Melanie Klein

The explorer of the nursery's deepest shadows, Klein peered into the infant mind and found a turbulent sea of "Internal Objects," envy, and primitive fantasies. She pioneered play therapy, realizing that a child’s toys are the vocabulary of their unconscious anxieties and loves. She is the lady of the "Splitting" mind, the one who mapped how we divide the world into "Good" and "Bad" mothers before we learn to handle the complexity of the whole. She represents the raw, primal roots of the ego, where the first bite of the apple is taken in the cradle.