Tribute to Melanie Klein

Introduction

In 1935 I was chosen by Dr. E. Jones and a small committee to undertake psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, not as a patient or trainee, but with the notion that I would undertake research of psychoanalytic doctrine in an academic (rather than clinical) framework. It was my understanding that Mrs. Susan Isaacs was given similar research significance. At the time few psychoanalysts were attached to universities in Britain — one could think only of Professor J. C. Flugel at University College, London.

Who suggested this in the first place I do not know: Flugel knew me well, because we were on the same staff and had the same allegiance to Professor Charles Spearman's work. Flugel probably guessed that I would proceed along academic lines at Oxford University because of my close ties with Dr. William Brown, Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford, successor to William McDougall. Brown and I had published an important paper ‘A Test of the Theory of Two Factors’ . Since 1930 I had been clinical psychologist at Epsom Mental Hospital, and had published papers in the psychiatric field (Stephenson, 1931, 1932a, 1932b, 1935a, 1935b). Though attached to Spearman's psychology, this was not without misgivings and Flugel must have been aware of my doubts.

There were two main reasons for my misgivings. First, I was trained as a physicist, with a Ph.D. in nuclear physics in 1926 when I was 24 years old. I must have been touched with the insight of the great American historian, Henry Brooks Adams, who could write to a friend in 1905 as follows:

The assumption of unity which was the mark of human thought in the middle ages has yielded very slowly to the proofs of complexity. The stupor of science before radium is a proof of it. Yet it is quite sure … that, at the accelerated rate of progression shown since 1600, it will not need another century to turn thought upside down. Law, in that case, would disappear as theory ox a priori principle and give place to force. Mo