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In April 2000, the Melanie Klein Trust sponsored a long overdue conference on the work of Herbert Rosenfeld. Part 1 of this book contains papers and discussions, with some amendments, from that conference. In Part 2 the authors chose four papers by Rosenfeld which they deemed to represent his most important contribution. They certainly deserve rereading, but I will concentrate on the papers from the conference. The authors, however, chose not to include papers from Impasse and Interpretation, published posthumously in 1987, an omission I personally regret and which will be addressed further on.
Riccardo Steiner, mentioning the Zeitgeist of the 1950s in the fifth chapter of this book, quotes an article from a Brazilian newspaper which described the ‘London of those years as a sort of “Princeton of psychoanalysis”, comparing the groups’ work with that of the great physicists who, before and during the 50s, had left a landmark in the study of sub-atomic particles' (p. 41). Indeed, Mrs Klein's most famous analysands, Wilfred Bion, Donald Meltzer, Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld, all set out to work on the most primitive aspects of the mind and cross-fertilized their researches in a way that has not occurred since. If Segal is forever connected with symbolism and art, Bion with the container-contained and his new metapsychology of L, H, K and its