Response to Emanuel Berman

Dear Sirs,

It is a pleasure to respond to Emanuel Berman's painstaking read of my ‘Klein-Winnicott’ article. Starting with the easier issue first: Berman corrects a factual error I made ( Int. J. Psycho-Anal.  83:  1144↗, fn. 11, last line)

in the chronological detail of Winnicott's attempts to include his paper on ‘Transitional objects’ in a publication associated with Klein's contributions. The chance for Winnicott to include what would become his seminal paper was for the 1952 IJPA Festschrift celebrating Klein's seventieth birthday and not the New directions in psychoanalysis volume published in 1955. Fair enough.

In terms of more substantive matters, namely Berman's interpretive disagreements with some of the other points of my paper, I think some of his points are based on a misreading of the paper's main argument. Berman writes that I exaggerated the importance of the unpublished 1937 Klein manuscript ‘Notes on baby.’ I think most archival researchers are aware that the discovery of any unpublished manuscript usually raises the issue of how it meaningfully fits into the published corpus of any major analyst (i.e. is it congruent or at odds with the received portrait we have of the author's work?). My point about ‘Notes on baby’ was fairly straightforward: while Klein neither developed nor published a theory of how environmental influence was mediated, ‘Notes on baby’ demonstrated her sensitivity to the environment, a factor which must be added to other frequent references made by Klein regarding the importance of the environment (Spillius, 1994). Put differently: in terms of the secondary literature, especially writers who follow Winnicott's view that Klein was ‘temperamentally incapable’ of factoring in the role of the environment ( Int. J. Psycho-Anal.  83:  1136↗, fn. 4), I simply offered ‘Notes on baby’ as a counter to a long-standing canard that I think is based on an uncritical acceptance of Winnicott's (1962) evaluation of Klein. If there weren't such a widesp