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Grosskurth's major biography of Klein is a fascinating and very readable account of this impressive woman's life. It is that impressiveness that is, perhaps, the strongest image one is left with on reading this book from which Klein emerges as totally committed to her work and resolute and uncompromising in endeavouring to secure a future for her ideas.
For me, the most interesting section is that concerned with the period around the time of the Controversial Discussions. By then Klein had formulated some of her most distinctive and original ideas and gained sufficient of a following for it to be possible to speak of a Kleinian group within the British Society. The arrival of the Freuds and of the Viennese analysts at the time of the Second World War led to major political wrangles in which the control of training — e.g. the allocation of candidates to particular analysts — emerged as a central issue, besides the scientific disagreements. Grosskurth's account illuminates the character of numerous of the participants in these struggles, particularly of Glover, Jones and Klein's daughter Melitta. These dissensions were, one sees, so severe that there was at times a real danger of the Society splitting, until the present ‘A’ and ‘B’ group arrangement was settled upon. The knowledge gained of this background helps one appreciate why some of Klein's papers were formulated in the way they were. Not in respect of her original ideas, but of the need, for example, to clarify disagreements with Fairbairn and to spell out where and how she differed from Freud.