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Dear Sirs,
I was intrigued by Joseph Aguayo's paper, ‘Reassessing the clinical affinity between Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott’ ( Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 2002, 83: 1133-52). I share the author's view that the period of close collaboration between the two has not been sufficiently studied, and he raises several interesting points. However, the paper's uncritical view of Klein and its tendency to denigrate Winnicott produce some biased formulations.
When discussing the ‘Transitional objects’ paper, Aguayo states that Winnicott ‘deliberated about whether to include this paper in a commemorative volume for , New directions in psycho-analysis (Klein, Heimann and Money-Kyrle, eds, 1952 [sic]), ultimately missing the publication deadline’ (p. 1144), and says this is detailed by ‘Grosskurth (1986, pp. 397-402)’. I was unable to locate this story in Grosskurth's biography. She states, however:‘Winnicott took his paper to the 1951 editorial meeting at which the selection was to be made for [Klein's] seventieth-birthday issue of the [International] Journal. Klein wanted him to revise the paper so that it more clearly incorporated her ideas. He refused; and with the manuscript under his arm, he sadly left the room’ (1986, p. 398). I do not know the source of the New directions story (actually, that book appeared in 1955, two years after the publication of ‘Transitional objects’), but in any case bringing it up while disregarding Grosskurth's account is misleading.
Aguayo exaggerates, I think, the importance of the unpublished ‘Notes on baby’. It is surely an interesting document, and he deserves gratitude for bringing it to our attention. But Klein's ability to observe in private notes the impact of the parents on the infant in a particular family does not in any way undo the neglect of this same impact in her theorising, and in her published case studies, as Aguayo mentions.