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It is very difficult for a disciple of Melanie Klein to write a review on her biography, thus the task of writing such a book for an English professor of Toronto University must have been even more arduous, despite her fame as biographer of the sexologist Havelock Ellis.
Jones, the biographer of Freud, was not only a prince writing about his King and the founder of his family, but a scientist recounting the foundations of a new science in order to facilitate its establishment, a task which appears natural near the end of his own career. Thus his point of view in selecting and using the material available on the theme is clear and univocal. Professor Grosskurth, on the other hand, was evidently fascinated by the passion and controversies of an extraordinary woman, who continued and developed the work of Freud, probably not assuming, in considering the theme, a stable enough position between an objective and impartial document and the seductive charm of a ‘chiaroscuro’ or of an unimpeded journalistic inquiry. I should imagine that the inevitability of this risk, seeing the controversial nature of the person and her works, dissuaded her pupils and disciples who were witnesses, at least of the final part of “her world and her work”, from carrying out this task, though it is not less complicated than that undertaken by Jones. Unavoidably one asks oneself how necessary it is to know the private life of a genius, of an extremely creative person. Are the qualities and faults of such a person enlarged in our own minds or should we only bear in mind the part of the personality involved in the creative activity which is truly extraordinary?
The title of Nietzsche's book Human, All Too Human comes to mind when reading Melanie Klein's life. Unlike Freud, the physician who in trying to cure nervous disorders learned ‘to understand’ people by means of their deepest motivations and, in order to understand others, had also to learn to interpret his own motivations, Melanie Klein - lik