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Much hard work was done for this biography, the first written about Melanie Klein. Phyllis Grosskurth consulted many documents and letters (even tracing a lost collection), conducted many interviews (some of people traced down resourcefully), and made herself acquainted with much psychoanalytic theory. She has a narrative gift, and like the experienced biographer that she is, she has organised a mass of material into easy and vivid readability. It is all the more to be regretted, therefore, that what must be the pivot of any biography, the author’s relation to his or her subject, has gone awry more often than it has stayed right.
The reader is likely to be made uneasy on the first page:
Melanie Klein was a woman with a mission. From the moment she read Freud’s paper On Dreams (1901) in 1914 she was enraptured, converted, and dedicated to psychoanalysis. Captivated by the concept of the unconscious, she followed its seductive lure …
This is language for religion and erotic infatuation and it sets a style the author will use on and off throughout the book in which
psychoanalysts, the pursuit of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytical issues are made sensational, psychologised, or politicised, to the extent that the author at times comes dangerously near to losing sight of whom and of what she is writing about.
One is thankful, however, that Professor Grosskurth has not written in a spirit of piety; but unfortunately she is often possessed – seemingly unawares – by a hostile animus against her subject. It is very obtrusive in Part One where she describes Melanie Klein’s early life in Vienna where she was born in 1882. As Phyllis Grosskurth recounts Melanie Klein’s relations with her father and mother, her two sisters – one of whom died when Melanie was 4, the later death of her loved and admired brother Emanuel, and the abandonment when she was 18 of her ambition to study medicine and become a psychiatrist for the sake of a mistaken engagement and marriage in which her th