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Melanie Klein Revisited, by Susan Sherwin-White, published posthumously, and Reading Klein, by Margaret and Michael Rustin are both important additions to writings about Klein. In my view, both are excellent.
Sherwin-White has brought together her earlier career as ancient historian and epigrapher with her later equally distinguished career as a child and adolescent psychotherapist. Like the birds described by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary (2010), she unites into a coherent and accessible whole the closest right-eyed/left hemisphere attention to detail with a left-eyed/right hemisphere wider world view.
Her focus is on Klein’s psychoanalysis of very young children, from 2 to 6 years, mainly from before she left Berlin in 1926, some written up in The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932). Sherwin-White’s passion for an accurate understanding of Klein and her work emerges by producing the evidence from both published and unpublished material, the latter from her researches in the Melanie Klein archive in the Wellcome Institute for the History and Understanding of Medicine in London. She also makes full use of recently published translations of Klein’s own clinical notes by Frank (2009) to refute contemporary claims of Klein’s harsh and negative analytic approach, and to correct Alix Strachey’s mistranslations into English which ‘eliminated’ the concept of reparation from her earlier writings.
She has used Klein’s notes and her own researches to extend understanding of Klein’s actual work beyond what can be learnt from the selective clinical material she used to illustrate themes in her published writings. It is helpful to the twenty-first-century child psychotherapist to know that Klein’s young patients threw things at her, attacked, spat and defecated in sessions. For example, Erna who ‘has talked about “eye-salad” … suddenly while scowling hurls pencil at my eye so
that eyelid hurts’. Many of Klein’s patients came to her with ‘severe’ infantile and obs