Abstracts from other Journals

 International Review of Psycho-Analysis, Volume  17, Part 3, 1990↗

Joan Raphael-Leff

Freud's archaeological collection peopled his work rooms with sublimated expressions of eternal, universal desires. I suggest here that these tangible remnants from the long buried past resonated with psychic representations and dream figures in Freud's own internal world, which, nevertheless, were not always consciously available to him. Despite a fascination with Egyptology evidenced in his antiquities, library and less conventional works, Freud focused on aspects of the Greek oedipal legend in his theoretical writing, neglecting Egyptian myths associated with ‘prehistoric’ realms of the archaic mother and Osirian/Mosaic father. I argue that convergence of traumatic events in his early childhood contributed to this delimiting Graeco-Roman filter, and that accessibility to the ‘dark continent’ was hampered by resistances his own self-analysis could not penetrate but which may have been worked through in the transference had he had an analyst other than himself.

 International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Volume  71, Part 3, 1990↗

A New Look at the Theory of Melanie Klein

Ruth Stein

This paper tries to show that Melanie Klein's theory can very profitably be viewed as a descriptive theory of strong emotions rather than an instinct or developmental theory. Furthermore, since in Klein's thinking feelings ‘create’ objects, the primacy of feelings in this theory is central. The paper contains a short chronological study of Klein's formulations of psychic phenomena in terms of affects. It is also maintained that the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions are constellations of affects and of reactions to them; that psychic development is essentially in terms of the capacity to tolerate feelings, and that the basic conflict in mental life is between feelings of love and hate and associated feelings. Such a view solves many of the conceptual difficulties of Kleinian the