The Controversy between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein
Where Melanie Klein surveyed Freud’s concepts, Anna Freud calmed that Freud’s concepts were misunderstood and distorted by critics. Melanie Klein posited unconscious fantasy, which is spelled ‘phantasy,’ as the symptom to be uncovered by analytic techniques. Anna Freud posited the interplay of environment and innate competencies as one world, body and mind as a singularity. Mind in this case is the combination of perceptual consciousness, memory and internal sensations, not a distinction between consciousness and a social mind.
Perhaps, the main difference was that Anna Freud emphasized the pleasure principle and instinctual gratification as the essence of the child whereas Melanie Klein emphasized aggression and mourning. Klein discusses the infant’s representation of the mother-infant interaction whereas Anna Freud discusses the mother’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the infant’s narcissism and autoeroticism.
Anna Freud represents the US psychotherapeutic community’s research focus as conventional: the analysts are reasoning scientists who consider their critics as power seekers and manipulators who think ‘deep analysis’ is a trojan horse, an ad to lure analysands. Klein represents the British psychoanalytic community’s aggressive attack and defense culture: the analysts are crusaders, the critics are authoritarians unwilling to offer challenging views.
Anna Freud brought the International Psychoanalytic Association to the US but the British Psychoanalytic Training Society declared Anna Freud to be an ideological extremist. This intergroup conflict between theoretical approaches to psychoanalysis reflects the anti-American and anti-Europeans biases.
