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For 25 years the New Library of Psychoanalysis has disseminated bold and innovative advances in recent analytic thinking, both within and beyond the profession, and a new publication on what is arguably the keystone Kleinian concept, edited and introduced by two eminent London Kleinians, is a significant event. However, while both seasoned and novice readers will find many details of interest, my overall impression was of a divided and insufficiently
organized volume which suffers from a lack of clarity about its overall purpose and lacks a unifying argument.
The book falls into three sections, the first concentrating on the evolution of the concept of projective identification in Melanie Klein's clinical and theoretical understanding; the second covers near-to-source developments of the concept in the work of prominent London-based Kleinians; the third, and longest, section charts its wider dissemination and use in non-Kleinian strands of the British Psychoanalytic Society, other Western European countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain), the United States and South America (Argentina, Brazil and Chile).
The opening chapter consists of an account by Elizabeth Spillius of her archival research into the evolution of Klein's thinking about projective identification. Presented in the form of brief notes with main themes and concepts presented in bold and reiterated in ever more summarized forms, this chapter feels like a pared-down précis of well digested ideas rather than (as I had hoped) conceptual exploration based on her original research. Spillius's chapter is followed first, by a reprinting of the 1952 version of Some Notes on Schizoid Mechanisms, then by several well-known, much-published papers on projective identification by prominent post-Kleinian thinkers - Bion, Rosenfeld, Joseph, Feldman and Sodré. These classics of post-Kleinian thinking are also introduced by Spillius, summarizing, under the authors' names - again picked out in bold - selected aspects