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JULIA KRISTEVA'S intriguing study of Melanie Klein's life and work praises Klein as “the most original innovator, male or female, in the psychoanalytic arena” (p. 11). I Kristeva's able hands, Klein emerges as a woman who moved through anxious preoccupations and personal struggles to develop a theory of the mind that is fluid, interactive, and
heterogeneous. Klein challenged the Freudian view of symbolic thought and interpretation, replacing it with metaphoric language. Kristeva proposes that what appears to the unpracticed reader of Klein as an awkward attempt at interpretation is in fact a type of word play, not to be taken in its formal sense at all. The dialogue between analyst and patient deconstructed and reconstructed language, so as to capture and incorporate the primitive states that became the focus of Klein's work. Language, in its concrete and poetic sense, provided the cure.
Kristeva looks at Klein from both a biographical and a theoretical perspective. She reviews Klein's life and the impact of her early psychoanalytic treatment of her own children, particularly her son Erich. She then examines Klein's theories of object relations, anxiety, the superego, internalization of the maternal relationship, phantasy, and symbolism. She concludes with chapters on Klein and language, and the politics of Kleinianism in its early years in England.
Julia Kristeva is well known as a French professor of linguistics, a novelist, and a practicing psychoanalyst. She has written extensively on literary and psychoanalytic theory. Her writing addresses contemporary issues in philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. She was a student of Roland Barthes, who described her as follows: “Julia Kristeva changes the order of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud: what she displaces is the already-said” (Moi, 1986, p. 1). In writing Melanie Klein, Kristeva lives up to Barthes's descr