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Bob Hinshelwood's original Dictionary of Kleinian Thought was published in 1989 and soon established itself, deservedly, as a classic. Not only was it to prove an invaluable reference book, but certainly the first half—the dozen or so ‘Main Entries’ which merited a chapter each—could be read through as if it were a conventional book. Of course all these distinctive topics—unconscious fantasy, internal objects, projective
identification, symbol formation et al—have structural elements in common deriving from the core Kleinian assumptions, so reading through the dictionary in this fashion felt analogous to listening to a recurrent theme being given a series of musical variations. I found this a very effective approach for as Spillius writes in the preface (p. xi) to The New Dictionary:
Kleinian concepts are often about very primitive elements of the human mind. They sometimes seem remote from common sense and rather like those ungraspable particles of subatomic physics, whereas at other times they can feel immediately and intuitively meaningful. However, it is very hard with the written word to pass on a real sense of understanding.
The formal arrangement that Hinshelwood originally adopted has certainly— perhaps fortuitously—enabled this variations on a theme approach to allow one's ‘understanding’ to be gradually filled out, rendered palpable, by this cumulative modelling of the elusiveness of abstraction into a more rounded hologram.
The new edition has very sensibly retained this structure, and indeed much of the content. The main changes in this latter respect had already been foreshadowed by Hinshelwood's own revision in 1991 when he noted the ongoing controversy around his entries for ‘Envy’ and the ‘Death instinct’, and he introduced the term ‘Pathological organization’ as a new general entry. This latter concept was of course to become the organizing motif of John Steiner's influential Psychic Retreats (1993), and accordingly is now further upgraded in the new