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Jean-Michel Petot's two volumes of Melanie Klein constitute a comprehensive and remarkably erudite explication of Kleinian metapsychology. His work does not simply restate Klein's ideas. It sets out neither to idealize nor denigrate Kleinian thought. Rather, Petot wants to address the form of Kleinian metapsychology. In this endeavor, he is most successful. His educational background in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and psychology has served him well in this otherwise difficult task of enunciating the complex work of Mrs. Klein.
If Petot's rendezvous with Kleinian thought is intended to show this formation, readers would probably profit most from these volumes by positioning themselves in the following way. We may consider psychoanalysis as a human science that, in the words of Nelson (1987), studies “the favored pretexts that lead us to produce the texts of our lives in the contexts of our times” (p.427; italics added). Accordingly, we should know as we read Petot's account of Klein's life and work what her pretexts or orienting assumptions were, who her acknowledged and unacknowledged mentors were, what influences allowed her to frame categories of thought in her work, and what clinical and historical contexts had a decisive impact on her new found psychoanalytic tradition. Given this viewpoint, it would seem that this twin volume is for beginners. On the contrary, beginners would be best served by first reading Segal (1964/1974) or, even better, by struggling through representative