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.
In this volume, Elizabeth Spillius has assembled papers written by members of the British Kleinian group in the period 1955 and 1985 and selected because they contain advances in theory. The papers allow the reader possibilities for considerations of comparative theory in that they are rich in clinical illustration. From the clinical material presented it becomes possible to think about alternative conceptual formulations to the ones the Kleinians put forward. This is important because the papers have a characteristic found in the work of members of most schools of psychoanalytic thought: the authors as a group develop their own language and build upon it, perhaps referring to antecedents in the work of Freud, but paying little or no attention to work of members of other schools of psychoanalysis and making scant effort to build bridges between their conceptualizations and the various concepts and terminologies that have evolved in other psychoanalytic groups. This includes, somewhat surprisingly, little or no reference to related work of other British object-relations theorists such as Winnicott and Fairbairn. This failure in analytic scholarship is a characteristic not only of the Kleinian group. It is as true of the American ego psychologists, the Kohut self psychologists, and the interpersonal psychoanalysts deriving from Sullivan. It has become the responsibility of the current generation of psychoanalysts to learn from attempts at comparison and integration of these bodies of theory.
Taken as a whole, the papers Spillius has collected are constructed on the foundation of Klein's conceptualization of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, articulated by her in her 1946 paper, 'Notes on some schizoid mechanisms'. The papers demonstrate the centrality for the work of Klein's followers of the theory of the positions, two organizations of anxieties, defences and object relationships present concurrently in the adult mind. These are fundamental for