Editorial

Following the special editions on Anna Freud (Vol. 21, No. 3), Michael Fordham (Vol. 22, No. 1) and Donald Winnicott (Vol. 22, No. 3), we are very pleased to be publishing an edition of the journal commemorating the life and work of Melanie Klein. As will be evident from the various contributions in this volume, Melanie Klein's thinking has been seminal and continues to have a significant influence on contemporary practitioners.

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) started work as a psychoanalyst at the end of the First World War in 1919, and when she died in 1960 she was still working clinically and developing theoretically. In her innovative work she expanded initially on the thinking of her mentor Sigmund Freud, and then began to diverge from him, offering profound new thoughts about mental processes and the primitive infantile phantasies which lie at the core of psychic life. A pioneer of object relations theory, she paved the way towards working with more disturbed patients, and was the first analyst to recognize that there was symbolic significance in children's play. She was a person and a thinker who aroused strong emotions; her ideas resulted in controversies which are still active today. We hope that this edition of the journal will give a sense of perspective in consideration of her life and work, and go some way towards illustrating both the complexities of her thinking and its continued relevance in our work with children, as child psychotherapists around the world understanding the concepts of Melanie Klein in clinical ways. This edition is not of course an exhaustive account of previous or contemporary thinking: we remain conscious of other rich contributions to the evolution of the history of ideas, including, for instance, those of Dr Donald Meltzer. Perhaps this edition will prompt current practitioners and thinkers to offer papers which may fill the inevitable gaps in this memorial issue.

We open with a paper by Hanna Segal, who was analysed by Melanie Klein a