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It is refreshing to read a slim 150-page book, a third of which consist of references and bibliography. Just this concrete fact in itself attests to the superb scholarly caliber
of Hughes but the content and style of this book also prove that Hughes is well informed, concise and clear. Her arguments are explicit and well articulated; she summarizes her theses elegantly at the end of the sections and at the end of the book. Hughes is no doubt a clear thinker/writer and a superb educator.
The book has four main chapters and a conclusion. In the first chapter, the writer reviews Freud's ideas on guilt, morality and retraces the path to the development of the concepts of superego, ambivalence, “omnipotence of thought” (thoughts seen as deeds) and guilt. She elegantly summarizes the development of structural theory (with an emphasis on superego) through Freud's excursions from his clinical work to anthropology around his well-known reflections on “primal horde,” “totem” and “taboo.”
With the second chapter, the main actors of the book appear vividly in the figures of Melanie Klein and her immediate heirs Paula Heimann and Susan Isaacs. Throughout the rest of the book, centering on the issue of morality, Hughes provides a detailed account of how Kleinian psychoanalytic thinking developed.
Melanie Klein's treatment of severely disturbed children (including one of her own sons) is portrayed with a powerful human dimension. The development of the concepts of “Paranoid Schizoid position” and “Depressive position” as fluid, reversible psychic positions in contrast to the classical notions of developmental phases/lines and regression/fixation is well demonstrated in the background.
The Kleinian side of the historical “Controversial discussions” is depicted with evocative detail. As one reads through Hughes' astute critique, it is impossible not to notice that, despite not being a clinician herself, Hughes has a knack for recognizing clinically relevant themes as demonstrated by h