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The focus of my comments will be on how Melanie Klein, the analyst, worked in these sessions, bearing in mind the ambiguous status of Klein’s notes: we do not know if they were intended for publication or presentation in this format or whether Klein herself thought that they were good examples of her work. Moreover, they often seem to be summaries of selected moments within the sessions rather than direct process notes (summaries, which if taken as verbatim make Klein’s interventions sound more intellectual or educational than one would imagine they actually were).
But it is precisely the fact that the notes are not presented as an illustration of some point or another, that they have not been selected to highlight a position on technique, pathology, therapeutic process, psychic dynamics, etc., that may, in a sense, invite us more directly into the reality of Melanie Klein’s consulting room. Indeed, we do not have the immediacy that comes from having detailed process notes, but still there is something raw about the material, coming from the very fact that it describes what went on in the clinical encounter prior to it being fully processed or integrated by Klein and subject to retrospective review in the service of illustrating a point. This allows us to see Klein in action – how she opts to intervene, what she interprets and what she might have interpreted but leaves aside. And the actions are multifaceted and shifting – different ways of intervention are taken up within the same hour, what seems overlooked in one hour appears in the next. Instead of the orderly nature of material published by an analyst, or even selected by one, we truly have glimpses of an analyst at work. In what follows I share a bit of what I think can be seen in these hours and I will only outline some conclusions which, hopefully, will open the reader to further reflection.
Before doing so I should note that one thing that makes this material especially interesting is the fact that the patien