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What do the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein share in common?
Arguably, not much. True, both concur in the centrality of unconscious process; still, their respective views of this process are strikingly dissimilar. Also true, both embrace Freud's death instinct (see Mario Rendon's review in this issue of Richard Boothy's Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud). And again true, both infer developmental schemata and corresponding models of personality formation. Nevertheless, a Kleinian baby is nothing like a Lacanian baby. Perhaps what they share most—a distinction also accorded the culturalist views of Karen Horney—is a very considerable wariness from the proponents of ego psychology who came to dominate American psychoanalyis in the 1950s.
Yet in the decades since, both Klein and Lacan have received increasing attention from therapists and from scholars of psychoanalysis. The Kleinian perspective, in both its original form and in its impact on the emerging British school of object relations, has been profoundly influential. The Lacanian emphasis on language, on the signifier, has lent new filip to the quality of attention clinicians give to precisely how their patients' discourses are constructed.
We begin with an altogether lucid paper by Susan Kavaler-Adler that renders Kleinian theory straightforward, placing Klein's perspective within a historical context. For Kavaler-Adler, Klein's theory offers an integrative comprehension of conflict and process models as represented respectively by Freudian drive theory and the British school. No less lucid, but altogether different in approach, is Patrick Hogan's effort to illumine the constitutive ambiguity of the signifier. Whereas Klein invites us to consider psychic structures (fantasies, identifications, objects), Lacan directs us to consider actual discourse, what's said, requiring our attendance to the utterance and its formation. We follow Hogan in his efforts to a