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This is a slender volume of just over one hundred pages consisting of four essays published by Mrs Klein's literary executors. One of these, “On Identification”, is reprinted from New Directions in Psycho-Analysis, a book previously discussed in this journal (Vol. 2, 2, p. 195). This paper illustrates the concept of projective identification, which has been acclaimed by some analytical psychologists (see pp. 145-66 of this issue, Murray Jackson and Esther Harding). This is not surprising since Jung frequently drew attention to the importance of identification, often under the name of participation mystique. If one takes the mystique away it is difficult to see how identification could take place unless by projection and introjection. However, the means are of great importance both to the method of reductive analysis and to the theory of ego development. The application of this knowledge has, in fact, resulted in the successful analysis of children (more especially in the case of very young or borderline psychotic children), a field in which Melanie Klein has done pioneering work. The fact that her theoretical framework is weak compared with that of orthodox psycho-analysis does not, in the reviewer's opinion, diminish her impact on dynamic psychology.
One psycho-analytic reviewer, C. R. Rycroft, regrets that “she insisted on presenting a vision which was really poetic or religious in language that makes a travesty of the scientific method”, and goes on to speculate that had Melanie Klein lived in the Middle Ages she would probably have been canonized (see , “Naivety of Melanie Klein”, in Observer, 17 March 1963). This is an interesting statement for at least two reasons: first, in that it seems a cover for the “scientific” psycho-analyst's unavowed desire to burn the heretic as a witch; second, the criticism is very reminiscent of some statements one has heard from time to time levelled against Jung. On other grounds, too, Rycroft's speculation has the stamp o