Melanie Klein revisited: pioneer and revolutionary in the psychoanalysis of young children

This accessible and lively book reminds us of Melanie Klein’s ground-breaking work with very young children and prompts readers to revisit its contemporary relevance.

In a lively foreword, Lisa Miller describes how this book is the ‘scholarly fruit’ of Susan Sherwin-White’s career. She tells us that writing this book sustained Sherwin-White in the four years of her last illness, and how determined she was to finish it before her death in June 2016. Miller draws a parallel between Klein’s controversial exploration of the unconscious, primitive states of mind of the infant and Sherwin-White’s classical training and former career as an academic pioneer in the Hellenestic field, both of which initially drew hostile reactions. She notes that Sherwin-White’s career as a psychotherapist meant that she was acutely aware of the extremes of disturbance that Klein is documenting. Miller states that Klein looks at the baby and young child as no one has ever done before, and this is clearly what is so enthralling for Sherwin-White.

In the introduction to her book, Sherwin-White sets out her stall. She states that while attention has been paid to Kleinian theory and post-Kleinian development, comparatively little has been written about Klein’s clinical work with very small children and the ongoing significance of this work for contemporary psychoanalytic psychoanalysis. Sherwin-White refers to the ‘revolutionary character’ (p. 1) of Klein’s work with this age group as well as to her recognition of the importance of mother‒infant relations, long before WW2 triggered explorations of attachment and the impact of separations. Melanie Klein Revisited is concerned primarily with Klein’s work with pre-latency children and it aims to bring back to our attention today the distinctive voice of these small children that Klein herself discovered. Sherwin-White writes of Klein’s awareness of the blind eye which adults can turn to the distress of young children – for cultural and unconscious