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When, more than twenty years ago, I invited Melanie Klein first to give a course of lectures and subsequently to settle in London I knew I was securing an extremely valuable recruit to the British Psycho-Analytical Society. But I had no perception at that time of what commotion this simple act would result in.1 Until then, and for a while afterwards, our Society had been a model of co-operative harmony. For a time Mrs Klein was given an attentive hearing and aroused great interest. Soon—perhaps, I like to think, aided a little by my influence which was manifestly exerted in her favour—she began to win adherents and devoted followers. Before long, however, cries began to be raised that in the views she rather vehemently presented she was ‘going too far’, which I think simply meant she was going too fast. Not that it was easy at first to detect anything radically new in these views or methods of work. The trouble was that she was pursuing them with a novel rigour and consistent recklessness that evoked in some members of the Society at first uneasiness and gradually an intense opposition. Other members who championed her work with a certain degree of fanaticism found this opposition hard to bear, and in the course of time two extreme groups developed who between them vociferously, and therefore easily, restricted the quieter scientific endeavours of cooler members.
The division in the British Society will, presently, I doubt not, be reproduced in all other psycho-analytical societies, and in the absence of colleagues with first-hand experience of Mrs Klein's work she must expect adverse critics to be in the majority. In England itself the storm was heightened by the advent of our Viennese colleagues whose life in their homeland had become literally impossible. They added to the other criticisms the opinion that Mrs Klein's conclusions not only diverged from but were incompatible with Freud's. T