On May 24th 1955, during the 19th International Psychoanalytical Association Congress, Melanie Klein read a paper at Geneva that was a surprise even to her closest collaborator-pupils and which, as happens for every psychoanalytical innovation or discovery, received both approval and disagreement. It was published two years later, as a book, entitled Envy and Gratitude.

I studied it very carefully immediately after its publication just at the same time as I was undergoing my own personal analysis. But now the feeling of “gratitude”, the metapsychological collocation of which is certainly a very present problem of great importance, is due to Phyllis Grosskurth because of her work Melanie Klein: her world and her work, which has been translated into Italian and published by Bollati Boringhieri in 1988.