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I find it convenient to divide her work into two phases. Until 1935, she was basically working within the theoretical framework of Freud and Abraham, though she made many changes in it, some of them inadvertent. After 1935, with the two papers on the depressive position (Klein 1935, 1940), the paper on the paranoid-schizoid position (1946), and Envy and Gratitude (1957), she developed a new theory of her own. (Spillius 1994, pp. 325-6)
The aim of this paper is to introduce some significant pages of Notes from the Melanie Klein Archives in the Wellcome Library in London.2 My attention was drawn to these Notes because they are entitled ‘Early Repression Mechanism’. Klein makes very few references indeed to repression in the sizeable sum of her published work. In fact she emphasized ‘splitting the object’ at least as much in her early work, and in her later work she emphasized the mechanism of ‘splitting of the ego’, together with the extraordinary mechanism she called ‘projective identification’. Amongst other things, to understand the differences in usage between splitting and repression would help to clarify the misunderstandings between different schools of psychoanalytic thinking.
My interest in finding an extended set of Notes by Melanie Klein on ‘repression’, was therefore aroused, and directed towards an historical perspective to discover how Klein's preference for the term ‘splitting’ had