V

One hesitates to evaluate an unfinished, posthumously edited book like George Klein's Psychoanalytic Theory. We can never know what aspect is the result of tragic interruption. It might be more fitting to use it as a collection of suggestions.

Yet this book has the appearance of system. Half of it was finished before the author's death. Themes reappear often enough to show what is elaborated and what is not. The editors—friends and colleagues of the author—assure us that it was intended as a reformation which starts by challenging old theory and ends by suggesting new. So we have both textual and biographical reason to read the book as a systematic critique and renovation of psychoanalytic theory.

Klein covered a vast area: philosophy of science; the nature of psychoanalytic explanation; Freud's thinking; Hartmann's ego psychology; the nature of sexuality, motivation, defense, adaptation, and esthetics. Even if he set out as a systematic surveyor and builder, work on such a broad front may turn out to be organized around some particular mission regarded by the author as a mere off-shoot or secondary consequence of his plan of operation.

Several aspects of Klein's work warn us that what is most important may lie below the level of explicit argument:

A good writer, where they are rare, Klein is almost always persuasive. Yet crucial concepts are likely to remain perpetually elusive.a

Ambiguous animus is a second peculiarity of the text. Klein was a sophisticated theoretician, sensitive to the nuances of the beliefs he opposed. He scorned models but understood their usefulness (p. 31). He scolded Freud for his physicalism, but acknowledged his constant concern with meaning (p. 117). He wanted psychoanalysis to make a break with other sciences but granted it the same sort of activity as the