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Melanie Klein's remarkable theoretical contributions to psychoanalysis are enduring. The breadth of recent Kleinian intellectual development is thoughtfully presented in Penelope Garvey and Kay Long's edited volume, The Klein Tradition: Lines of Development—Evolution of Theory and Practice over the Decades. This collection stands on the shoulders of volumes of a similar scale from past decades (e.g., Spillius 1988). The authors have approached their aim of showcasing contemporary Kleinian theory and practice by using a global scope that includes authors ranging beyond familiar London Kleinians, as well as applications of Kleinian theory to fields outside of clinical psychoanalysis. The result of their efforts is a rewarding collection of essays. This hefty book includes twenty-seven essays in total: an introduction, twenty-three articles on clinical theory and practice, and four relating to applications of theory to literary and sociological/organizational realms.
Penelope Garvey and Kay Long are consummate scholars of the Kleinian tradition who have come together in a fruitful cross-Atlantic partnership. Garvey is a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a coauthor of the New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (Spillius et al. 2011). Long, a training and supervising analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, teaches and writes about contemporary Kleinian theory and technique.
Garvey and Long open their book with an erudite overview of Klein's work and a consideration of her theoretical and clinical contributions. They emphasize the crucial impetus her development of play technique with children gave to her subsequent theoretical contributions. Her most important departure from Freud, they venture, is her view that drives are
fundamentally object seeking, an insight with profound implications for theory and clinical work. In their estimation, Klein's conceptual outlining of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is “p