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M. Klein published her writings over a thirty-year time-span, which began when Freud was at the height of his creative powers. Thirty years after her death, a book has been published which outlines and discusses the more long-term aspects of her influence, namely, the way her concepts and formulations have been developed by her pupils and followers. It seems significant that E. Bott Spillius offered to edit this work, since before becoming an eminent member of the English Kleinian group, she had been an anthropologist, and just about thirty years ago published an important social anthropological study of the family. The contributions to this volume, many of which have become classics, revolve around eight essential themes and are indeed all outlined and developed by the English authors of the Kleinian “family”. The themes discussed in the two volumes are as follows: the analysis of psychotics — projective identification — on thinking — pathological organisations — developments in technique — clinical papers on adult psychoanalysis — child analysis — the application of Kleinian ideas in other fields. The first four themes deal with theory.
It should be pointed out immediately that Melanie Klein Today begins with the analysis of psychotics and projective identification, while the analysis of children is discussed at the end, along with the application of psychoanalysis in other fields, even though child analysis was what Klein began with and what first made her work famous. The introduction to this, the penultimate part of the work has, like all the others, been written by Bott Spillius. Here she states that since the 1950s there has been a decline in the amount of five times a week psychoanalytic work with children, and fewer articles have been written on the subject, apart from those by Meltzer. In the introduction to the section “on thinking” in Volume 1, after having discussed Bion's theories and models, Bott Spillius had already mentioned E. Bick's work