A Personal View of the Kleinian Contribution1 (1962)

In the course of your explorations outside Freud's own writings you will already have come across other important names, and you will have met analysts who have contributed in an original way, and whose contributions have been found generally acceptable. For instance, you will have met Anna Freud, who had a unique position in her father's life during the last two decades, and who cared for him with fortitude when he was ill, and you will be familiar at least with her classic summary of psychoanalytic theory in her Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936). In any case, Anna Freud has had an immense influence on the way psycho-analysis has developed in the United States, and her stimulating interest in what others are doing has been responsible for much research that is published under other names.

Now Anna Freud was not so important in England as she has been in the United States, simply because of the very great developments that took place in London in the twenty years after the end of World War I, before Miss Freud came over with her father, refugees from Nazi persecution. It was during this period that my own psycho-analytic growth was making root and stem, and it might interest you therefore to hear from me something of the soil in which I had become planted.

You see, there developed a Melanie Klein–Anna Freud controversy, and this has not yet resolved itself. But this was not important for me in my early and formative years, and it is only important to me now in so far as it hampers free thought. In fact Melanie Klein and Anna Freud had a relationship in the Vienna days but this had no meaning for me.

From my point of view psycho-analysis in England was an edifice whose foundation was Ernest Jones. If any man earned my gratitude it was Ernest Jones, and it was Jones to whom I went when I found I needed help in 1923. He put me in touch with James Strachey, to whom I went for analysis for ten years,