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“‘After the Analysis …’” was written in 1938, but its contents are timeless. It is a bracing mix of psychoanalytic wisdom, frankness, practical realism, clinical experience, cynicism, empathy, analytic understanding, and a weary worldliness, tempered by a dash of fellow-feeling toward analysts about the considerable number of patients who expect far too much of analysis. Not only do patients fall prey to this phenomenon, Schmideberg says, but analysts do, too.
In 1938 London, in the atmosphere of sharp theoretical and personal disagreements building within the British Psychoanalytical Society, between the English branch and the Viennese branch of the psychoanalytic movement (otherwise known as the Kleinians and the Freudians), this paper written by Melanie Klein's only daughter seemed shockingly anti-Kleinian.1 Schmideberg read it first in the British Society in 1937, and it was heard as a direct attack on her mother. Such theoretical disagreements, augmented by the voices of the Continental analysts—and especially that of Anna Freud, who fled Vienna for London in 1938—finally