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Given the way that both psychoanalysis itself and Kleinian theory in particular have changed over the past 82 years since Melanie Klein taught these recently found and published lectures, the question arises regarding their contemporary relevance. Can they actually impact psychoanalytic authors and clinicians drenched in contemporary modes of analytic thinking and practice, or are they merely of historical interest?
In our view their value goes well beyond the historical interest. They are not dead specimens only to be rarely revisited for dry academic purposes. Rather these lectures are still very much alive; they are full of relevance and still have things to say to us directly from those bygone years. In fact, they are so alive and actual that our first reaction to reading them was that of surprise. The Lectures shine new light on Melanie Klein’s thinking, lending it an open-endedness that leads us to revisit and rethink the past, present and future of Kleinian psychoanalysis. Moreover, reflection on their narrative structure and style reveals that the lectures embody a special way of thinking and building psychoanalytic arguments—structure and content of thought here being intimately tied. Of special interest also are Klein’s thoughts on the analytic attitude and her understanding and use of the concept of interpretation that are developed in the lectures. We now elaborate.
Julia Kristeva writes that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1980, p. 66). If we approach texts with this insight in mind, we could approach the contemporary concept of reverie, for example, as something already dormant in Freud, in his concept of evenly suspended attention (but without the inter-subjective component). Freud’s thinking planted a seed that was absorbed and transformed by later thinkers into something which stretches back to psychoanalysis’ origins, is a hotly debated topi