You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Some years ago, I attended a symposium on the Controversial Discussions, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, at which the featured speakers were Ron Britton (representing the Kleinian view), Peter Fonagy (the contemporary Freudian view), and David Tuckett (the Independent view). At one point, Fonagy spoke about the tendency toward insularity among Kleinians, and also acknowledged a measure of envy about that group's collective focus on systematically developing their concepts. In reply, Britton dryly quipped that it was not altogether unpleasant to be the target of envy since his group had more candidates. He added that the important distinction is less a theoretical matter than one of the difference between good and bad clinicians. Indeed, on this occasion, the American audience was impressed by the similarities among the three presenters' discussions of clinical material, as well as by their clinical acumen.
In reading the Kleinian literature, one is struck by the relative absence of reference to other psychoanalytic schools and by the care taken to trace the roots of their thinking to Freud's original contributions.1 This is not a lockstep obeisance to Freud, but rather what is regarded as a continued elaboration of his work in creative and new ways. It has been said that Freud discovered the child in the adult, and Klein revealed the infant in the child. Consequently, we discover in Klein's writings terms that are familiar to the Freudian analyst, such as the superego, the primal scene, and the Oedipus complex,2 which have been extended to