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All but two of the papers collected here have been published previously, many in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, in the two volumes edited by Spillius (1988), and in collections by individuals such as Joseph (1989) and Steiner (1993). Despite such redundancy, the present volume is justifiable as an attempt on the part of a leading American ego psychologist to break down long-standing prejudices against Kleinian thought on the part of his North American colleagues—prejudices that have until recently prevented their serious engagement with what Schafer believes to be some of the most creative theoretical and technical work in psychoanalysis today
Aside from the intrinsic value of the papers themselves (by Edna O'Shaughnessy, Ruth Riesenberg-Malcolm, Hanna Segal, Betty Joseph, Michael Feldman, Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Eric Brenman, John Steiner, Robin Anderson, Ronald Britton, Ignes Sodre and Irma Brenman Pick), the introduction, although also previously published (Schafer 1994), offers a masterful summary of the essential themes and emphases of the work of the London Kleinians (whom Schafer refers to as the Kleinian Freudians to distinguish them from other, perhaps especially Latin American, Kleinian groups), as well as a systematic comparison of their work with that of mainstream American ego psychology In addition, Schafer provides a brief editor's introduction to each paper, outlining its essential significance and relating it thematically to other contributions.
In his preface, Schafer indicates his wish to counter “a growing tendency, in the United States at least, to include the work of the Kleinian group under the broad rubric ‘object relations analysis’”—a label used to subsume various Winnicottian, Sullivanian, and even Kohutian contributions. But against such revisionism, the contemporary Kleinians “emphasize that they are loyal Freudians. They consistently focus on manifestations of transference and countertransference in conscious and unconsciou