Preface by the Editors

Elizabeth Bott Spillius occupies a unique position among contemporary Kleinian psychoanalysts. She is a renowned training and supervising analyst, teaching for many years at the British Society and also in Europe and North and South America. But anyone familiar with the literature of Kleinian psychoanalysis over the last 20 years realizes she is more than that as well - in her capacities as chronicler, archivist, editor and historian, she is Boswell to the Kleinian Dr Johnson. How, in the future, psychoanalysts think about the development of post-Kleinian thought will be profoundly affected by Spillius's description, understanding and organization of these ideas.

Her history and her training have predisposed and prepared her for this role: she grew up in Canada in an academic family with ties to the wild Canadian countryside as well as to university life. She graduated from the University of Toronto and then went to graduate school to study anthropology in Chicago, arriving in London in 1949 to do further work in anthropology at the London School of Economics and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. What this has meant is, first of all, that she has never really lost her North American voice – she is direct, unfussy, open-minded and straight-talking. Her writing is at the same time personal and matter of fact.

Secondly, she consistently writes from the dual viewpoints of a psychoanalyst who is also a social scientist: in everything she studies she is by temperament and by training both a participant and an observer. In the first paper in this book, Anthropology and Psychoanalysis (Chapter 1) she describes the relationship between these two disciplines, but as one reads through the book, one can see this complex

interrelationship running through all her work. Development always interests her – her own, that of her patients and the development of her two fields of study. She is interested in how and also why one idea develops out of another, expanding the origi