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I approached this book with mixed feelings. This was partly occasioned by the title, which aroused in me some reluctance to accept the confines of the label “Kleinian” just as volumes denoted “Freudian” raise my hackles a little. Not, however, the idea of a dictionary, because Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) was an obvious and excellent reference point, and in any case dictionaries more generally are such delightful source-books. My first readings in it were of the dipping-in variety, and this did not help to settle my doubts, as of course it is easy in such a large volume (500 pages) to find particular entries from which one would diverge or to wonder about omissions. But when I began to look at the book as a whole in a more serious way, I began to appreciate how substantial a contribution it is to the study of those ways of thinking and theorising and doing clinical work which have grown out of Melanie Klein's work. I became very much impressed both by Hinshelwood's immense intellectual energy and by his capacity for lucid exposition, his range of interest, and his overall grasp of both theoretical lines of development and the patterns of psychoanalytic life which have sustained the creative development of Klein's ideas. So when I had given the book the attention it deserves, I felt it was a most useful addition to a personal psychoanalytic library, since the codification and cross-referencing of the dictionary form prove most enlightening.
The book is organised in two parts. Part one consists of thirteen main entries which cover both the major concepts introduced by Klein (paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, projective identification, etc..) and her revisions of established analytic concepts (e.g. Oedipus Complex, superego, etc.) These are in chronological order in relation to Klein's writings. Hinshelwood says modestly in his introduction that “Possibly these entries could be read as the chapters of an introductory work on Kleinian psychoanalysis” and I thi