Clinical lectures on Klein and Bion, Edited by Robin Anderson, Routledge,  Chapman and Hall, 1992,  125 p.

This slim volume is part of The New Library of Psychoanalysis series, and its contributors are all training analysts of the British Psychoanalytic Society. Most of us approach Kleinian theory from a kind of paranoid-schizoid position, as though it were either the good breast or the bad breast of psychoanalysis. We have yet to reach a depressive position ambivalence from which the Kleinian contribution has a valued, if not beyond reproach, place in the general corpus of theory. I am not being facetious, for the book makes clear that Kleinian theory deals with cognition and epistemology, and provides a way of conceptualizing the process of assimilation of new ideas.

The authors elaborate the work of Joseph, Rosenfeld, Segal, Bion, and others in a most successful effort to portray Kleinian theory as a vital, evolving, and above all relevant body of knowledge. The book commences with an excellent summary of the contribution of Klein and Bion in the context of their personal biographies and the history of the psychoanalytic movement. It goes on to cover such subjects as fantasy, the paranoid-schizoid position, projective identification, and the ways in which the projections of infants and children can be contained as communications,