Author's Response

I was very glad that most of the discussants found my exposition clear, since my aim was to try to show Kleinian technique “in action.”

Some of the discussants, Dr. Buxbaum for instance, make the point that they remain unconvinced about the “superiority of the Kleinian concepts over the Freudian ones.” This does not surprise me, nor was “convincing” at all my aim.

I do not think we can convince one another, or anyone else, about the merits of analytic techniques. Conviction can come only from analytic experience; if not from personal analytic experience, then at least from an experience of joint work, seminars, discussion of cases over long periods, etc. But it is most fruitful if we can acquire a better understanding of our colleagues' technique—hence I find the collective volume on Psychoanalytic Techniques most welcome.

Though I shall not be able to deal with all the interesting points raised in the discussion, I shall take up a few that seem to me of most importance:

Dr. Wolman criticizes me for saying that “new facts” emerged in Klein's work with children and that Klein found “evidence” of early superego, etc. I quite agree that “superego” is a concept, not an observable fact. One could say that certain phenomena observed by Freud could best be explained if one used a concept of an internalized phantasy figure which etc., etc. My sentence would then run: “The phenomena observed by Melanie Klein could best be explained by extending the concept of the superego …,” etc. However, in our everyday language we do speak of superego, projection, introjection, etc., as though they were facts, since these concepts and models are our everyday tools.

Equally, I agree that one cannot “prove” the depressive position, any more than one can “prove” the Oedipus complex; one can only argue the usefulness of the concept and theory.

All I can say is that in my view the Kleinian concepts cover a wider range of phenomena than the classical ones, and that the Kleinian technique seems to me