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This well-known book by Leon Grinberg, the distinguished South American analyst, now appears in this publication, newly translated into English. The book reflects a long career in psychoanalysis, in which the themes of this book have obviously been a major preoccupation. Contained within it, therefore, is the distillate of a great deal of clinical experience, particularly with seriously-depressed patients, and the part played in these conditions by mourning, guilt and narcissism. Grinberg draws on Freud, Abraham, a large background of analytic writing, and Melanie Klein in particular, but he also has a distinct approach and theoretical stance of his own, which emerges in this book.
A potential British reader who does not inhabit Kleinian 'country', glancing at the book, might think of it as yet another guide-book to that well-frequented terrain. A Kleinian might, as I did, think he was paying a return visit to the motherland. It was this deceptive expectation that misled me and produced that bewildering disorientation which arises when a previously-unvisited country is taken to be known because the topography looks familiar and the names are the same. It was as if one were in Virginia or Maryland and thought one was in England. If someone should want to tease out the differences between Grinberg's writing and that of some of the London 'Kleinians' of the 1990s, a 'compare-and-contrast' approach could be tried between this book and Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion (ed. R. Anderson, London: Routledge, 1992).
What perhaps adds to the difficulties of achieving a more than superficial orientation to the text is that it represents writing undertaken over many years, and the time relationships of the different parts of the book are not made clear in this edition. I would recommend to any reader that s/he start by reading the final chapter entitled 'Conclusions, revision, and new thoughts on guilt and depression'. It is particularly clear, though condensed, and g