Introduction

Any systematic attempt to teach Melanie Klein's work runs almost immediately into difficulties that are the exact opposite of the problems facing one in teaching Freud. Where the theoretical tail wags the clinical dog with him, hardly any theoretical tail exists to be wagged with her. This is not immediately apparent because all her earlier work (until the paper on manic-depressive states, but really only taking a clear-cut line of departure with the 1946 paper on schizoid mechanisms) is couched in the theoretical language of Freud and Abraham, shifting from the terms of Libido and Topographic Theory to the new Structural one.

One can hardly ascribe naïveté to such an astute woman; one must assume that the philosophy of science did not really interest her. The laws of evidence; the distinction between description, model, theory and notational system; the different classes of definitory statements - none of this concerned her. This was partly a matter of modesty, for she clearly considered her work to be merely a filling-out and clarification of Freud's and never recognized the huge leap she had made in method or model of the mind. She tended to be hurt and astonished by the hostility directed at her and thought of it only as antagonism to the ideas, much as Freud felt in his early isolation. But surely a great deal of this unfriendliness stemmed from very poor communication, linguistic snarles, further provoked by the dogmatic demeanor of her (and her colleagues') writing. These are the preconditions for political struggle over the ‘mantle’, Freud's, Abraham's, later Mrs Klein's. Although it now becomes a bad pun to speak of dis-mantling the Kleinian myth, that is certainly one of the main functions of these lectures.

In order to do this I chose to re-enforce Mrs Klein's own courageous attempt, embodied in that unique and fairly unread masterpiece (Henry Reed said it stood beside ‘War and Peace’ on his shelf), ‘Narrative of a Child Analysis’. On the whole the adventur