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Kleinians: Psychoanalysis Inside Out is about the lives and work of Klein, Susan Isaacs, Joan Riviere, Adrian Stokes, Herbert Rosenfeld, Wilfred Bion, Esther Bick, Frances Tustin, Hanna Segal and Ronald Britton, eminent members of the Kleinian Group of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Adrian Stokes was not a clinician, but his writing on art and literature has been greatly influenced by Klein.
Each chapter, one for each author, stands in its own right and each one can be read quite separately. The author has done an impressive amount of work in collecting information about these ten remarkable people and in selecting the essentials of their writing. As a result she gives an interesting account of their work within a biographical context. Although some who have known these authors in person or who have studied their work in depth could feel that Janet Sayers provides a rather superficial picture, they will all the same be enriched by her work. To think simultaneously of the person and the work of ten leading authors is a considerable achievement, which cannot fail to impress the reader.
Different stories, different backgrounds but all extraordinarily original and creative in their study of the human mind. The magnitude of the task leads, at times, to quantity rather than quality prevailing. As a consequence, the personalities in question can become flattened in the process and the accuracy of the original formulation lost. It is impossible to miss, for example, the potential contradiction between the assertion that Miss Bick seems to have had ‘a happy infancy’ and, in the next paragraph, the extraordinary list of losses which occurred during the first five years of her life!
Case-studies are the most significant aspect of the book, particularly as they are told in the chronological context of the authors' lives. Compared with the general light-hearted style of the book, case-studies make intense, demanding reading. The author uses almost verbatim material from the