Conflict and Compromise

The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45. Editors: Pearl King & Riccardo Steiner. London & New York:  Tavistock/Routledge. 1991. pp.  958 + xxv. £100.

In 1927 Ernest Jones invited Melanie Klein to join the British Psycho-Analytical Society. She had already given lectures on child analysis and attended meetings as a guest, and her ideas were finding favour with her hosts. Over twenty years later, Jones (1950) said he had no idea at the time ‘of what commotion that simple act [of invitation] would result in’. The commotion did not break out at once; and it might never have done so with the intensity it did but for the Anschluss in 1938. That tragic event led to the incursion of Viennese analysts into the British Society and the emigration from Vienna of the Freuds, thanks to the initiatives of Jones and Princess Marie of Greece. Anna Freud was forever grateful for that achievement; but Klein resented the fact that Jones encouraged the Viennese to come and brought the Freuds to England. She considered Anna Freud destructive of psychoanalysis and thought her own position, that of her group, and the British Society itself threatened by the intrusion. Her foreboding was justified.

Over ten years earlier, in 1927, it was already clear that important differences of opinion on matters of child analysis divided Vienna and London, though at that time there was no overt hostility. Several years elapsed before these differences gave rise to serious concern and led to the so-called ‘Exchange Lectures’ between the two Societies. In London, most members were appreciative of, and influenced by, Klein's work, and for several years Edward Glover supported her before he began to oppose what he came to see as her new metapsychology, at first with caution (Glover, 1933) and then with vigour (Glover, 1934). In 1933 Klein's daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, came to London with her husband Walter (who had initially trained in Vienna), and both were accepted into the British Society. At first she had