Commentary: “Rereading Klein's ‘Some Reflections on “The Oresteia”’—the Evolution of the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Four Generations of Chinese Women”, by Xu Jianqin (Jane Xu)

There is a tradition of connecting the life experiences of psychoanalysts to the development of their conceptual and clinical approaches, as shown in biographies of Freud by Jones (1953), Klein by Grosskurth (1986), Winnicott by Philips (1988), Fairbairn by Sutherland (1989), and Kahn by Hopkins (2006), to name just a few. Agreeing that the theoretical contributions of analysts are inseparable from their life experiences, Jane Xu proceeds to summarise key moments in the life of Melanie Klein in order to show how she may have been led to her views on the development of endopsychic structure in infants. We meet Klein as a sad girl, a depressed young adult woman in an unhappy marriage, burdened by the demands of two young children, and then as a dying seventy-eight-year-old woman rejected and abandoned by her own daughter, Melitta, to whom she had been extremely close prior to their falling out over grief-borne accusations over the death of Klein's son, Melitta's brother. Then Xu reminds us of Klein's sensitive appreciation of fantasy as the driver of human development, her acknowledgement of the intensity of instinct-driven love for and envy of the breast, and her antedating of the Oedipus complex to the first year of life.

Turning to Klein's 1963 paper reflecting on the Oresteia, Xu describes the infant's fear of being devoured and destroyed by even the good mother, a fear that persists throughout early childhood until being gradually modified by experiences of the reality of a good-enough mother-infant relationship over time. The point of this reference to Klein's views articulated in the Oresteia, and the earlier references to the strains in her relationship with Melitta, is to remind us of the drama of love and hate from infant to mother as a context for considering the vagaries of the mother-daughter relationship in general, and in China in particular.

I am puzzled by Xu's choice of the Oresteia paper as the premier statement of Klein's views. Certainly it has the