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The recently published Lectures on Technique by Melanie Klein edited and introduced by John Steiner (2017) is a small book of great interest. It comprises two previously unpublished texts that centre on issues of technique. One is a series of lectures that Melanie Klein offered candidates at the British Psychoanalytic Society in 1936, and the other a transcription of seminars that she held with young British analysts in 1958. As Klein states at the start of the lectures, they deal “with details of technique … [but] at the same time aim at clarifying and exemplifying the main principles that … underlie psychoanalytic technique and theory, since these two are inseparable” (2017, p. 29). In line with this effort, the lectures include clear descriptions of Klein’s views of the unconscious, the superego, phantasy, the conflictual relationship between love and hate, guilt, anxiety and other basic dimensions of analytic theory, but with a special focus on how these dimensions and their discovery shape technique, and in turn how technical developments that have taken place have shaped our theories (e.g. how Freud’s discovery of unconscious guilt led to more in-depth interpretation and how working at these depths advanced our knowledge of unconscious phantasy). This relationship between theory and practice plays a central role throughout the lectures. In fact, at one point, Klein goes as far as to say that “a contribution to theory is only of value if in the long run it helps towards the development of technique” (p. 38)—emphasizing that psychoanalysis’ true contribution lies in the clinical realm.
The principles that Klein clarifies in the lectures pertain also to the analyst’s frame of mind. As she explains: “Since we come to look at the person’s mind through the medium of our own mind, it is evident that very much, if not everything, depends on our frame of mind in which we set out to work” (p. 29). The desirable analytic frame of mind, the “analytic attitude,” as Klein co