Chapter 4 Melanie Klein on the Past

It is generally believed that contemporary Kleinian analysts interest themselves in a patient's past mainly in so far as it is expressed in the immediate analyst-patient relationship, a view which is particularly associated with Betty Joseph's work but which is shared by many other contemporary Kleinian analysts. It therefore comes as something of a surprise to discover that Klein, especially in her writings in the Archive, pays close attention to what the patient actually says about his past as well as to the way he expresses it in the transference. She also thinks, however, that a person's unconscious phantasies are an important part of his thinking and feeling and influence his memories so that the relation between experiences and thoughts about the past and the present are never simple or straightforward.

Of Klein's published papers, ‘The origins of transference’ is the one that tackles the relation between past and present most directly (Klein 1952a). In it Klein says ‘I hold that transference originates in the same processes which in the earliest stages determine object-relations’ (p. 53), which is the basis of her belief that full exploration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the transference will reveal the past experiences and unconscious phantasies of the patient. She also makes a rather condensed statement about the transference situation, which she says consists of many situations transferred from the past into the present (1952a: 55); she calls this putting together of many past situations the ‘total situation’. She goes on to say:

It is only by linking again and again … later experiences with earlier ones and vice versa, it is only by consistently exploring their interplay, that present and past can come together in the patient's mind. This is one aspect of the process of integration which, as the

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analysis progresses, encompasses the whole of the patient's mental life.

Thus integration of the patient's past and his present was an im