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As an account of the early history of Klein's concept of the internal object, this was an interesting and informative paper. Dr Hinshelwood has carefully researched records of
professional meetings of the British Psycho-Analytical Society during the period from 1934, and manuscript notes relating to papers given during this period. It is his view that some of the fundamental work done by the early Klein group in clarifying and establishing what they meant by terms such as ‘internal object’ and ‘phantasy’ was in direct response to challenges from the Freudian establishment. Theoretical positions became more fiercely contested when the Society began to split into factions after the arrival of the Freud family in London, and the very different personalities of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein acted as lightning conductors for conflicts and rivalries which before the war had taken place over the safe distance between London and Vienna.
The powerful dynamics operating within the Society at that time prevented theoretical differences in the two groups' discussion of sublimation in the formation of fantasy/phantasy from being worked out within the scientific debate. Dr Hinshelwood explains these differences in a helpful appendix to the article, which shows how in Anna Freud's model, anxiety and the inhibition of anxiety lead towards a healthy sublimation and conscious fantasies. The Kleinian model begins from a pathological state in which unconscious phantasies increase anxiety, the inhibition of which results in manifest symptoms. In one version unconscious phantasies are at the beginning of the chain, whilst in the other model conscious fantasies are the eventual product. Thus the different groups were using the same terms to indicate very different concepts.
Tracing the history of the theoretical controversies between the groups, the author refers to papers by Isaacs, Heimann, Klein, Anna Freud and others to cast light on the development of the Klein group's thinking. We se