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.
These two volumes contain an immensely useful collection of psychoanalytic papers published by Kleinian analysts over roughly the last thirty years. They are introduced with admirable clarity by the editor, Elizabeth Spillius, who has grouped the papers in a number of ways. The primary division into volumes centred on ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ is acknowledged to be an artificial one because of the centrality of direct discussion of clinical material in all Kleinian writing, but it is none the less a helpful organizing principle, which has allowed some major threads of development to be picked out. Within each volume, Spillius's introductory observations and linkages are of great interest, and the organization by theme makes the collection into an intellectually coherent whole. The reader's pleasure, however, will probably focus on the opportunity to explore the distinctive voice and approach of a range of well-known Kleinian analysts whose writing gives a very strong sense of their individual analytic sensibility. The quality of writing and thinking is an enormous pleasure to the reader.
Spillius divides Volume 1 into sections entitled ‘The analysis of psychotic patients’, ‘Projective identification’, ‘On thinking’ and ‘Pathological organizations’. She makes it clear that this involves a choice of emphasis, and excludes some other significant elements in the Kleinian tradition, particularly in the fourth section. Her Introduction provides an excellent summary of the main lines of theoretical development. The outline of Bion's contribution is brilliantly lucid and clarifies which of his ideas have been generally accepted and which remain more controversial. Spillius's editorial style is studiously impartial on these matters, and she offers rather few opinions of her own, but her map-drawing will enable readers to orientate themselves in a variety of ways. The emphasis on