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Dr. Segal knows how to bring the gist of Kleinian thinking into a short paper and does so without oversimplifying the issues. It is a tour de force. I envy her—in the commonly used sense of the word, I hope.
I agree with Dr. Segal's approach toward viewing Melanie Klein's work as it developed from the early 20's onward, but I see that development in a slightly different way, with a shift in the middle. Somebody once said that Melanie Klein became Kleinian in 1935 when she introduced the “depressive position” and the conceptualizations that followed (mainly the interplay of that position with the earlier paranoid-schizoid one). That way of dividing her work, although arbitrary, helps.
In the early days, much of her work was observing with a new tool: taking play analysis seriously (a technique in which the handled toy was interpreted as a dream element). To that pre-Kleinian Klein we owe: (a) a technique that allowed to probe beyond, and (b) the facts that were found. Those facts did not, in any way, alter the fabric of Freud's conceptualization; there were additions that have to do with location of events (an earlier calendar for ego development was proposed) and with the magnitude of certain affects, mainly early sadistic oral impulses whose strength had been underrated at the time.
That early, fact finding, pre-Kleinian period is now a psychoanalytical legacy that pervades the work of most analysts—even though some of them do not know it. And here I have an addition—not a criticism—to make of Dr. Segal's contribution. She states that Melanie Klein observed that the children developed transferences
and that those ties were even stronger than in adults. That is correct, but I do not think that Melanie Klein interpreted, at that time, in the transference the way we do today. In her Psycho-Analysis of Children, for instance, transference interpretations are wanting. And, incidentally, it is more difficult to interpret in the transference to a child than to an adult.
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