You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Can the elephant wed the whale? Difficult, I would say, because each lives in different surroundings. Such is the difficulty of a dialogue between Klein and Lacan. Huge and magnificent as they are, there is little chance of intercourse between them. However, Klein and Lacan head the two most distinctive European psychoanalytic schools, so any attempt to bring about the impossible communion deserves our interest and attention.
The meetings took place in London during the academic year 1994/95 as lectures delivered to a mostly English and Kleinian audience. The title is a misnomer, by the way. The dialogue is really between Kleinians and Lacanians. How well they articulate the views of the pioneers is a delicate matter. These Kleinians, most of them trained at the Tavistock, have moved to Bion and beyond. (Few of the hard-core Kleinians of the British Society are here.) The instinctivist excesses of Klein have been mollified by due attention to the presence of the object as an agent in the human drama. They remain loyal, though, to Klein's attention to the clinical material as they see it, with little interest in metapsychological speculation.
True to their tradition, the Lacanians walk the other side of the street. There is almost no reference to clinical material of their own, but they are rich in elegant critical reframing of the abundant Kleinian material to fit their own conceptions It is in this aspect that I see the major flaw of this dialogue. Because they present their patients' case material, Kleinians become the “patients” for the Lacanians to speculate on. The only own material presented is a child observation by Bice Benvenuto. All other clinical discussions deal with cases presented by other analysts—old and new. Kris, Schmideberg, and Etchegoyen become the usual suspects of not understanding that psychoanalysis really is what Lacan established it was.
Dany Nobus answers a critical question about the implications of Lacan's ideas for clinical work, by refer