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I will say at the outset that this little book is a gem. When asked to review the book, I thought it a good opportunity to revisit Melanie Klein's work. In a way, I had begun the most important paths of my own analytic identity with a simultaneous immersion in Klein and her contemporary, Ronald Fairbairn. Exposure to their writings drew me from America to London, where I found ready access to dyed-in-the-wool Kleinians at the Tavistock Clinic in the early 1970s, but had to ferret out help with Fairbairn because John Sutherland had retired from his post as medical director of the Tavistock and returned to Scotland. Klein was in the air and the water then, just as Anna Freud was the soul of what was then the Hampstead Clinic.
Klein had died twelve years before I arrived in 1972, and Bion was not yet recognized. Although his formative papers had been written, he was hardly mentioned, even by those who later become his disciples. Winnicott had died two years earlier, and a strong but different contingent of Tavistock faculty taught his work.
So the atmosphere in which I received Klein's teaching was reverential, giving the feeling that one had missed the golden days by being just a bit too young and arriving too late on the scene. And Mrs. Klein was presented as a towering and formidable figure, to be revered and feared, her exploration of the primitive inner world a veritable Walpurgisnacht, a celebration of human destructiveness that lay at the heart of darkness in each of us. I know I exaggerate, but I do so to give a kind of image of the awe in which the student of Klein was expected to hold her and her