Melanie Klein Today: Developments in Theory and Practice, Volume  2: Mainly Practice. Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius. A Tavistock Professional Book Published in Association with the Institute of Psychoanalysis. London: 1988,  315 pp.

In Melanie Klein Today, Volume 2, Elizabeth Bott Spillius has edited a compilation of essays written by the best and brightest of Kleinian clinicians over the last forty years. While Volume I focuses exclusively on theory, Volume 2 provides a window through which we enter the inner sanctum of the Kleinian office, and observe firsthand, just how these analysts practice what they preach. Expecting something quite sensational, what we find is that the work of these therapists is not so very different from the rest of us who have incorporated some form of object relations approach into our thinking. What, in fact, is so surprising is the depth of our surprise. After all, it was Klein herself, once considered the wildest stepchild of the psychoanalytic family, who initiated our thinking about the harsh primitive superego, the idealized self, and other figures who live in our internalized object world. Through her play therapy work with children, it was Klein who first observed that the analyst was assigned roles that reflected deeply primitive feelings and fantasies that the patient could not tolerate. In fact, it is this technique, which grew so organically out of Klein's experience with children at play—the technique of projective identification—which is the primary theme of this very compelling book.

Divided into four sections, the book focuses on “Developments in Technique,” “Clinical Papers on Adult Psychoanalysis,” “Child Analysis,” and finally, the “Application of Kleinian Technique” to other fields of study and work. Each section is prefaced by a short introduction by the editor, where she succincdy highlights the historical significance of each paper, underscores the theoretical trend of the papers as a whole, and notes how controversies within the field were fueled or resolved by the papers selected.

Profound and critical changes in Klein's original technique are brightly visible in these papers. As Spillius points out, most apparent is a very radical shift in th