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Professor Weininger is an enthusiast; this is the latest in a series of his expositions of Melanie Klein's work. He has identified, rightly, that Klein's writing often lacks a reader-friendly style—while for Kleinians she is inspiring, for others she seems so frequently offputting. Klein herself remarked a little despairingly, in describing her chosen area of interest, that there is a 'great handicap, for these phantasies arise at a time when the infant has not yet begun to think in words'.
Weininger has decided to grasp the nettle. All his books are attempts to move, as the subtitle of this one suggests, from the bones of theory to the flesh and blood of experience. In this book, he describes Melanie Klein's theories of just those remote unconscious phantasies, and he attempts to substitute words for whatever the preverbal infant uses for 'thinking' and 'communicating'. This is a courageous venture and therefore it risks the very same response that Melanie Klein's own writing often attracts: 'It's all very well but how does she know; and anyway I can't believe that babies have those sorts of feelings and phantasies'. The question is whether he has managed to avoid provoking such