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Invited by Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein came to London in 1926, where she worked until her death in 1960.
Apart from her successful introduction of triumphant psychoanalytic concepts, Melanie Klein’s life was full of tragic events. She was the product of an unwanted birth. Both her parents showed little affection to her. Her much loved elder sister died when she was four. Melanie was made to feel responsible for her brother’s death. Her academic studies were interrupted by marriage and children. Her marriage failed. Her son died. Her daughter, well-known psychoanalyst Melitta Schmideberg, fought her openly and histrionically in the British Psycho-analytic Society and left to America. She neither reconciled with her mother nor attended her funeral. Melanie Klein was also clinically depressed.
Klein's theoretical work gradually centered on a highly speculative hypothesis propounded by Freud, which stated that life may be an anomaly, that it is drawn toward an inorganic state, and therefore, in an unspecified sense, contains an instinct to die. In psychological terms Eros, the sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby postulated to have a companion force, Thanatos, which seeks to terminate and disintegrate life.
