I

I was a graduate student at New York University in the late sixties when George Klein was in the process of developing the ideas collected in this volume. He had the tight, intense body of a former lightweight fighter and, balding as he was, a high dome of a forehead cleaved by a deep vertical furrow, as if his keen and by-then irreverent intelligence had penetrated inward. He punched the air as he lectured to us about the “vital pleasures,” as he called them, and the superfluity of psychoanalytic metapsychology—“a second theory,” he said, tautologically, “a theory of a theory.” Having turned from Rapaport's highly abstract vagaries to Erikson's earthier psychosocial phenomenology, Klein told us to heed the more demonstrable “identity themes” organizing our inner histories. He hoped to meld this perspective with those of psychological philosophers like Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty, long favorites of his, and with the so-called her-meneutics of Paul Ricoeur, whose Essai sur I'Interprétation11 was just then in translation. Klein's objective was to render of psychoanalysis a systematic science of psychic meanings, its propositions grounded solidly in the available data of the clinical setting.

I was Klein's research assistant and it was one of my jobs to cull quotations from Freud's writings, particularly the case histories, in an effort to prove that Freud's evolving metapsychology was extrinsic to his construction of the clinical material. It was not an easy task; Freud himself wavered from one level of inference to another, and his cases tended to obey the logic of unconscious fantasy rather than that of scientific deduction. Such phrases and paragraphs as I could find I would pass on to Klein, who would then retreat into his office at the Research Center, its walls lined with the artwork of his wife, Bessie Boris, and an occasional effort of his own. Here he would pore over these cases in point, marshalling evidence for his work in progress.