ABSTRACT
The social construction of motherhood is a major part of the foundation upon which the rest of a culture is built. Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theories are extremely useful in understanding the social construction of motherhood and the ways in which Western patriarchal culture needs motherhood to function to protect itself from perceived threats of disintegration and annihilation. Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882 into an unorthodox family, in terms of both its lifestyle and its religious choices. Her father, an unambitious but intellectual physician, rejected his Jewish family heritage. Based on her knowledge of the existence of the primitive superego and the importance of aggression and anxiety in the infant, Klein had begun to reformulate the Freudian vision of the internal world and development of the child. It is clear that Miller is at least partially correct when she implies that Klein had a very ambivalent view toward children and motherhood in her own personal life.
