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I HAVE TO START WITH AN APOLOGY for my introduction to the dialogue being, of necessity, very inadequate.1 I find myself faced with a rather daunting task. Our theme is "Kleinian Analysis Today," but I know that I cannot take for granted that the readers have a sufficient grounding in basic Kleinian theory, say, as it was at the time of Mrs. Klein's death, for me to be able to introduce the discussion on new developments, so I will have to start by saying something about Klein's work, which again, in this brief account, cannot be done satisfactorily. Those of you who know Kleinian literature will find it very elementary, while for those of you not familiar with Kleinian concepts, the account will be too sketchy and too compressed.
I shall try to concentrate on a few basic concepts and then to indicate some guidelines to new developments, relying on the discussion to fill out and elaborate the themes.
In my view, Klein's work falls into three distinct phases. The first one, mainly based on child analysis, culminates in the early thirties with the publication of "The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego" in 1930 and The Psychoanalysis of Children in 1932. Then comes the formation of the concept of the depressive position and the bringing in of the whole concept of positions, and with it some departure from Freud's metapsychology, and finally, a formulation of the paranoid/schizoid position and the work on primitive envy.