Melanie Klein: By Hanna Segal. New York: Viking Press, 1979. 194 pp.

Melanie Klein has been dead for twenty-one years, and the time has come to re-evaluate her contributions now that the Zeitgeist of current-day psychoanalytic interest seems to be shifting toward the archaic, pregenital lairs of early infancy which she so intrepidly explored from the time of her earliest writings in 1921. This re-evaluation calls for some knowledge about the person, Melanie Klein—about her attitudes, her politics, the life experiences which contributed in some measure to the slant of her contributions—in order to round out our perspective on her work. This is precisely what Hanna Segal has set out to provide.

Melanie Klein's work had a tremendous impact on colleagues in her lifetime and afterwards. Virtually a third of the psychoanalytic world today is either "Kleinian" or has been significantly affected by her work. The rest of the psychoanalytic world has chosen to shun her and her work, at times with an absolutism which even today seems puzzling. Therefore, what influenced her and why her contributions have been so provocative are important questions for psychoanalysts to ponder.

Hanna Segal, one of Melanie Klein's most distinguished analysands (and it should be said that many of her analysands became world famous) has written the sort of book that balances between biographical glimpses and vignettes on the one hand and attention to the development of Klein's technique and theory on the other. Segal has a well-earned reputation as the most lucid and least arcane of Kleinian analysts writing today. Through her pen, the person of Melanie Klein begins to emerge. First of all, Klein was petite, beautiful, feminine, proud—even vain, fearlessly honest, intuitive, and a dedicated product of fin de siècle Vienna. Bion, another of Klein's illustrious analysands, once informed me that she deeply resented having her work referred to as "Kleinian." She was largely influenced by Freud, Abraham, and Ferenczi (undergoing analysis