MELANIE KLEIN I
by Robert M. Young
Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882, the year Charles
Darwin died. Freud was 26 that year; Marx died the next year. Klein died, age
78, in London in 1960, having emigrated from Berlin in 1926 at the urging of
some British psychoanalysts. My perception is that her influence has grown
steadily over the intervening four decades. In some countries it is very great
-- Britain, Italy, Brazil, Argentina. In others it is small but growing –-
Germany, America. It is said that there are more Lacanian than Freudian analysts
in the world. There are, I think, many less Kleinian than Freudian analysts and
therapists worldwide. I think it fair to say, however, that her ideas are the
most controversial, since many Freudians do not engage with Lacan at all, while
people in the broad Freudian movement are very likely to hold strongly negative
views about Klein. These may or may not be well-informed.
I will try to characterise her, her ideas and some of those
of the people she influenced. I’ll start with a stark summary. She went straight
for the primitive. One of her followers said that while Freud concentrated on
the structures, the forms of unconscious functioning, she focused on the content
of primitive, psychotic anxieties. She believed that the primitive was never
transcended, that we never have a maturational achievement permanently under our
belts, as it were. A new challenge to our equanimity could arise internally or
externally at any time, and much, perhaps all, would have to be fought for all
over again. She believed that the internal world was less clearly structured
than Freud or his daughter Anna did, that the superego was present from birth
rather than being an achievement attained at five or six years of age in the
wake of the resolution of the Oedipus complex. She believed that envy and
destructiveness loomed much larger in the unconscious than Anna Freud did,
though, in my opinion, Sigmund’s views, as expressed, for example, in ‘Beyond
the Pleasure Principle’ and Civilization and Its Discontents, were nearer
Klein’s than Anna Freud’s. Where Anna Freud gained her reputation from listing
the unconscious defence mechanisms available to the ego to keep irrationality at
bay and outside of consciousness, Klein argued that the warp and woof of
everyday unconscious processes involved violent impulses, splitting, projection,
disintegration, treating others as part-objects. Extremely primitive unconscious
phantasies (which she spelled with a ph to distinguish them from day-dreaming
and imaginings) are bubbling away in the inner world and the simmering of this
cauldron is a prerequisite to being able to think at all. The better state of
mind which she posited and which Jack Nicholson might call ‘as good as it gets’
is not really very wonderful. It consists of seeing life as a mixture of extreme
emotions, involving less violent splitting, treating the objects of our feelings
as whole, not as parts, and being motivated by a form of guilt which is
reparative, not brittle and punitive. This state of mind, called the depressive
position, is astringent and far from conventional ideas of happiness and cannot
be maintained as a norm. We can only strive to be in it as much as can be
managed. Klein’s view of human nature characterises humankind as more intense,
fraught, troubled, nearer the edge, sometimes over it, than the picture painted
by other psychoanalysts. Life is harder, more painful, crazier, a perpetual
struggle. Henryk Ibsen and Joseph Heller rather than ‘Mary Poppins’ and ‘The
Sound of Music’. Life ‘is not objective reality but a phantasmagoria peopled
with our own fears and desires’ (Grosskurth, 1985, p. 62), ruled more by the
turmoil of the inner world than by neo-Freudian adaptations to the outer world.
Klein’s life and her psychoanalytic views were of a piece.
Her parents did not choose to have her, her analyst died, her marriage failed,
one son died in a tragic climbing accident (some suspected suicide). Her
daughter, Dr Melitta Schmideberg, who became a well-known psychoanalyst, fought
her histrionically and publicly in the British Psycho-analytic Society, then
emigrated to America, then returned and, unreconciled to the end, gave a lecture
in London the day of her mother’s funeral, did not attend the funeral and wore a
special pair of red boots that day. Like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein had no
university education, so going to America where to be an analyst you had to have
a medical degree, was out of the question. Anna Freud experienced her as an
implacable rival and apostate and fought her in the trenches of the British
Psycho-analytic Society until, in the hope of working something out, the society
staged a set of bitterly fought controversial discussions over a period of years
in the early 1940s, the upshot of which was an historic compromise according to
which the Society has three groups -– Kleinians, Freudians and Independents (the
last initially consisting of analysts to whom neither Anna Freud nor Klein was
willing to refer training cases). The main committees have representatives from
each of the three groups, and the Presidency rotates among them. This structure
has persisted for over half a century, and it is true to this day that
Independents peck Freudians (latterly called Contemporary Freudians), the last
group being very much the rump of the membership. Kleinians peck both of the
other groups. Indeed, after the Controversial Discussions Anna Freud
concentrated her energies on the Hampstead Clinic, housed across the street from
where her father had died and where she lived until her death in 1982 with her
companion, Dorothy Burlingham. It is now the Freud Museum. She lived 22 years
longer than Klein and, like Klein, was surrounded by a deferential and loyal
coterie of colleagues. In seminars they always commented in strict order of
seniority.
Klein’s colleagues were both highly-creative and fiercely
sectarian. Toward the end of her life they created the Melanie Klein Trust,
which looked after her heritage. No matter how talented an analyst, if he or she
is out of favour with the trust, then he or she is an outsider. The careers of
mediocrities who are in with the trust prosper. If you fell out with her or were
insufficiently deferential, you left the warm environment of the Klein Group.
This happened to Donald Winnicott, who was dropped because he did not pay
sufficient homage to her in his highly-original ‘Transitional Objects…’ paper
(1951), which he had penned to go into a Kleinian collection but was dropped. He
felt that Klein saw him as a lightweight, and even his wife said that he
suffered from an innate ‘benignity’, something unacceptable in the prima donna
atmosphere of the Freud-Klein controversies. In this conflict of world views
(Gross 400) Winnicott refused to take on board three key Kleinian tenets: the
death instinct, the paranoid-schizoid position (of which more anon) and the
existence of innate envy. On the other hand, he thought her concept of the
depressive position was one of the most important in psychoanalysis, second only
to the discovery of the unconscious. Paula Heimann, who had been a favourite of
Klein’s, left the group because she eventually found its cult of the individual
insufferable. Klein was herself very intense and demonstrative; Winnicott called
her ‘the Eureka shrieker’ (Gross 121).
From the time when she read Freud’s short book On Dreams in
1914, when she was in her early thirties, she was captivated by psychoanalysis
and longed to practice it. The key to Klein’s ideas is her work with very young
children, something she was urged to do by her first analyst, Sandor Ferenczi,
with whom she worked in Budapest. It is ironic that Anna Freud also worked with
children but perceived much nicer people in her patients. Where Anna Freud said
very young children could not free associate, Klein saw a rich inner phantasy
life reflected in play. Where Anna Freud saw herself as a teacher and her task
as education, Klein made deep, even militant interpretations of the anxieties
about breasts and other body parts, about hate, tearing, scooping out, biting
and murderousness which shocked non-Kleinians.
Melanie was herself conceived by accident, her father was ‘an
old fifty’, and there was little affection shown to her by either parent. Her
father was weak and unsuccessful, and her mother was contemptuous of him. An
adored older sister died when Melanie was four. There was plenty of sibling
rivalry in her family. ‘It was’, says her biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, ‘a
family riddled with guilt, envy, and occasionally explosive rages, and infused
with strong incestuous overtones’ (Gross 20). She married young -- a chemical
engineer. When she married her doting brother went straight downhill to
decadence and death, and Melanie was made to feel responsible. The marriage was
never a happy one. Klein was depressed and unfulfilled, and her husband was
unfaithful from the first year of the marriage. Melanie was clinically depressed
and sometimes institutionalised. They parted in 1920, leaving her with three
children. I have mentioned the fate of two of them. The third later changed his
name to Clyne, presumably to obscure his Jewish origins.
Melanie Klein arrived in Berlin at the age of 38 and remained
there for five years. She became a member of the Berlin Society and went into
analysis with Karl Abraham who died fourteen months later. Ferenczi and Abraham
were regarded by Freud as the best clinicians in the whole psychoanalytic
movement. Klein’s findings about aggression, sadism and other intense feelings
in the very young child’s mind, along with her brazen and dazzling originality,
made some colleagues shy away, others to treat her as wild and still others to
hate her. Abraham, while he lived, protected her. Having given some
well-received lectures to the year-old, 37 member British Psycho-analytic
Society in 1925, she moved to London the next year at Ernest Jones’ invitation.
When she came to England, she was in dispute with the Berlin Society, rumoured
to be out of favour with Freud and Anna, was a divorcee and had had various
affairs. She was the first Continental to be made a member of the British
Psycho-analytic Society. Alix Strachey said at the time that she looked like a
whore run mad and a dotty woman, but one whose head was filled with things of
thrilling interest (Gross 136). Klein’s impact on the place was dramatic, and
creativity –- not only hers -- blossomed.
Alas, Anna Freud was both the daughter of the founder of
psychoanalysis and a bear of very little brain. Her book on the psychoanalysis
of children was at first rejected for publication. When it was eventually
published only favourable reviews were tolerated by those around Freud. She
claimed that children could not free associate, could not be analysed (only
taught) and other unimaginative things. The whole of it was an embarrassing
attack on Klein, whose play technique was opening up the inner worlds of
children with breathtaking results and consequences for the whole of
psychoanalysis. For the next fifty-odd years a conspiracy was maintained to
protect the world from seeing this unequal contest clearly –- the creative
versus the anointed. In 1932, Klein published The Psychoanalysis of Children,
and it was apparent to everyone that it was the most original work which the
Hogarth Press had published up to that date. Where the Freudians proposed a
model of the mind with clearly differentiated structures and stages of
development, Klein presented a much more dynamic set of processes in which a
number of emotions and developmental levels operated simultaneously and with
tumultuous intensity -– love and hate, projection and introjection, splitting,
phantasy, often lording it over reality (cf. Gross 195). Grosskurth calls it ‘a
mosaic of turbulence’ (196).
From its founding in 1924 up into the 1940s, the British
Psycho-analytic Society was a fiefdom controlled by Freud’s loyal administrator,
Ernest Jones, who held or controlled all major offices. Edward Glover was second
in command and heir apparent. He was also the analyst of Klein’s daughter,
Melitta, and, alas, was in league with her in a hate campaign against Melanie
Klein. Throughout the 1930s violent antipathies were building up between Klein
and her followers, on the one hand, and Glover and Melitta, on the other. Jones
was initially Klein’s mentor: he had even sent his children to her for analysis.
He was also the peace-keeper, but he became increasingly ambivalent, and there
could be no mediation when the geographical gap was closed, and the dying Freud
and Anna moved from Vienna and Nazi persecution to Maresfield Gardens on 6 June
1938 (all of Freud’s sisters perished in the Nazi camps). Freud died on 23
September 1939, 20 days after the war began, having been made a Corresponding
Member of the Royal Society during his short stay here. A third of the members
of the BPS were by then refugees from the Continent, all allies of Anna Freud.
The polarisation was a caricature, and James Strachey
characterised it in a letter as the belief that psychoanalysis is a game
preserve of the Freud family and that Klein’s views were fatally subversive. His
letter ended ‘bloody foreigners’ (gross 257). Anna Freud protested against
Klein’s deep interpretations. Anna claimed she represented her father’s views,
which were binding on all psychoanalysts (Gross 314). Klein had a tendency to
pomposity and self-righteous behaviour (Gross 200). She was overbearing. Her
group was dubbed ‘the Ebeneezer church’. The rowed over internal objects, Klein
claimed that there were object relations from birth; Anna Freud claimed that
there was a period of primary narcissism. They disagreed over the role of
phantasy, which I’ll speak about later. Anna Freud refused to consider processes
before second year (Gross 321). Klein claimed that there was guilt from the
beginning and a superego before the Oedipus complex. This was surely apostasy.
Klein posited preverbal phantasies. Indeed, she focussed on the preverbal and on
deeply repressed material and felt that interpreting at this level was where the
analyst’s work made a difference. Kleinians stressed the centrality of
transference interpretations and the negative transference; Anna Freud’s group
denied both. Klein posited innate envy and an ongoing role for the death
instinct (which, after all, Freud had insisted upon) while Anna Freud thought
children were altogether nicer. Klein, on the contrary, drew constant attention
to psychotic mechanisms to the point that she had to deny that she was claiming
that children are psychotic.
James Strachey characterised the polarised opinions as
follows: ‘”Your views are so defective that you are incompetent to carry out a
training analysis or for the matter of that any analysis at all,’ says one
protagonist. “Your views are so false that you are incompetent to carry out a
training analysis or for the matter of that any analysis at all,” says the other
protagonist’ (Gross p.335).
The conflict mellowed as a result of the structural
compromise I mentioned earlier and as a result of the ageing of the
protagonists. Glover resigned, and Jones retired to the country, but the
atmosphere of implacable conflict is not gone, even now. A consultant was called
in a few years ago to consider dismantling the historic compromise, but it has
still not occurred. Klein remained active and productive until very near the end
of her life. Her last paper was ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’. She died in Sept
1960 after a successful operation for colon cancer; during convalescence she
fell out of bed, and died of complications from the broken hip.
We might attribute much of this to two strong female
personalities, but I don’t think that can explain why, thirty years on, when
Kleinianism was found attractive by a few people in the Los Angeles
Psychoanalytic Institute, a distressingly similar conflict blew up. The result
was uproar which became so intense that the American Psychoanalytic Association
repeatedly threatened to close down the institute unless they got rid of the
Kleinian influence. Of course, part of this is explained by the defensiveness of
the Freudian orthodoxy, quaintly referred to as ‘traditional American
psychoanalysis’ in the internal memoranda> It was, in fact, made up of elements
drawn from German immigrants and the work of Anna Freud, an Austrian. But, as
Douglas Kirsner (2000) has shown in an insightful story of this conflict,
another important factor was certainly the militancy, contempt and intolerance
of the nascent Kleinian group, inspired or at least catalysed by the leading
British Kleinians whom they invited to teach them. Herbert Rosenfeld was
described as ‘pretty autocratic. He made pronouncements like Moses receiving the
tablets on the Mount. He had that character of stating something as the real,
ultimate truth, stating as a fact what could not have been more than a
speculation’. Donald Meltzer was similarly experienced as arrogant and made a
remark which polarised the atmosphere. ‘He is said to have equated Kleinian
analysis with contemporary psychoanalysis and classical analysis as belonging to
the early part of the century.’ (The head of training at the Lincoln Clinic in
London said something similar recently.) Kleinian ideas were taken up by a group
of Young Turks who became, as James Grotstein later reflected, ‘unreasonably
obnoxious, certain, omnipotent: “We have the truth”. I know I felt that. The
trouble is I think we all did ourselves in. We were right but we were wrong’.
Grotstein felt that... the visiting British Kleinians made him ‘feel like a
naughty colonial’. In Grotstein’s view, ‘While the Los Angeles Kleinians were no
doubt scapegoated, the Kleinians also reacted very provocatively and became more
strident as the polarisation continued. The polarisation resulted in a
decreasing middle ground — the leaders of the institute were seen by many (the
Kleinians included) as enemies of the Kleinians whom the leadership purportedly
viewed as a threat to psychoanalysis’ (quotations from Kirsner, 1999, ch. 4). It
was a very rough encounter, indeed, recalling the most abrasive episodes in the
earlier Controversial Discussions in London, where, on one occasion, Winnicott
pointed out that there was an air raid going on, so intense was the internal
warfare in the meeting. The Los Angeles episode, like the Controversial
Discussions, tells me that there is a problem at the heart of Kleinian
assertiveness. It is therefore not in the least surprising that many people are
wary of Kleinian ideas. On the other hand, Kleinians argue that entrenched
orthodox positions have to be attacked. In the history of ideas, as in the
history of societies, people in power never relinquish it voluntarily.
I am now gong to take a deep breath and move out of the
biographical and historical mode and concentrate on ideas in theory and in
clinical practice. Bob Hinshelwood’s Dictionary of Kleinian Thought is over 500
pages long. It has thirteen main entries and 148 subsidiary ones. It is
therefore obvious that I cannot be exhaustive. I have been trying in what I have
said so far to draw you into a Kleinian world view. In my second lecture I will
also say something about some of the ideas of subsequent Kleinians. My aim,
however, can only be to whet your appetites and hope to inspire you to read on,
seek supervision or perhaps to set up study groups. I am going to try, as I have
already begun to do, to convey the kind of minds Klein believed her work with
children showed that we have. As Meltzer describes it, Freud's world is 'a world
of higher animals', 'creatures seeking surcease from the constant bombardment of
stimuli from inside and out'. He contrasts Klein's world as 'one of holy babes
in holy families plagued by the devils of split off death instinct' (Meltzer,
1978, part III, pp. 115-16). One is a world of animals as scientific objects
reacting to stimuli, the other a world of human subjects haunted by demons. One
emphasises the relations with the environment, the other relations with the
inner world of phantasy.
This is not merely a difference of emphasis. Matters which
may appear on the surface to be about common sense or adult relationships or
genital sexuality may also turn out to be about much more primitive
psychological levels of distress. Similarly, the difference between the worlds
of Freud and Klein may be described as one of level of explanation and of
causality. Klein’s most original analysand, Wilfred Bion, put the point clearly
in the conclusion to his essay, 'Group Dynamics -- A Re-view', Bion says,
'Freud's view of the dynamics of the group seems to me to require supplementing
rather than correction' (Bion, 1961, p. 187). He accepts Freud's claim that the
family group is the basis for all groups but adds that ‘I would go further; I
think that the central position in group dynamics is occupied by the more
primitive mechanisms that Melanie Klein has described as peculiar to the
paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In other words, I feel... that it is
not simply a matter of the incompleteness of the illumination provided by
Freud's discovery of the family group as the prototype of all groups, but the
fact that this incompleteness leaves out the source of the main emotional drives
of the group' (p. 188). 'Further investigation shows that each basic assumption
contains features that correspond so closely with extremely primitive part
objects that sooner or later psychotic anxiety, appertaining to these primitive
relationships, is released. These anxieties, and the mechanisms peculiar to
them, have already been displayed in psychoanalysis by Melanie Klein, and her
descriptions tally well with the emotional states' of the basic assumption
group. Such groups have aims 'far different either from the overt task of the
group or even from the tasks that would appear to be appropriate to Freud's view
of the group as based on the family group. But approached from the angle of
psychotic anxiety, associated with phantasies of primitive part object
relationships... the basic assumption phenomena appear far more to have the
characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety, and to be not so
much at variance with Freud's views as supplementary to them. In my view, it is
necessary to work through both the stresses that appertain to family patterns
and the still more primitive anxieties of part object relationships. In fact I
consider the latter to contain the ultimate sources of all group behaviour' (p.
189).
I am stressing three themes: the primitive, the psychotic and
unconscious phantasy. I'll say something about the term 'psychotic' and then
turn to the concept of phantasy and the anxieties which primitive phantasies
generate. To most of us 'psychotic' refers to psychosis, a primary disturbance
of relations with reality, and psychotic symptoms are an attempt to restore the
link with objects (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1983, p. 370). Psychotics are said to
be 'out of contact with reality' for much or all of the time. They hear and see
things that are not there — hallucinations — and wildly distorted things that
are — delusions. In psychiatry the notion of ‘psychotic’ is safely restricted to
people designated as ‘mad’.
Kleinians think differently about the psychotic. Psychotic
mechanisms and processes are ubiquitous throughout life. I want to turn now to
the mechanisms in question and their evolution from the asylum to the nursery.
Klein described schizoid mechanisms as occurring 'in the baby's development in
the first year of life characteristically... the infant suffered from states of
mind that were in all their essentials equivalent to the adult psychoses, taken
as regressive states in Freud's sense' (Meltzer, 1978, part III, p. 22). Klein
says, 'In early infancy anxieties characteristic of psychosis arise which drive
the ego to develop specific defence-mechanisms. In this period the
fixation-points for all psychotic disorders are to be found. This has led some
people to believe that I regard all infants as psychotic; but I have already
dealt sufficiently with this misunderstanding on other occasions' (Klein, 1946,
p. 1). Meltzer, a loyal disciple, comments that 'Although she denied that this
was tantamount to saying that babies are psychotic, it is difficult to see how
this implication could be escaped' (Meltzer, 1978, part III, p. 22).
Kleinian thinking evolved in three stages. As in the above
quotation, Klein saw schizoid mechanisms and the paranoid-schizoid position as
fixation points, respectively, for schizophrenia and paranoid psychosis the
depressive position as the fixation point for manic-depressive psychosis. In the
second phase of her thinking, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions
became developmental stages. Her terminology included 'psychotic phases,
'psychotic positions' and then 'positions' (Klein, 1935, pp. 275n-276n, 279).
Thirdly, in the work of Bion and other post-Kleinians, these became economic
principles and part of the moment-to-moment vicissitudes of everyday life. The
notations 'ps' and 'd' were connected with a double-headed arrow — psÖd — to
indicate how easily and frequently our inner states oscillate from the
paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position and back again (Meltzer, 1978, part
III, p. 22). They are elemental and ever-present and constitute the basic
tonality of how we feel at all times. In Bion's writings on schizophrenia an
ambiguity remained as to whether or not the psychotic part of the personality is
ubiquitous or only present in schizophrenics, but Meltzer concludes his
exposition of Bion's schizophrenia papers by referring to the existence of these
phenomena in patients of every degree of disturbance, even so-called 'healthy'
candidates in training to be therapists (p. 28).
I offer here John Steiner’s brief characterisations of the
two positions which have come to be seen as the basic modes of feeling between
which people oscillate: ‘As a brief summary: in the paranoid-schizoid position
anxieties of a primitive nature threaten the immature ego and lead to a
mobilisation of primitive defences. Splitting, idealisation and projective
identification operate to create rudimentary structures made up of idealised
good objects kept far apart from persecuting bad ones. The individual’s own
impulses are similarly split and he directs all his love towards the good object
and all his hatred against the bad one. As a consequence of the projection, the
leading anxiety is paranoid, and the preoccupation is with survival of the self.
Thinking is concrete because of the confusion between self and object which is
one of the consequences of projective identification (Segal, 1957).
‘The depressive position represents an important
developmental advance in which whole objects begin to be recognised and
ambivalent impulses become directed towards the primary object. These changes
result from an increased capacity to integrate experiences and lead to a shift
in primary concern from the survival of the self to a concern for the object
upon which the individual depends. Destructive impulses lead to feelings of loss
and guilt which can be more fully experienced and which consequently enable
mourning to take place. The consequences include a development of symbolic
function and the emergence of reparative capacities which become possible when
thinking no longer has to remain concrete’ (Steiner, 1987, pp. 69-70; see also
Steiner, 1993, pp. 26-34).
Hanna Segal provides a clear and evocative exposition of the
depressive position: ‘Melanie Klein considers that there is a crucial step in
the infant’s development when he recognises his mother as what she termed a
"whole object." This is the time the baby starts recognising his mother and sees
her as a real, separate, person. With that recognition there is a fundamental
change in the whole mental attitude of the child. Omnipotence diminishes; and
there is a recognition of one’s dependence on another human being, seen as a
proper person. The egocentric, narcissistic attitude, in which the infant
conceives of objects in relation to himself being good for one or persecuting to
one, gives way to the relationship to another person seen as having her own
feelings, problems, and relations to other people as well as oneself. Towards
that person, on whom he depends completely, the infant experiences acute
ambivalence. When splitting diminishes he recognises that he loves and hates one
and the same person. With that recognition goes guilt about the hatred and fear
of losing the object through one’s own aggression. This becomes the basis of a
different kind of superego than the savage, hated, and hateful, figure on the
part-object level. This situation leads to feeling of pining for the lost
object, of the capacity to mourn the loss, and is the basis of normal mourning.
But as the situation is full of pain and anxiety of loss it also can mobilise
powerful manic defences. But alongside these, another mechanism develops which
cannot be properly called a mechanism of defence, since it is not based on
denial of the problem, characteristic of defences, but on the recognition of a
problem and a new way of dealing with it: that is reparation. According to
Klein, reparative impulses play a large part in good human relationships and are
also the basis of all sublimation.
‘It is also implicit in Klein’s definition of the depressive
position that the Oedipus complex should start at the same time; since in this
whole world associated with recognising mother as a whole object, a relation to
father is recognised for what it is. So both the ambivalent attacks on mother
and the reparative impulses towards her are soon extended to the parental couple
in an Oedipal constellation (Segal, nd). I will say more about the Oedipus
complex and the Oedipal constellation in my second lecture.
So much for bringing 'psychotic' into the realm of the normal
and neurotic. Turning now to 'phantasy', the essays in Developments in
Psychoanalysis (1952) are versions of the papers which formed the Kleinian texts
in the Controversial Discussions. Many things were at stake, but at the heart of
it, in my opinion, was the question of the primacy of the inner world, as
opposed to the more interactive, adaptive framework of ideas which came to be
associated with ego psychology and, more recently, so-called ‘Contemporary
Freudianism’. Anna Freud rebuts the claim that she 'has an inveterate prejudice
in favour of the modes of external reality... and of conscious mental processes'
(King and Steiner, 1991, p. 328), but I think that the relative weights assigned
to inner and outer worlds provides a legitimate demarcation between Kleinian and
Freudian orientations. The contrast became even more marked between Klein and
her successors, on the one hand, and developments in America, on the other: the
school of ego psychology, which is the majority point of view in Continental and
American psychoanalysis (Tyson and Tyson, 1990), but it is in a minority
position in Britain, where it is associated with The Anna Freud Centre and the
contemporary Freudian or ‘B Group’ at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, where
its best-known exponents have been the late Joseph Sandler (1987, 1989), his
widow, Anne-Marie Sandler (1978) and his protégé, Peter Fonagy, Freud Professor
at University College London.
As a part of the issue over the primacy of the inner world, I
believe that people were genuinely shocked by what they thought was sheer
craziness and nastiness of the child’s unconscious as described by Klein and her
supporters. Indeed, there is in the text of the Controversial Discussions a
protest along these lines by Michael Balint, who dryly comments in the
discussion of Susan Isaacs' fundamentally important paper (to which I shall turn
next) that 'perhaps Mrs Klein is laying undue emphasis on the role of hatred,
frustration and aggression in the infant' (King and Steiner, 1991, p. 347). This
is an understatement.
I begin with the elementary point (made earlier) that
'phantasy' refers to 'predominantly or entirely unconscious phantasies', as
distinct from the sort of conscious fantasies or imaginings we associate with
daydreams or idle imaginings (Isaacs, 1952, pp. 80-81). Joan Riviere appeals to
Freud's hypothesis that the psyche is always interpreting the reality of its
experiences — 'or rather, misinterpreting them — in a subjective manner that
increases its pleasure and preserves it from pain' (Riviere, 1952a, p. 41).
Freud calls this process 'hallucination; and it forms the foundation of what we
mean by phantasy-life. The phantasy-life of the individual is thus the form in
which the real internal and external sensations and perceptions are interpreted
and represented to himself in his mind under the influence of the pleasure-pain
principle'. Riviere adds that 'this primitive and elementary function of his
psyche — to misinterpret his perceptions for his own satisfaction — still
retains the upper hand in the minds of the great majority of even civilised
adults' (p. 41). I suggest — and this lies at the heart of my overall argument —
that this point about misinterpreting the reality of the psyche’s experience to
the point of hallucination as normal and basic is the essential point — the ur-fact
— about human nature as depicted by Klein.
This general function for phantasy is repeated in Susan
Isaacs' definition. The '"mental expression" of instinct is unconscious
phantasy... There is no impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not
experienced as unconscious phantasy' (Isaacs, 1952, p. 83). ‘The first mental
processes... are to be regarded as the earliest beginnings of phantasies. In the
mental development of the infant, however, phantasy soon becomes also a means of
defence against anxieties, a means of inhibiting and controlling instinctual
urges and an expression of reparative wishes as well... All impulses, all
feelings, all modes of defence are experienced in phantasies which give them
mental life and show their direction and purpose' (ibid.).
When we turn to the content of the phantasies a problem of
communication arises: 'they are apt to produce a strong impression of unreality
and untruth' (Riviere, 1952, p. 20). This is because when we write or speak
about them we are clothing preverbal and very primitive mental processes in the
language of words in dictionaries. Phantasies are rendered by patients as black
holes, nameless dread, part objects, offal, shit, urine, dreams of wet cinders
or barren desert mindscapes, pus, slime, feelings of being overwhelmed,
engulfed, disintegrated, in pieces, devoured, falling through empty space,
spiders, bugs, snakes. Language drawn from work with autistic patients includes
dread of falling apart, falling infinitely, spilling away, exploding away,
threat of total annihilation, unintegration (as distinct from the disintegration
of schizophrenia), experiencing a missing person as a hole (rather than
'missing' them as not present). The phrase ‘nameless dread’ is often used to
convey this kind of feeling.
When I cannot find a piece of paper or go to a room and
cannot recall why, I don't just think of age and preoccupation. The fabric of
reality is momentarily rent asunder, and in that moment I feel in imminent
danger of dying, of disintegration, of unendurable panic. Indeed, I want to die.
My childhood was filled with unbearable terrors, some drawn from the radio and
movies, some I thought up unaided. I offer these reports as my version of what
Klein calls 'a cave full of dangerous monsters' (Klein, 1935, p. 272). My
general point is that if you ask the question, 'What is a psychotic anxiety when
it's at home and not in the pages of an implausible and nearly unfathomable text
by Melanie Klein?', you'll be able to be less sceptical if you interrogate the
fringes of your own memories and distressing experiences and, of course, dreams.
Elizabeth Spillius points out that ‘unconscious phantasies are somewhat more
accessible in early childhood; in adulthood the path to them is indirect,
through dreams, in imaginative constructions, sometimes in group behaviour, in
symptoms, parapraxes, etc., though always in disguised form’ (personal
communication). Psychotic anxieties are ubiquitous, underlie all thought,
provide the rationale for all culture and institutions and, in particular cases,
help us to make sense of especially galling ways of being.
Klein's views on these matters are based on Freud and
Abraham's notions of oral libido and fantasies of cannibalism (Gedo, 1986, p.
94). She refers to sadistic impulses against the mother's breast and inside her
body, wanting to scoop out, devour, cut to pieces, poison and destroy by every
means sadism suggests (Klein, 1935, p. 262). Once again, the projective and
introjective mechanisms of the first months and year give rise to anxiety
situations and defences against them, 'the content of which is comparable to
that of the psychoses in adults' (ibid.).
Orality is everywhere, for example, in the 'gnawing of
conscience' (p. 268). Hunger gnaws, that is, we unconsciously feel attacked by
what we lack and urgently need, for example, by the mother’s not coming when we
cry: we are enraged. Riviere says that 'such helplessness against destructive
forces within constitutes the greatest psychical danger-situation known to the
human organism; and that this helplessness is the deepest source of anxiety in
human beings' (Riviere, 1952a, p. 43). It is the ultimate source of all
neurosis. At this early stage of development, sadism is at its height and is
followed by the discovery that loved objects are in a state of disintegration,
in bits or in dissolution, leading to despair, remorse and anxiety, which
underlie numerous anxiety situations. Klein concludes, 'Anxiety situations of
this kind I have found to be at the bottom not only of depression, but of all
inhibitions of work' (Klein, 1935, p. 270).
It should be recalled that these are pre-linguistic
experiences developmentally, and sub-linguistic in adults. It is a
characteristic of the world view of Kleinians that the primitive is never
transcended and that all experiences continue to be unconsciously mediated
through the mother's body. Similarly, there is a persistence of primitive
phantasies of body parts and bodily functions, especially biting, eating,
tearing, spitting out, urine and urinating, faeces and defecating, mucus,
genitals. Klein’s clinical writings are veritably hard to bear, hard to credit,
hard to follow. She is operating — well and truly — in the most primitive parts
of the inner world, where dream symbolism meets up with primitive bodily
functions and body parts. Her way of describing these phantasies is easy to
caricature and becomes wooden when adopted in a parrot-like fashion by
inexperienced acolytes. In the subsequent history of Kleinian psychoanalysis,
however, her outlook on unconscious phantasy has continued to prevail. Elizabeth
Spillius reports that this is one of Klein's concepts which has been 'very
little altered' by subsequent Kleinians (Spillius, 1988, vol. 1, p. 2).
However, many Kleinians (though not all, for example, Donald
Meltzer) have altered their language and have become more likely to make
interpretations in terms of functions rather than anatomical part objects. Edna
O'Shaughnessy has suggested the notion of 'psychological part objects' as an
analogy to bodily part objects. Spillius takes this up and argues 'that we
relate to psychological part objects... to the functions of the part object
rather than primarily to its physical structure. It is the capacities for
seeing, touching, tasting, hearing, smelling, remembering, feeling, judging, and
thinking, active as well as passive, that are attributed to and perceived in
relation to part objects'. Spillius concludes her remarks on this change in
emphasis in technique by relating it to Klein's concept of projective
identification. The functions 'are frequently understood as aspects of the self
which are projected into part objects' (pp. 2-5; cf. vol. 2, pp. 8-9).
Klein was untroubled by being called an 'id psychologist'
(Gedo, 1986, p. 91). She unrepentantly conceived the analyst's task to be to
confront the patient with the content of the unconscious. She did not pursue
'corrective emotional experience' (a goal fashionable among some Freudians), did
not encourage regression and the reliving of infantile experiences (nor did she
avoid them when they occurred), or explicit educational or moral influences. She
kept 'to the psycho-analytic procedure only, which, to put it in a nutshell,
consists in understanding the patient's mind and in conveying to him what goes
on in it' (Klein, 1955, p. 129). She felt that confidently articulating
interpretations of very primitive material in the face of resistance diminishes
the patient's anxiety and opens the door to the unconscious. Nor did she shy
away from such deep interpretations or transference interpretations from the
beginning of analytic work with a patient (Klein, 1975, vol. 2, pp. 22-24; Gedo,
1986, p. 92).
Why is all this such an innovation? Riviere points out that
anxiety was of great significance to Freud, but that much of his rhetoric was
scientific, especially physiological. He did not concern himself with the
psychological content of phantasies. Indeed, he and many of his ‘Freudian’
followers have tended to use scientistic analogies instead of conveying human
distress in evocative language. By contrast, 'Anxiety, with the defences against
it, has from the beginning been Mrs Klein's approach to psycho-analytical
problems. It was from this angle that she discovered the existence and
importance of aggressive elements in children's emotional life... and [it]
enabled her to bring much of the known phenomena of mental disorders into line
with the basic principles of analysis' (Riviere, 1952, pp. 8-9).
Kleinians have consistently written in a language which
eschews analogies drawn from natural science, albeit Klein did retain a notion
of instinct, even though this was largely redundant as a result of her object
relations perspective. They went on to propose elements of a general psychology,
including the claim that there is 'an unconscious phantasy behind every thought
and every act' (Riviere, 1952, p.16). That is, the mental expression of
primitive processes 'is unconscious phantasy' (ibid.). It is not only a
background hum, as it were. Isaacs claims that 'Reality thinking cannot operate
without concurrent and supporting unconscious phantasies' (Isaacs, 1952, p.
109). And again: 'phantasies are the primary content of unconscious mental
processes' (pp. 82, 112). 'There is no impulse, no instinctual urge or response
which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy' (p. 83). 'Phantasies have both
psychic and bodily effects, e.g., in conversion symptoms, bodily qualities,
character and personality, neurotic symptoms, inhibitions and sublimations' (p.
112). They even determine the minutiae of body language (p. 100). The role of
unconscious phantasy extends from the first to the most abstract thought. The
infant's first thought of the existence of the external world comes from
sadistic attacks on the mother's body (Klein, 1935, p. 276; 1946 p. 5).
'Phantasies — becoming more elaborate and referring to a wider variety of
objects and situations — continue throughout development and accompany all
activities; they never stop playing a great part in mental life. The influence
of unconscious phantasy on art, on scientific work, and on the activities of
everyday life cannot be overrated' (Klein, 1959, p. 251; cf. p. 262).
These anxieties are not only ubiquitous: they interact in
complicated ways. As Riviere points out, 'It is impossible to do any justice
here to the complexity and variety of the anxiety-situations and the defences
against them dominating the psyche during these early years. The factors
involved are so numerous and the combinations and interchanges so variable. The
internal objects are employed against external, and external against internal,
both for satisfaction and for security; desire is employed against hate and
destructiveness; omnipotence against impotence, and even impotence (dependence)
against destructive omnipotence; phantasy against reality and reality against
phantasy. Moreover, hate and destruction are employed as measures to avert the
dangers of desire and even of love. Gradually a progressive development takes
place... by means of the interplay of these and other factors, and of them with
external influences, out of which the child's ego, his object-relations, his
sexual development, his super-ego, his character and capacities are formed'
(Riviere, 1952a, pp. 59-60).
Where Freud discovered the child in the adult, Klein
discovered the infant in the child and led us to take seriously the abiding role
of infantile psychotic anxieties underlying the unconscious phantasies which
constitute the inner world of the adult.
I am going to pause here, having sketched Melanie Klein’s
ideas of the primitive, the psychotic and unconscious phantasies. Next time I
will discuss projective identification, Klein’s most influential concept, and
her ideas about the Oedipus complex, along with certain ideas developed by later
Kleinians.
This is the text of the first of two talks on ‘Melanie Klein’
and was given at the Tavistock Clinic 18 January 2000, in the series
‘Psychoanalytic Pioneers’, sponsored by CONFER. The later parts of it draw on my
other writings.
READINGS
Klein’s writings are all available in a five volume paperback
series published by Virago. Some of her writings are difficult of access but
many are clear and accessible. R. D. Hinshelwood’s A Dictionary of Kleinian
Thought, which I conceived, edited and published, was specifically designed
to make her ideas accessible, and I commend it to you. There are two collection
written while she was alive which encompass the Kleinian movement (Klein et al.,
1952, 1955), while a more recent two-volume work, Melanie Klein Today (Spillius,
1988), brings the movement up to more recent times. Jean-Michel Petot has
written a two-volume close analysis of the development of her thought. In Mental
Space I have written an exposition of her key ideas, set in their theoretical
context, while in Inside Lives Margot Waddell offers a clinical account of
Kleinian ideas of the development of the personality. There are other works in
the Kleinian tradition listed below, and Hinshelwood has complied a bibliography
which purports to include all Kleinian writings up to 1995. There is also a
quarterly journal devoted to Melanie Klein and Object Relations (http://www.tier.net/esfpub/journals.htm).
Finally, although it offended some of her acolytes, Phyllis Grosskurth’s Melanie
Klein: Her World and Her Work (1985) is in my opinion an appropriately Kleinian
biography, warts and all.
Anderson, Robin, ed. (1992), Clinical Lectures on Klein and
Bion. Routledge.
Bell, David, ed. (1999) Psychoanalysis and Culture: A
Kleinian Perspective. Duckworth.
Bion, Wilfred R. (1955) 'Group Dynamics — a Re-view', in
Klein et al., eds. (1955), pp. 440-77; reprinted in Bion (1961), pp. 141-91
______ (1961) Experiences in Groups and Other Papers.
Tavistock.
______ (1967) Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on
Psycho-Analysis. Heinemann Medical; reprinted Maresfield, 1984.
______ (1970) Attention and Interpretation. Tavistock.
______ (1992) Cogitations. Karnac.
Bleandonu, Gérard (1994) Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works
1897-1979. Free Association Books.
Britton, Ronald (1989) 'The Missing Link: Parental Sexuality
in the Oedipus Complex', in Britton et al. (1989), pp. 83-102.
______ (1992) 'The Oedipus Situation and the Depressive
Position', in R. Anderson, ed. (1992), pp. 34-45.
______ et al. (1989) The Oedipus Complex Today: Clinical
Implications. Karnac.
______ (1998) Belief and Imagination: Explorations in
Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
Farrell, Em (1994) Lost for Words: The Psychoanalysis of
Anorexia and Bulimia. Process Press.
Grosskurth, Phyllis (1985) Melanie Klein: Her World and Her
Work. Hodder and Staughton.
Hinshelwood, Robert D. (1991) A Dictionary of Kleinian
Thought, 2nd ed. Free Association Books.
______, compiler (1999) ‘Seventy-five Years of Kleinian
Writings 1920-1995: a Bibliography’ http://www.egroups.com/docvault/klein/
Hyatt Williams, Arthur (1998) Cruelty, Violence and Murder:
Understanding the Criminal Mind. Karnac
Isaacs, Susan (1952) ‘The Nature and Function of Phantasy’,
in Klein et al. (1952), pp. 67-121.
Joseph, Betty (1989) Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change:
Selected Papers. Routledge.
King, Pearl. & Steiner, Ricardo, eds. (1991) The Freud-Klein
Controversies 1941-45. Tavistock/Routledge.
Klein, Melanie (1928) 'Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict',
reprinted in W. M. K. I, pp. 186-98.
______ (1935) 'A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of
Manic-Depressive States', reprinted in W. M. K. II, pp, 262-89.
______ (1940) ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive
States’, W. M. K. II, pp. 311-38.
______ (1945) 'The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early
Anxieties', reprinted in W. M. K. I, pp. 370-419 and in Britton et al. (1989),
pp. 63-82.
______ (1946) 'Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms', reprinted
in W. M. K. III, pp. 1-24.
______ (1952) ‘The Origins of Transference’, reprinted in W.
M. K. III, pp. 48-56.
______ (1955) ‘The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique: Its
History and Significance’, reprinted in W. M. K. III, pp. 122-40.
______ (1955a) ‘On Identification, W. M. K. III, pp. 141-75.
______ (1958) ‘On the Development of Mental Functioning’,
reprinted in W. M. K. III, pp. 236-46.
______ (1959) ‘Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy’;
reprinted in W. M. K. III, pp. 247-63.
______ (1975) The Writings of Melanie Klein, 4 vols. Hogarth.
Vol. I: Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works., 1921-1945. Vol. II: The
Psycho-Analysis of Children. Vol. III Envy and Gratitude and Other Works;
1946-1963; . Vol. IV: Narrative of a Child Analysis. all reprinted Virago, 1988.
(W. M. K. )
______ et al. (1952) Developments in Psycho-Analysis.
Hogarth.
______ et al., eds. (1955) New Directions in Psycho-Analysis:
The Significance of Infant Conflicts in the Patterns of Adult Behaviour.
Tavistock; reprinted Maresfield,
Meltzer, Donald (1978) The Kleinian Development Part I:
Freud’s Clinical Development; Part II: Richard Week-by-Week; Part III: The
Clinical Significance of the Work of Bion. Strath Tay: Clunie.
______ (1992) The Claustrum: An Investigation of
Claustrophobic Phenomena. Strath Tay: Clunie.
______ et al. (1975) Explorations in Autism: A
Psycho-Analytical Study. Strath Tay: Clunie.
Menzies Lyth, Isabel (1988) Containing Anxiety in
Institutions: Selected Essays, vol. 1. Free Association Books.
______ (1989) The Dynamics of the Social: Selected Essays,
vol. II. Free Association Books.
Money-Kyrle, Roger E. (1978) The Collected Papers of Roger
Money-Kyrle. Strath Tay: Clunie Press.
Petot, Jean-Michel (1979) Melanie Klein, Vol. I: First
Discoveries and First System 1919-1932. Trans. Madison, CT: International
Universities Press, 1990.
______ (1982) Melanie Klein, Vol. II: The Ego and the Good
Object 1932-1960. Trans. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1991.
(There is an illuminating review of these volumes by Elizabeth Spillius in
Internat. J. Psycho-Anal. 74: 1274-1280, 1993.)
Rey, Henri (1994) Universals of Psychoanalysis in the
Treatment of Psychotic and Borderline States. Free Association Books
Riviere, Joan (1952) 'General Introduction', in Klein et al.
(1952), pp. 1-36.
______ (1952a) 'On the Genesis of Psychical Conflict in Early
Infancy', in Klein et al. (1952), pp. 37-66.
Rosenfeld, Herbert (1965) Psychotic States: A
Psychoanalytical Approach. Hogarth; reprinted Maresfield Library.
______ (1987) Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and
Anti-Therapeutic Factors in Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychotic, Borderline,
and Neurotic Patients. Routledge, pp. 157-90.
Segal, Hanna (1973) Introduction to the Work of Melanie
Klein. Hogarth; reprinted Karnac, 1988.
______ (1981) The Work of Hanna Segal: A Kleinian Approach
to Clinical Practice. Aronson; reprinted Free Association Books/ Maresfield
Library, 1986.
______ (1990) Dream, Phantasy and Art. Routledge
______ (1996) Psychoanalysis, Literature and War: Papers
1972-1995. Routledge.
______ (nd) ‘Introduction to Melanie Klein’ (excellent brief
account) http://www.egroups.com/docvault/klein/
Spillius, Elizabeth B. (1983) ‘Some Developments from the
Work of Melanie Klein’, Internat. J. Psycho-Anal. 64:
______ (1988) Melanie Klein Today, 2 vols. Routledge
Steiner, John (1987) ‘The Interplay between Pathological
Organizations and the Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions’, Int. J.
Psycho-Anal. 68: 69-80; reprinted in Spillius, ed. (1988), vol. 1, pp. 324-42.
______ (1994) Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organizations in
Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients. Routledge.
Waddell, Margot (1998) Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the
Growth of the Personality. Duckworth.
Weininger, Otto (1992) Melanie Klein: From Theory to Reality.
Karnac.
Williams, Gianna (1997) ) Internal Landscapes and Foreign
Bodies: Eating Disorders and Other Pathologies. Duckworth.
Young, Robert M. (1994) Mental Space. Process Press.
______ (1994) ‘New Ideas about the Oedipus Complex’, Melanie
Klein and Object Relations. 12 (no. 2): 1-20.
______ (1999) ‘Being a Kleinian Is Not Straightforward’
http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/pap113.html
Most of my writings are available on-line at http://www.psychoanalysis-and-therapy.com
References which do not appear in the Readings
Freud, Anna The Psychoanalysis of Children
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
Freud, Sigmund (1920) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, S. E.
18, pp. 7-64.
______ (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents. S. E. 21, pp.
59-145.
______ (1953-73) The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. Hogarth (S. E.).
Gedo, John. E. (1986) Conceptual Issues in Psychoanalysis:
Essays in History and Method. New York: Analytic Press.
Kirsner, Douglas (2000) Unfree Associations: Inside
Psychoanalytic Institutes. Process Press.
Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, J.-B. (1983) The Language of
Psycho-Analysis. Hogarth; reprinted Maresfield.
Sandler, Joseph (1987) From Safety to Superego: Selected
Papers. Karnac Books.
______, ed. (1989) Projection, Identification, Projective
Identification. Karnac Books.
Sandler, Joseph and Sandler, Anne-Marie (1978) ‘On the
Development of Object Relations and Affects’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 59: 285-96.
Segal, Hanna (1957) ‘Notes on Symbol Formation’, Int. J.
Psycho-Anal. 38: 391-7; reprinted in *Segal (1981), pp. 49-65.
______ (1981) The Work of Hanna Segal: A Kleinian Approach to
Clinical Practice. Aronson; reprinted Free Association Books/ Maresfield
Library, 1986.
Tyson, Phyllis and Tyson, Robert L. (1990) Psychoanalytic
Theories of Development: An Integration. Yale.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1951) ‘Transitional Objects and
Transitional Phenomena’, in Winnicott (1975), pp. 229-242.
______ (1971) Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications;
reprinted Penguin, 1971.
_____ (1975) Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. Hogarth.
Melanie Klein Trust Home Page
http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/index.html
MELANIE KLEIN AND KLEINIANISM eGroup
When I took part in setting up the Object Relations eGroup, I
assumed that the forum would be devoted to Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and more
general issues in the object relations tradition. This has not occurred. I am
also struck by the demise of the Melanie Klein Home Page. By contrast to these
facts, the Bion forum is thriving. I draw the conclusion that there is a place
for a forum devoted to Klein and the people and ideas in the tradition which she
began.
I will also in due course set up a Melanie Klein Home Page
with references, links and other pertinent materials.
One of the things I hope will flourish on this eGroup is that
people will draw others’ attention to new publications and offer comments on and
reviews of them.
Subscription and comments by people critical of Kleinian
ideas are welcome, as long as they are put in a civil and constructive way, but
I confess that my main aim is to foster discussion among essentially people
sympathetic to Kleinian ideas.
To join the eGroup, send an e-mail with no message to Kleinians-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
The eGroup's messages document vault, and more are available
on the web at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kleinians/
Copyright: The Author.
Address for correspondence: 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ
robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk