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.
Hearsay Has It that when the Chairman of the Professional Committee of the Tavistock Clinic some while ago read a paper at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis on the Psycho-analysis of Institutions, a distinguished Kleinian analyst tartly observed that there was no such thing. The concept was empty.
At first hearing one knows what she means. Psychoanalysis is rooted, in its concepts and methods, on what takes place between two people in a consulting room. It is, one may say, concerned with understanding the emotional experience contained or made present in that room. Its founder's genius lay in realising that this emotional experience, resonating and amplified through the medium of transference, opened a door to the understanding of the mind. Opening this door promoted development, fundamentally in the inner world of the patient, though also of course in that of the analyst her- or himself. Melanie Klein's formidable contribution, as I see it, was greatly to enlarge and clarify the concept of the inner world, its contents and relations, as the focus of development. From this point of view it is not so much the relation of the patient to external reality as his or her relatedness to psychic reality within, which focuses analytic work, session by session, term after term.
When one shifts the focus of attention from the pair to the group, or the institution, or the society (if indeed there is an