Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. Heinemann.
- Dicks, H. V. (1967). Marital Tensions: Clinical Studies Towards a Psychological Theory of Interaction. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Grosskurth, P. (1986). Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work. Alfred A. Knopf.
- Hinshelwood, R. D. (1989). A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. Free Association Books.
- Isaacs, S. (1948). The nature and function of phantasy. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 29, 73–97.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1995). Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. Yale University Press.
- Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174.
- Klein, M. (1937). Love, guilt and reparation. In M. Klein & J. Riviere, Love, Hate and Reparation. Hogarth Press.
- Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 125–153.
- Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
- Klein, M. (1957). Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Sources. Tavistock.
- Klein, M., & Riviere, J. (1937). Love, Hate and Reparation. Hogarth Press.
- Mitchell, S. A., & Black, M. J. (1995). Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought. Basic Books.
- Segal, H. (1964). Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. Heinemann.
- Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Basic Books.