General Introduction

My encounters with Melanie Klein have taken many forms: reading her books and papers, my two personal analyses, supervision and various other forms of learning from senior colleagues, my own clinical work, discussions with colleagues of my own generation and later with students and supervisees, explorations in the Klein Archive – everything, in fact, except direct exchanges with Klein herself. The closest I came to direct contact with Klein was watching her from a distance at the British Psychoanalytical Society when I first started psychoanalytic training in 1956. After my first year I went away for nearly three years on an anthropological field trip and when I returned in the autumn of 1960 she had just died.

In spite of their indirectness my encounters with Klein have been deeply stimulating and it is because of the thoughts engendered by these contacts that I eventually began to write the papers of the present book.

Becoming an analyst is a slow process: first the training, then the uneasy period of starting to practice. Gradually I began to learn from my patients, especially from several gifted but troubled people who came to analysis soon after I had started in private practice. They helped me to realize that under a spectacular display of symptoms there may be another person with special talents all his own. ‘I deaden myself so as to avoid the feeling of dying,’ said one of my early patients. ‘I am a crustacean, not a vertebrate,’ said another. I was impressed by the way they could describe their dilemmas so succinctly. Those patients, and others too, described me as well as themselves.

They showed me that I had been trying to talk to them in psychoanalytic jargon, and their criticism helped me realize that simple thinking and straighter talking would be better for everyone.

I found myself quite intrigued by the formal and informal structure of the British Society, with its complex history, its great proliferation of committees and its three Groups, but one of