| Melitta Schmideberg | |
| Birth Name: | Melitta Rene Klein |
| Birth Date: | 17 January 1904 |
| Birth Place: | Ružomberok, Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia) |
| Death Place: | London, England |
| Work Institutions: | British Psychoanalytical Society |
| Relations: | Melanie Klein (mother) |
Melitta Rene Schmideberg-Klein (née Klein; 17 January 1904 – 10 February 1983) was a Slovakian-born British-American physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst.
Schmideberg was born in Ružomberok, Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia) into a Jewish family, the only daughter and eldest child of Arthur Klein and psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (née Reizes). She had a brother, Hans, who was born in 1907. Prior to the First World War, the family moved to Budapest. Following the war, her father moved to Sweden and Melitta and her mother returned to Ružomberok, where Melitta graduated from high school in 1921.[1] She moved to Berlin to train at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where she met Austrian psychoanalyst Walter Schmideberg, a friend of Freud, whom she married in 1924.[1] [2]
In 1927, Schmideberg earned her M.D. from Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. That same year, her mother moved to London. Five years later, in response to rising anti-Semitism in Germany, Melitta and her husband joined her in London, where she became a British citizen.[1]
She moved to New York City in 1945 and helped found the Association for the Psychiatric Treatment of Offenders in New York.[1] She became a U.S. citizen in 1959, when she was living at 444 Central Park West.[3]
After her mother's death in 1960, she returned to London, where she died in 1983.[1] [4]
In London, she joined the British Psychoanalytical Society as associate member. Entering further analysis with Edward Glover,[5] she became a partisan with him in their vocal dispute with her own mother;[6] and later resigned from the Society in 1944[7] to concentrate on her work with juvenile delinquency.[2] She is sometimes seen as an extreme example of the bitterness that can be instilled by having an analytic parent.[8]
She was the founding editor of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology.[9]
In the 1930s, Schmideberg published a series of articles in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, on subjects ranging from the asocial child to intellectual inhibitions.[10]
During The Blitz, Schmideberg published a set of observations on reactions to the air-raids in London, noting increases in localism, in drinking and (especially in women) sexual desire.[11]