Melanie Klein: Her World and her Work: By Phyllis Grosskurth. New York: Knopf, 1986, 515 pp., $25.00.

This is a very interesting and informative study of Klein's world and work. The reader learns about Klein's formative years, her geographical displacements "From Vienna to Budapest" (Part I), where Ferenczi analyzed her, and to "Berlin" (Part II), where Abraham was her analyst. Jones invited her to "London" (Part III), where she arrived in 1926, and practiced and taught until her death in 1960. Her play technique to analyze children distinguished her and spurred her scientific creativity. While Anna Freud stated that transference cannot develop in children because they are still attached to their parents, Melanie Klein clarified that transference happens in child analyses and that in those analyses what is transferred is the relationship to internal fantasy figures, the "internal parents." British analysts soon wanted to learn child analysis from her.

"The decade from 1928 until 1938 was, in relative terms, the most peaceful and productive of Klein's turbulent life" (p. 183). In 1932 she published The Psychoanalysis of Children and started her first candidate in training, Clifford Scott, M.D., from Canada. The "English school" was beginning to be defined far more clearly as the "Kleinian school." Tragedy also happened during that decade. Her eldest son, Hans, died in 1934, while mountain climbing. Hans' death was a source of grief to Klein for the rest of her life. Like Freud's (1900Interpretation of Dreams was the outcome of self-analysis, so the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States(Klein, 1935) is an examination of Klein's soul. Writing this paper Klein realized that grief could be a stepping stone to maturity and development. She concluded that the depressive position is central to the emotional development and formulated the concept of reparation, as her important contribution to psychoanalysis. During 1937 she published Love, Hate, and Reparation, coauthored with Joan Riviere.