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Charlotte Schwartz's The Mythology Surrounding Freud and Klein is divided into chapters on Freud, Klein, Abraham, Ferenczi, Jones, Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Winnicott. While I found the chapters on British School contributors interesting, I focus here on the Freud and Klein chapters, in which the author questions the tradition that sees Freud as an instinct theorist and Klein as an object relations theorist.
In her introduction, Schwartz asserts that Freud was inherently interested in objects and that Klein was predominantly interested in instinctual drives. Initially, this seems as if Schwartz is revisiting the nature versus nurture argument that once pervaded developmental theories. She writes, “Though Klein repeatedly referred to the object, her object was in essence a phylogenetic object … created and infused by the instincts and only secondarily, ontogenetic,” in short, a “drive object.” According to Schwartz, this places Klein closer to Freud's instinct theory than to object theorists. She believes that Klein's theories influenced psychoanalysis and suggests that seeing her as a radical departure from Freud was politically and institutionally motivated to contest Freud and his ideas. Schwartz believes this history has deprived training institutions—at least in the United States—of greater awareness of Kleinian thought, including her valuable concepts of envy and greed.
As a Kleinian myself, I was disappointed in Schwartz's limited attention to Klein's ideas. While she acknowledges her preponderance of interest in Freud, she gives Klein the same amount of attention as Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Winnicott, whom she considers the real object theorists.
The chapters on Freud are very compelling. Schwartz presents evidence in a historical way, as Freud did, and shows how objects were important to his libido theory and, later, to his structural theory. At the same time, Schwartz wonders how Fairbairn and