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This book is an important contribution to our understanding of Klein’s views on psychoanalytic technique and theory. As well as being of historical interest, it remains highly relevant to the contemporary working analyst who wishes to clarify aspects of his clinical work with patients. How much does he interpret what is going on in the “here and now” of the sessions and how much does he relate this to the patient’s account of his history? What weight does he give to unconscious phantasy, and how does he use these theories? How does he understand the feelings and thoughts that arise in his own mind, usually thought of as counter-transference? And how do these link with the thoughts induced in him by the patient’s phantasies, anxieties and behaviour?
All this and more are addressed in Klein’s Lectures on Technique, which are published here for the first time. These six lectures were given to students at the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1936 and probably repeated several times in subsequent years. The text was discovered in the Melanie Klein Archives in the Wellcome Medical Library in London and studied by Claudia Frank and Elizabeth Spillius, who was the Honorary Archivist to the Melanie Klein Trust.
These lectures were given during a period in which Klein was formulating her ideas on psychic development and functioning, and reflect her evolving theoretical and clinical model. She had published Psychoanalysis of Children in 1932, and a few years later her major paper on the depressive position (1935). Her conceptualization of the “Paranoid-schizoid position” was not published until 1946. Fundamentally, she suggested that the constant operation in phantasy of projection, introjection and identification contributed to the construction of an inner world of objects and self, which determines the individual’s relation to themselves and to the external world.
The Kleinian approach to the technique of psychoanalysis which she articulates in these lectures has a special s