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Meira Likierman has written a detailed textual analysis of the thinking of Melanie Klein. Unlike Hanna Segal in her classic book, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (1964, second edition 1973), Likierman does not rely on illustrative clinical material to convey Klein's ideas. Nor does she attempt, like Hinshelwood (1991) and Kristeva (2000), to show the links between Klein's ideas and other schools of thought, and between Klein and what has come to be called ‘post-Kleinian’ psychoanalysis—the work of Bion, Rosenfeld, Segal, Joseph and others. Like Petot (1990, 1991), Likierman aims for a definitive exegesis of Klein's texts. She wants to go right into the heart of the conceptual difficulties of Klein's thought in an attempt to reach ‘an elucidation of her theory in its own terms and from her own perspective as manifest in the texts’ (Likierman, p. 5).
On the whole I think Likierman's achievement is impressive. At times her detailed scrutiny is a little quirky. At times, too, there are interesting issues to which I think she pays too little attention: Klein's developing use of the concept of death instinct, for example, and her views on the relation between superego and internal objects. But for the most part she brings thoughtful enlightenment and occasionally novel insight, in particular in her discussion of Klein's concept of internal objects; her discussion of Klein's implicit distinction between the tragic and the moral aspects of the depressive position; and her discussion of Klein's distinction, also