Editorial

The principal document in this issue of Psychoanalysis and History goes under the title ‘Autobiography’: a series of fragments written by Melanie Klein in the summer and autumn of 1959. The ‘fragments’ covered by the title ‘Autobiography’ are focused on Klein's early life, her family, the years of her marriage, children and her first encounters with psychoanalysis. The original documents are lodged in the Klein Papers in the Wellcome Library's Archives and Manuscripts Section, London, where scholars have consulted them; most notably, the opening chapters of Phyllis Grosskurth's biography of subject Klein's accounts of her own early life to some searching scrutiny, depicting much of their content as Klein's ‘family romance’. We are very pleased that they are now made publicly available in print, courtesy of Janet Sayers's transcription and editing.

One of the most surprising aspect of Klein's reflections on her early life is the view she gives of her Jewish family emerging out of the constraining circumstances of late nineteenth-century Imperial Austria - and of the persistence of the effect of these circumstances on her own values. Also amongst the striking features of Klein's early life were her wanderings: although born and raised in Vienna, once married to her engineer husband, she lived for some years in Ružomberok and Heřmaneč, both in what became Czechoslovakia after World War I, before moving to Budapest for some nine years; after sheltering in Ružomberok with his family from the post-war turmoil of Budapest, her husband took a job in Sweden and the couple separated, Melanie moving to Berlin for the next six years until in 1926 she settled for the rest of her life in London. ‘Having been by birth an Austrian subject, I had now become a Czecho-Slovakian subject and, with my husband settled in Sweden … I became a Swedish subject, which, at a