Klein, Melanie

orig. Melanie Reizes

(born March 30, 1882, Vienna, Austria—died Sept. 22, 1960, London, Eng.) Austrian-British psychoanalyst. She married at age 21 and had three children before undergoing psychoanalysis with Ferenczi S in Budapest, Hung. She studied the psychoanalysis of young children, joining the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (1921–26) and later moving to London. In works such as (1932) and (1961), she asserted that children's play was a symbolic way of controlling anxiety and that observation of free play with toys could serve as a means of determining early psychological impulses.

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