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The following notes on the movie Citizen Kane by Melanie Klein were brought to my attention in 1995 by Austin Case, who discovered them in the Wellcome Archives in London. Elizabeth Bott Spillius and Betty Joseph, who are trustees of the Melanie Klein Trust, have given permission for them to be published. Apparently, the notes have never been included in any of Klein's published works, no doubt because they are sketchy and incomplete. Despite their incompleteness, however, they are of interest, because they show how Klein, like Freud, was always interested in art and its unconscious meanings. Klein used Julian Greene's novel If I Were You to illustrate her ideas concerning projective identification and also used the Oresteia to illustrate the anxieties of early infancy. She maintained that the greatness of Aeschylus's tragedies derived from his intuitive understanding of the inexhaustible depth of the unconscious and the ways in which this understanding influenced the characters and situations he created. She also felt that this understanding had a general application for all great artists' work.
The film starts with the death of Citizen Kane. His life story from two aspects: official one, which appears in the paper, describes the