Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945

This first volume of Klein's collected writings gathers the papers she published between 1921 and 1945, tracing the arc from her earliest clinical work with children to the theoretical framework that would define object relations. Present here are the papers in which she sets out the play technique, reads children's play as a direct route to unconscious phantasy, and builds her early accounts of internal objects, persecutory and depressive anxiety, and the reparative impulse. The long title essay from 1937 argues that love and guilt are bound together: the wish to restore a loved object felt to be damaged in phantasy becomes, for Klein, a foundation of moral feeling and creative work. For the clinician, the volume shows how these concepts were first reasoned into being, giving the mechanisms behind the depressive position rather than a later summary of it.