The Melanie Klein Trust: Home Page

Melanie Klein 'The power of love - which is the manifestation of the forces which tend to preserve life - is there in the baby as well as the destructive impulses, and finds its first fundamental expression in the baby’s attachment to his mother’s breast which develops into love for her as a person. My psycho-analytic work has convinced me that when in the baby’s mind the conflicts between love and hate arise, and the fears of losing the loved one become active, a very important step is made in development. These feelings of guilt and distress now
enter as a new element in the emotion of love'.

Love, Guilt and Reparation
(1937), p.311.

Melanie Klein became famous as a pioneering child psychoanalyst whose work
from the 1920s until her death in 1960 shed vivid new light on the emotional
life of infants and children. Born in Austria in 1882, she moved to Britain
in 1926 and soon became a controversial but powerful presence in the British
Psychoanalytical Society, in London. Together with a group of brilliant
students (including Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion and Herbert Rosenfeld) she did
pathbreaking work in the understanding and treatment of narcissistic
disorders and the psychoses. Since her death Melanie Klein's ideas have been
further developed by those she taught or influenced, in many parts of the
world.

The Trust was set up to promote training and research in the psychoanalytic theory and technique
associated with Melanie Klein’s work.

Registered Charity: 251672