My child training was Kleinian, while my first analysis was Independent Group. In undertaking an adult psychoanalytic training I had a Freudian psychoanalyst and considered myself, in Brett Kahr's term, ‘Kleinacottian’! I find some Kleinian theory essential in my work, but have been concerned by a growing awareness of the different kinds of cultural use of Kleinian theory that I have experienced in adult British Kleinian therapists, counsellors, and analysts as opposed to child practitioners. In the second part of the paper, I take a subject from my adult work in which there is a clear theoretical and clinical difference between a Kleinian approach and others. It comes from my PhD on learning disability as a trauma and focuses on the topic of grievance. I found myself profoundly affected by the way a grievance showed itself in this work to be a grief that had not been understood. It also includes clinical material that can be seen in the revised and extended second edition of my book, Mental Handicap and the Human Condition, which has just been published.