Introduction: The Archive

In the following three chapters I focus particularly on Kleinian ideas about technique, the use of the past and projective identification. I will use material from the Melanie Klein Archive as well as from the published writings of Klein and several contemporary Kleinians.

In her will Klein left her notes and papers to the Melanie Klein Trust, and in 1984 these documents were given to the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. There are 29 boxes each containing 800 to 1000 pages of papers, some in German, some in English, some handwritten, some typed. The papers had already been catalogued in 1961 and this 1961 catalogue was used as a guideline by Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Assistant Archivist at the Wellcome Library, who corrected certain anomalies and added further material when it was donated. Most of the Archive has now been microfilmed. The Archive is available to bona fide scholars who contact the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre at the Wellcome Institute, but it is not always possible to see the original documents because some of them are very fragile.

There are 12 boxes of clinical notes and 9 boxes of lectures and notes about psychoanalytic technique and theory. So it is clear that Klein, unlike Freud, thought that her unpublished notes were worth preserving. It seems likely that she destroyed most of her letters concerning professional matters, because there are very few letters from and to colleagues, although there are many family letters. Klein dates her clinical notes, but most of her notes on theory and technique are undated. Most of the clinical notes stop in about 1950. Her notes on theory and technique appear to continue until the late 1950s,

although it is difficult to be sure of this because most of them are undated. However, there is one set of notes on projective identification which, unusually for Klein, is given a date, which is 1958. I could not find any explanation in the