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The attitude towards Kleinian theory among psychoanalysts in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s could best be characterized as dismissive, trending towards overt hostility. At a time when most psychoanalysts trained in American Psychoanalytic Association Institutes were required to be physicians the idea that the brain of an infant could support a fantasy life such as the one outlined by Klein seemed absurd and incompatible with our knowledge of biology. No one of any standing would risk their professional reputation by acknowledging even an interest in what Melanie Klein had contributed to the literature regarding the “primitive mind” of the child. The exact year when the tide began to shift in the direction of acceptance is hard to pinpoint. Roy Schafer's role in establishing a beachhead for the Kleinian approach with the publication in 1997 of The Contemporary Kleinians of London can be recognized as important because it represented a shift in the thinking of a classical American psychoanalyst. Schaefer directed psychoanalysts to think of examining the work of contemporary Kleinian psychoanalysts from a different perspective, one, in which, the value of Klein and her followers’ theory and methods was acknowledged to the extent of considering the advantages of their approach.
During the past twenty-five years the influence of Klein has grown to the point where even relational psychoanalysts have begun to cite Klein as one of the major influences on the development of their thinking. In a recent book Steven Cooper (2016), a prominent relational psychoanalyst attempts to demonstrate how he combines relational and Kleinian thinking in order to achieve a synthesis of these two seemingly incompatible approaches to psychoanalytic work with patients. What has happened? How do we explain the influence of Klein on psychoanalysts in the United States, the previous bastion of critical resistance to her thinking? The dominance of classical or orthodox psychoanalysis