Melanie Klein was a Austrian born British psychoanalyst who helped formulate new therapeutic techniques for children and she had a significant influence on child psychology and modern psychoanalysis. Klein had questioned some of the groundwork assumptions of Freud but Klein always thought of herself as a faithful follower to Freud's ideas. Klein was innovative with her work and interestingly she also was the first person in the field to apply traditional psychoanalysis upon young children. Klein was well opinionated and demanding of loyalty from those who followed her work and Klein was able to create quite the influential training program in psychoanalysis. Klein is also considered to be one of the co-founders of object relations theory. "Klein's theoretical work in time became more focused on speculative hypothesis and was eventually accepted by Freud, which actually stated that life may be a delicate occurrence, that is drawn to an inorganic state and therefore, in an unspecified sense, withholds a drive towards death". "Also put in another fashion of psychological wording Eros (properly, the life instinct) is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death instinct), which allegedly attempts to terminate and disintegrate life. "Klein and Freud both felt that biomental forces were the foundation of the mind". "Freud and Klein never went astray from terms of theirs or conceptualizations although there were protests and controversies by followers, especially now". Klein was innovative in working with children directly often at the age of only two years old and she saw children's play as the main mode of emotional communication as she attempted to interpret emotional meanings of play. Klein realised that parental figures had a important role in the child's phantasy life and she considered that the timing of Freud's Oedipus complex was not fully clear. In contrast to Freud, Klein concluded that the superego was around a much longer time before the Oedipal phase. "After looking into ultra-aggressive phantasises related to hate, envy and greed in young ill children Klein came up with a model of the human mind that connected significant oscillations of state, with whether the postulated Eros or Thanatos instincts were in the fore". "She named the state of the mind, when the sustaining principle of life is in power, the depressive position". "The psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life she called the paranoid schizoid position". Klein's feelings on regarding aggression as a significant influence in its own right when evaluating children stirred up some conflict with Anna Freud, a big time child psychotherapist who was working in England at the time. At current times Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the big schools within psychoanalysis and Kleinian psychoanalysts are also members of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Kleinian psychoanalysis is claimed to be the most significant school of psychoanalysis in Britain, in much of Latin America, and with the possible exclusion of Lacanianism, in much of continental Europe. In the USA, the Psychoanalytic Center of California is the most key training center that follows the ideas of Melanie Klein's work. Kleinian psychoanalysis with adults consists of a very traditional method that applies using an analytic couch and meeting four to five times a week. Kleinian analysis focuses on the comprehension of very "deep" and primitive emotions and phantasies. So just from this blog entry I can see it is obvious that Melanie Klein was brillant and I found it interesting how much of what she did reminds me of the psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler.