ABSTRACT
Until Grosskurth's (1986) biography the existence of Melanie Klein's depression was probably a little known public fact. While she refers to depression in her unpublished memoir, she gives little sense of her many relapses. Even within the psychoanalytic community in Britain, where she eventually settled, there would have been but a handful of people with knowledge of it, with only a small proportion of these ± perhaps her closest colleagues and supporters ± aware of the fact that she had gone into analysis with both SaÂndor Ferenczi, her ®rst analyst, and later with her second analyst Karl Abraham, for acute depression. Perhaps as she was gaining a foothold in the British Psychoanalytical Society ± eventually becoming the ®rst European analyst to become a member ± people were more preoccupied with fathoming who she was as a personality, and quite how she had arrived at her revolutionary ideas of working with pre-latency children. Moreover, she presented these ideas with such enthusiasm and vigour that depression would have been a distant thought in people's mind (Segal 1979, p. 173). In time, however, and as her role in the society became more established ± and more complex ± they may have wondered how she coped with the experience of initial acceptance and high praise ± Jones defended her unstintingly to Freud as `a sane, well-balanced and thoroughly analysed person' ± followed by subsequent trenchant and partisan opposition to her ideas and methods, especially when it rang out from her own daughter.
