In September 2025, it will mark 65 years since the death of Melanie Klein, one of the most influential and controversial psychoanalysts of the 20th century. A Jewish Austrian born in Vienna in 1882, Klein revolutionized psychoanalytic practice by turning her attention to the emotional world of children and proposing that psychic life begins far earlier than Freud had assumed. Her theoretical and clinical contributions reshaped psychoanalysis—especially in the English-speaking world and Latin America—and sparked intense debates that continue to this day.

Klein’s childhood was marred by loss and grief. Still a girl, she witnessed the death of her sister Sidonie and, later, her brother Emmanuel, with whom she shared a close intellectual bond. The death of her father at age eighteen left her emotionally and financially vulnerable, influencing the course of her life. She married young to Arthur Klein, with whom she had three children, but the marriage was unhappy and ended in separation. By then, Melanie was already immersed in Freud’s work and the burgeoning discussions of psychoanalysis when she moved to Budapest and underwent analysis with Sándor Ferenczi. Later, in Berlin, she analyzed with Karl Abraham—an immediate disciple of Freud—and it was with his support that she began clinical practice, especially with very young children, something unprecedented at the time.

In 1926, she settled in London, which provided fertile ground for developing her ideas. It was there, over subsequent decades, that she elaborated her object relations theory—one of the major currents in contemporary psychoanalysis. Contradicting Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex as the origin of psychic life, Klein proposed that an infant, from the first months of life, already grapples with deep anxieties, ambivalent desires, and complex psychic defenses. The child’s mind, she argued, is structured around unconscious fantasies linked to the maternal breast, perceived alternately as good and persecutory. This radical division between good and bad objects defines what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position—a primordial psychic state. As the child develops and recognizes that the good and bad objects are one and the same (the mother), it enters the depressive position, characterized by feelings of guilt and the desire to repair imagined damage caused by its aggression.

For Klein, concepts such as envy, guilt, reparation, projective identification, and introjection were central to psychic constitution. Her body of work spans from the analysis of psychotic states to mourning, creativity, psychosomatics, and the psychopathology of everyday life. Her book The Psycho‑Analysis of Children (1932) marked a turning point in clinical child analysis. In Envy and Gratitude (1957), she described envy as a primitive emotion directed at the good object—usually the maternal breast—that frustrates for being perceived as inexhaustible. This formulation, radical for its time, was met with both enthusiasm and resistance.

Melanie Klein’s clinical work was profoundly innovative. By using children’s play as a pathway to the unconscious—what we now call play therapy—she demonstrated that even young children can be analyzed, and that complex defense mechanisms like splitting, denial, and projection are already operating. Her technique became a reference not only in child psychoanalysis but also in adult psychotherapy, psychiatry, and social thought.

However, her career was not without conflict. In the 1940s and 50s, she engaged in one of the most intense theoretical battles in psychoanalysis: the so‑called “Controversial Discussions” within the British Psychoanalytical Society. On the opposite side stood Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, who criticized Klein’s early-stage interpretations and theorizing about developmental phases before the Oedipus complex—without the rigor of Freud’s framework. This debate split British psychoanalytic circles into three groups: orthodox Freudians, Kleinians, and a third “Independent” group that sought to synthesize both. These tensions enriched the English psychoanalytic tradition, which today still stands out for its theoretical diversity.

Even in her personal life, Melanie Klein was no stranger to controversy. Her relationship with her daughter Melitta—also a psychoanalyst—was marked by public accusations. Melitta went so far as to denounce her mother in the clinical community, questioning her practices and ethics. Meanwhile, her son Hans—whose analysis was published posthumously—died young under circumstances that fueled speculation and fantasies about the intensity of family dynamics within a household steeped in theory and interpretation.

Despite—or perhaps because of—these controversies, Melanie Klein left an indelible mark on international psychoanalysis. Her popularity in Latin America, especially in Brazil and Argentina, grew exponentially from the 1950s, peaking in the 1970s and 80s. This was due to the broad translation and circulation of her works and the influence of her disciples—like Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion—on generations of Latin American analysts. In a continent marked by dictatorships, symbolic violence, and deep social trauma, Klein’s emphasis on internal conflict, persecutory anxiety, and the desire for reparation resonated deeply. It was a psychoanalysis that dealt with the tragic—and that made sense.

Beyond the clinic and theory, Melanie Klein also made it to the stage. Her life and ideas inspired the play Mrs. Klein, written by Nicholas Wright and first staged in 1988 at London’s National Theatre. The drama focuses on Klein’s mourning for her son, Hans, and her confrontations with her daughter, Melitta, exploring the boundaries between private life and psychoanalytic thought. The play was acclaimed and had international runs, with notable performances by Uta Hagen and Clare Higgins. Although her story has yet to be adapted directly into film, documentaries and literary works frequently reference or draw from her theories—from series on motherhood to film and literature studies that use Kleinian categories to interpret contemporary narratives.

The play depicts a single spring day in 1934, focusing on her son’s death and the intense clashes between Melanie and Melitta. Mrs. Klein has been staged three times in Brazil: in 1990, with Ana Lúcia Torre; in 2003, with Nathália Timberg; and in 2024, starring Ana Beatriz Nogueira as Melanie Klein and Natália Lage as Melitta.

Melanie Klein died in London in 1960, of cancer, at the age of 78. But her thought, far from exhausted, continues to ignite intense debates and fresh interpretations. In times when emotions, childhood, trauma, and symbolic reparation are increasingly central, her ideas remain more relevant than ever. For her admirers, she was a visionary who dared to peer into the mind of the infant and name what no one else dared. For her critics, she was a speculative theorist who projected more onto children’s play than it might actually contain. But, like any essential figure, Melanie Klein never left anyone indifferent.