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It sometimes seems as if the history of psychoanalysis consists only of a series of recurrent blow-ups, each of which plays a part in the general mythology about the story of the growth of Freud's school. I think that these well-publicized, if still little understood, difficulties repeatedly have arisen because of an inadequate degree of normal give-and-take within psychoanalytic communities. For if differences of opinion were more of a run-of-the-mill matter, and people were encouraged to disagree without its involving stakes of personal friendship, loyalty, and above all, transferences, then volcanic kinds of eruptions would be less likely to break out.
The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-1945 is a scrupulously detailed account of the struggle within the British Psychoanalytical Society over the ideas and practices of Melanie Klein. I know of no comparable set of key documents apart from the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg & Federn, 1962-1965). Like the Minutes, The Freud-Klein Controversies was not edited by professional historians but by members of the psychoanalytic family, and therefore both texts suffer from a lack of academic distance ideally brought to bear on historical evidence. Although the Minutes at the time of their publication went largely unreviewed and not professionally discussed, I have already read two fine accounts of The Freud-Klein Controversies (Forrester, 1991; Rudnytsky, 1991). So there is reason to think that some advances have been made in the integration of psychoanalysis into the history of ideas as it is studied at universities.
The editing of The Freud-Klein Controversies leaves, I think, something to be desired. Both King and Steiner are members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and inevitably they are trying to tidy up the story of their group. For example, the book