You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
John Steiner’s presentation, ‘Melanie Klein’s Technique Then and Now’, given at West Lodge in June 2015, with contributions from the event’s chair, Priscilla Roth, and discussion panel members Ron Britton and Michael Feldman, plus an audience question and answer session. In his presentation, Steiner explores the content of Melanie Klein’s six (then) unpublished lectures on technique, which Klein originally presented in 1936. He describes the development of Klein’s play technique, her thoughts on of the ‘analytic attitude’, her ideas about the deep connection between the positive and negative transference, and her view on the fundamental importance of transference and the exploration of unconscious phantasies within psychoanalytic technique. Steiner discusses two issues that remain controversial: how to understand countertransference and use it in the pursuit of understanding the patient, and to what extent the analyst should remain in the ‘here and now’ of the session or make links with the patient’s unconscious via the patient’s early history. He also draws on a transcript of a seminar Klein held in 1958 with young analysts of the British Psychoanalytical Society, to demonstrate developments in Klein's thinking during the intervening years.