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These four sessions bring into focus an important aspect of the development of Mrs Klein's work, the concept of reparation. It has a very confusing beginning and winds gently through her work, never really drawn together anywhere, in spite of the book she wrote with Joan Riviere in 1937, Love, Hate and Reparation.
Again in this week, we meet a contaminated field, because Richard missed the first three sessions, and after his unusual extra session on Sunday became ill again. In a way the week is split into two, the first two sessions being devoted to his recovery from the terrific paranoid and hypochondriacal reactions to his illness and those sessions of the previous week which probably precipitated it, and then the last two sessions devoted mainly to the excitement of having an extraordinary session that arouses both his jealousy and his curiosity. The outbreak of paranoia is particularly linked to his having a sore throat and becomes connected with his hostility towards his father and Paul and the wish for the hook to stick in their throats, like the salmon which might die because of the hook.
The transference context of that material is devoted to mistrust of Mrs Klein, his hostility to her, not just to the ‘brute’ Mrs Klein. He wants to swear, using the word ‘bloody’ to assault her. She seems very relieved when he specifically indicates his wish to assault her. She is probably a bit wrong in the beginning of the first session when she takes up the ‘Melanie’ as a feeling of having a good mummy inside him. Quite likely it is a bit of cheekiness and patronization, treating her as a servant, like Cook and Bessie. She corrects herself quickly enough to pick up his paranoia. She is able to link it back to that confession of his fear of being poisoned by Cook and Bessie and she says quite promptly that he is feeling poisoned by her the moment he has pain in his tummy, feeling that she is really feeding him a fish hook.
He recovers quite nicely, which she tends to attribut