Melitta Schmideberg: The Psychoanalyst Who Made Therapy Humane and Accessible

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Transcript below

In today’s episode, I’m focusing on a figure who is too often reduced to a footnote in psychoanalytic history: Melitta Schmideberg.

My name is Simone. I’m a psychoanalyst, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode.

Melitta Schmideberg (1904 – 1983)

Most people know Melitta Schmideberg as the rebellious daughter of Melanie Klein, but Melitta was an original and radical thinker who questioned the very foundations of psychoanalysis in order to reshape it for those who needed it the most. At the time, psychoanalysis was largely a luxury: reserved for the wealthy, with rigid rules, and centred almost exclusively on the patient’s inner world, with the analyst positioned as a distant, neutral figure.

And that is the core of it. I’ll move past the dramatic and undeniably intense mother–daughter conflict and focus on her work. Melitta Schmideberg was deeply concerned with people on the margins, particularly offenders.

This episode looks at how she challenged the traditional rules of psychoanalysis: rules about class, time, money, and technique. Through this challenge, she helped shape what can truly be described as a psychoanalysis for the many.

Early Life

Melitta Schmideberg was born Melitta Klein in what is now Slovakia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She began her psychoanalytic training in Berlin before relocating to London with her husband, the Austrian psychoanalyst Walter Schmideberg, who was friend of Freud.

The Controversial Discussions

Her arrival at the British Psychoanalytical Society happened during the Controversial Discussions of the early 1940s, which was the most profound internal crisis the Society ever faced, marked by an intense disagreement over the future direction and core meaning of British psychoanalysis.

On one side were the traditional Freudians, represented by Anna Freud. On the other, were the followers of her mother, Melanie Klein, developing an entirely new school of thought. There was also a third group, the Independent or Middle Group of British analysts. Melitta Schmideberg stood firmly against her mother’s ideas with real intensity. She rejected the Kleinian focus on concepts such as the paranoid-schizoid position in infants.

Daughter-Mother Rift

It was a brutal way to separate from her mother. And yet, that intensity is the key to her entire practice. Melitta Schmideberg believed that a psychoanalysis focused only on the middle and leisure classes produced a deeply incomplete picture of the human mind. She wanted to link the inner world to external social reality, arguing that the two simply cannot be separated. This was not just a theoretical position for her. She put it into action by building institutions.

The Scientific Treatment of Delinquency

She spent more than a decade working at the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency, the ISTD, in London. Then, after moving to the United States, she co-founded the Association for the Psychiatric Treatment of Offenders in 1950 with Jack Sokol. It began on a very small scale, essentially as a referral network, and relied entirely on volunteers. Psychiatrists and psychologists offered treatment to offenders, often seeing them in their own private offices rather than in formal institutions.

Melitta Schmideberg knew that the people she was treating, many of them marked by long histories of trauma and instability, simply could not fit into the classic middle-class psychoanalytic model.

Looking at the changes she introduced, they radically redefine what therapy can look like. One example is time. Traditional analysis is built around strict punctuality, fifty minutes, no more, no less. She abandoned this entirely. Her patients missed appointments constantly, and she treated this as part of the reality of their lives rather than as resistance or failure. Sessions could be shorter or longer depending on what was needed in that moment, and in times of crisis she offered additional sessions immediately. For her, rigid time limits were an obstacle, not a therapeutic tool.

Money was another major barrier. Treatments in her institutions were free, supported by the state or by charities. But this was not just about access. Her reasoning went much deeper. She believed that deep analytic work was only possible if the patient was completely certain that the analyst was not motivated by the fee.

Melitta Schmideberg bent the rules whenever necessary to build a trusting, positive relationship. She lent her patients books, accepted small gifts without turning them into something to be psychoanalysed, and at times offered practical advice. She made home visits, went to hospitals, and met patients where they actually lived their lives. There’s even an account of her visiting a patient who had just given birth. She was willing to be a real person in their world.

She also insisted on making the setting real. She hated bare, clinical rooms. She believed they were frightening for people who were already afraid. Instead, she wanted a relaxed, homely atmosphere, a space that felt human rather than intimidating.

During sessions, her cat might be wandering around the room. She might show a patient a painting on her wall or even do her needle work. And she wouldn’t stare at them, and she wouldn’t take notes, which she knew made paranoid patients feel like they were under a microscope. It was all about creating a sense of safety that her patients had probably never ever felt.

Reassurance

And this brings us to the most controversial part of her technique at the time: reassurance. Orthodox Freudians, and especially the Kleinians – her mother’s school of thought – were firmly against any form of active reassurance. But Melitta Schmideberg argued, very forcefully, that interpretation alone, telling a patient why they behave as they do, is meaningless until the analyst has become a good object for them.

Good Object

By a good object, she meant that the patient must first internalise the therapist as a source of safety and kindness. Without that, interpretation simply doesn’t land. For Schmideberg, reassurance, validation, and active help had to come first. This wasn’t an extra or a soft addition to the work. It was the foundation. It created the sense of security that made any deeper analytic work possible.

And if her one-to-one work was radical, her broader philosophy was even more so. Together with her institution’s co-founder, she developed what they called group therapy in reverse. It’s a complete inversion of the usual model. Instead of one therapist working with a group of patients, an entire team worked together to support a single offender.

The aim was to bring the influence of as many therapeutically minded people as possible into one person’s life. That team could include social workers, prison or probation staff, teachers, and even supportive members of the community. The purpose was to help the individual slowly build an external support network from the ground up.

She described it as recreating a family: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbours. What she was really trying to do was rebuild the social safety net that had been missing for the patient who had never had it in the first place.

Melitta Schmideberg often argued that “insight” (the goal of her mother, Melanie Klein) was a luxury. She famously said that we cannot analyse a man who is starving or facing eviction in the same way we analyse a wealthy patient on a couch. Her “group therapy in reverse” was her way of stabilising the patient’s reality so that psychological healing could actually begin.

She believed that many offenders suffered from “social malnutrition”. They didn’t just need to understand their “oedipal complex”; they needed to know how to hold a job, how to trust a neighbour, and how to feel like a member of a community.

And this work with people on the margins gave her some remarkably sharp insights. She was the one who coined the term stable instability, a phrase that captures borderline and antisocial personalities with striking precision. She observed that people living between neurosis and psychosis could draw defences from anywhere. Their inner world was chaotic, but the chaos itself followed a pattern. There was stability in the instability.

To work with this, the psychoanalyst could not remain a passive interpreter. Melitta Schmideberg believed the analyst had to be a real person: at times an educator, at times a coach. In a sense, the therapist lends the patient their own healthy ego. This means helping with practical problems, supporting the strengthening of a fragile or damaged ego, and providing structure where none exists. The psychoanalyst becomes a temporary scaffold, holding things together until the person can stand on their own.

Conclusion

So, the main takeaway is that Melitta Schmideberg was a genuinely radical visionary. She forced psychoanalysis to confront class, money, and social reality. Her work acted as a necessary and vital corrective. She showed that treatment has to be flexible, humane, and collective, especially for people on the margins.

Schmideberg’s message is that psychological problems cannot be separated from social ones. Any real progress has to be guided not only by scientific understanding, but also by human sympathy. Holding those two together was the work of her life.