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.
The volume contains twenty-one papers by fifteen psycho-analysts and one artist. The analysts are mostly members of the Kleinian school; all of them are sympathetic to Mrs. Klein's researches. The book is divided into two parts: the first containing “Papers in Clinical Psycho-Analysis”. the second, “Papers in Applied Psycho-Analysis”. It is an important publication which contains the more recent developments in Kleinian theory and practice; it will, I hope, receive close attention from analytical psychologists because of the links which are developing between the two schools. I shall point to some of them in the course of this review.
A book of collected papers by different authors is always liable to develop defects, something gets left out, or an important principle gets elaborated too late. This is true of the present volume, which leaves the reader too frequently at a loss because the theory of counter-transference, first elaborated by Paula Heimann in 1950, is not, at least in my view, given sufficient prominence early on. I would therefore suggest that before reading the child analyses the reader should look up the brief account of Paula Heimann's views which appears in the articles by Rosenfeld and Bion.
Mrs. Klein's play technique has been much criticized on grounds that need not be gone into here, and it is therefore valuable to have a clear exposition of it by her in her opening paper, “The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique: its history and significance”. This gives an outline of her method of child analysis, shows how she developed it and where it has led her. The cautious, modest style carries conviction of the genuine pioneering that she has done which has led to a substantial gain in knowledge of the unconscious processes operating in child development.
Since I do not read books of this kind straight through I turned, after perusing the first paper, to the two on the analyses of small children, one by Lois Munro, “Steps in Ego-Integration observed in a Play-