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On the cover of both books is a picture by Marc Chagall. It is a self-portrait painted in 1922. On his head is a drawing of a simple house, home. A couple, dressed in the clothes we recognize as those worn by Jews of that era, walk together in the foreground. To their left is a young woman with a baby in her arms. Perhaps it describes something of the central topic in these books. Is it possible to carry the past and meet the future in a creative way, and what might contribute to such an outcome? It is this very general question that seems to be at the heart of the these books, set as they both are in a period of the utmost horror and devastation, the Nazi uprising and persecution and the Second World War.
The first book It Is a New Kind of Diaspora is about the migration of psychoanalysts fleeing from Europe, leaving behind both their geographical and psychoanalytic homes, and the factors which determined their fate in the host countries. This is what Anna Freud referred to as ‘a new kind of diaspora’. The second book, just as the title says, is about ‘tradition, change and creativity’. The tradition is Freudian psychoanalysis, the change is Melanie Klein's new and innovative ideas, and then the book considers how it came about that there was a creative outcome.
Steiner's interest is in the legacy of Freud's work and he brings to these issues a breadth of knowledge of history, language, religion, psychoanalysis and epistemology that is daunting. He is also one of the the archivists for the British Psychoanalytical Society which has given him a particular opportunity to study documents relevant to these issues. His approach reflects the