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.
This is an important but also an irritating book. It is important because it is a major study of the development of Klein's thought. Using his background in philosophy, Petot examines her work to see how it developed as a theoretical system. He shows how her theories evolved from her clinical experience, how she maintained some concepts throughout her work, developed others as she went along, and abandoned others in favour of new concepts she found more adequate. The book is irritating because Petot is so keen to show how Klein makes conceptual distinctions that he sometimes loses the general trend in a maze of conceptual differentiations. This tendency to miss the wood for the trees is much more marked in Volume II than in Volume I.
Volume I makes a useful distinction between what Petot calls the 'Proto-Kleinian System', which is his conceptualisation of the ideas Klein was developing until about 1923, and the 'First Kleinian System', which is his definition of the ideas that Klein evolved as she developed the play technique and began to conceptualise the findings it revealed. In my view, neither the Proto-System nor the First System was really a new theory, for Klein was following the ideas of Freud, Ferenczi, Abraham, and Jones. She was, however, applying their ideas to new material, the findings of the analysis of children; she was discovering new clinical facts, which I think she was not yet able or even trying to integrate into a new theory of her own. Petot carries out a most useful task, however, in teasing out the assumptions and ideas, many of them partly implicit, that Klein was gradually developing during this early period.
Klein's first analytic work was with her son Erich; at first in the form of what Petot calls 'psychoanalytic education', and later in the form of two spells of analysis proper, from 1921 to 1923. Klein's second patient was 'Felix', whom Grosskurth suggests