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Roy Schafer, an eminent training analyst in New York, has long been interested in Kleinian psychoanalysis. As he explains in the epilogue to this book, in the 1950s he was
indoctrinated to consider Kleinian analysis a wildly speculative system basing itself on inadequate evidence and giving rise to unverifiable interpretations; also as a mythology or demonology that was taking Freud's already discredited death instinct speculations too seriously and literally
Over the next forty years, he has endeavoured to look at Kleinian meta-theory and writings and help others
re-open closed eyes and ears, not only to a valuable body of analytic contributions but also to the rich, primitive world of object relational phantasy
This book is his way of introducing these authors, who he has struggled so hard to de-demonise and value for himself, to a wider, predominantly American, audience.
The book itself is a collection of eighteen papers by twelve authors. Some (Segal, Steiner, Feldman, and Anderson) have contributed two, and Betty Joseph, three, papers. Of the eighteen papers, all have previously been published, except the two from Robin Anderson; and, of those previously published, eight are from the 1980s and another eight from the 1990s. The various chapters are brought together, initially by Schafer's interesting introduction, ‘The Contemporary Kleinians of London’ (previously published in 1994 in Psychoanalytic Quarterly) and thereafter by his useful, smaller, introductory comments to each article. In this way, Schafer is following the tradition of previous collections of Kleinian works, including Spillius's two-volume set, Melanie Klein Today (1988), Joseph's selected papers, Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change (1989), and Steiner's Psychic Retreats (1993), to mention a few. He is generous in his indebtedness to many of the above authors for their help.
The editor restricts himself to authors living and working in London, thus excluding figures such as Bion