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Essential Readings from the Melanie Klein Archives: Original Papers and Critical Reflections is an important compilation of personal documents and lectures from the Klein Archives, together with significant research from noted Klein scholars (Jane Milton, Claudia Frank, R.D. Hinshelwood and Maria Rhode) edited by Jane Milton, archivist of the Melanie Klein Trust. The first part of the volume, “In Klein's Own Words”, includes the final version of Klein's autobiography.† While fragments of it had been published previously, this is the first publication of the complete autobiography. Also included are a personal letter to her friend and colleague, Elliott Jaques, and four beautifully written and accessible lectures given to lay audiences between 1936 and 1939.†
In the second part, “Studies from the Melanie Klein Archives”, Milton presents the archival research. Claudia Frank's chapters (previously only available in German) focus on technical aspects of Klein's work: one on her thinking about how external reality emerges in internal reality, another on her use of reassurance, and a third on Klein's unsuccessful foray into applied psychoanalysis. In chapters previously published but revised for this book, R.D. Hinshelwood traces the development of Klein's ideas about repression and splitting, countertransference and internal objects. Milton's own contribution expands Klein's thoughts on her 1963 paper, “On a Sense of Loneliness”, adding new, personally meaningful and clinically relevant material. With special access to closed confidential files of Klein's work with her patient Dick, Maria Rhode discusses Klein's astute grasp of his autistic features before this condition had been recognized.
Klein's lectures are a pleasure to read. One is immediately drawn into a sense of being in the audience, listening as Klein discusses her sophisticated ideas in simple and succinct terms. Speaking in non-technical language to a wide audience of educators, cl