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It would be folly or, in more appropriate Anglo-Saxon parlance, madness on my part to emulate this ten-minute tour de force, this delicacy of a choice Scottian vintage. The impact of Scott's comments, written or uttered, on the psychoanalytic knowledge of mourning, depression and mania is better appreciated when they are historically connected with his clinical première. In 1938, Scott (1947) reported the first ‘Kleinian’ analysis of a psychotic adult; he had begun ‘analysing in an institution several patients with severe manic-depressive disorders’ a year and a half after Klein's (1935) presentation of her epoch-making ‘Contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states’.
It is not surprising that we should be led by the Freudian paradigm of the analytic situation to the ‘royal road’ of mourning, thus establishing a ‘genetic continuity’ between Freud's ‘third phase’ and the ‘Kleinian development’ (Meltzer, 1978). I should like to continue in the same vein, with a special emphasis on the contributions of three other ‘early analysts’ to the architecture of the monumental ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (Freud, 1917): a turning-point in Freudian ideology and the starting-point of the Kleinian tradition.