Chapter 3 Melanie Klein Revisited: Her Unpublished thoughts on Technique

Klein published only three papers on technique, ‘Symposium on child analysis’ in 1927, ‘The origins of transference’ in 1952 and ‘The psycho-analytic play technique’ in 1955, but she left a set of unpublished lectures on technique and over 1500 pages of notes especially devoted to technical problems. She intended to write a book on technique, but did not do so. She was also going to write books on schizoid mechanisms, loneliness and mental development – too many topics, perhaps, for her to focus on any single one of them.

It is important to remember that although Klein eventually developed a new, influential and controversial theory, she was basically a clinician. She was fascinated by clinical material even to the point of losing herself in its details. I know too from discussions with James Gammill, whose work with a small child patient Klein supervised from 1957 to 1959, that she had a remarkable memory for clinical material, her own as well as his (Gammill 1989 and personal communication). Winnicott makes the same point (1965). I am told that in arguments about theory with colleagues Klein tended to resort to convincing clinical examples. She was sometimes accused of confusing concepts and data, which I imagine she found puzzling and unfair.

My view that Klein was basically a clinician was also her view of herself. In an unpublished note she says:

I would like to draw attention to the fact that I have always been primarily a clinician. It has never happened that I arrived at a concept theoretically and then allowed this concept to guide my clinical work. It has always been the

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other way round. From time to time going over my psychoanalytic experience and observations, I have arrived at certain concepts …

I also think that she liked clinical material for its own sake. The Archive shows that she sometimes presented long descriptions of patients’ material in her lectures and technical seminars, including far more detail than she would have needed to prove a poin