Readers who are not very familiar with recent Kleinian work will find the papers she has selected extremely informative and in virtually every case impressive.
Melanie Klein Today, Volume 1 collects theoretical papers written by Kleinian analysts in the decades after Klein's death, with Elizabeth Bott Spillius arranging them into four sections: the analysis of psychotic patients, projective identification, thinking, and pathological organisations. Each section carries her own introduction, which places the papers in order and shows how one line of work followed from another.
The commentaries keep close to the papers themselves, tracking how concepts such as projective identification moved from description toward clinical use. Read together, the selection sets out where post-Kleinian theory had reached by the late 1980s, with the primary sources printed beside a reading of what each one contributed.
Routledge published it in 1988 in the New Library of Psychoanalysis, alongside a second volume given to practice. For a clinician it serves as a compact reference to the theoretical papers of the period, held together by editorial commentary rather than left as a loose anthology.
About the authors
Elizabeth Bott Spillius
Elizabeth Bott Spillius (1924 to 2016) was a Canadian-born scholar who trained first as a social anthropologist, conducting fieldwork in Tonga and studying family and social networks in London, before becoming a psychoanalyst. A training analyst and Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, she worked within the Kleinian tradition. She edited the two-volume Melanie Klein Today (1988), which brought contemporary Kleinian thinking to a wide readership, and wrote on projective identification, envy, and the development of Kleinian technique.
Elizabeth Bott Spillius
Elizabeth Bott Spillius (1924 to 2016) was a Canadian-born scholar who trained first as a social anthropologist, conducting fieldwork in Tonga and studying family and social networks in London, before becoming a psychoanalyst. A training analyst and Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, she worked within the Kleinian tradition. She edited the two-volume Melanie Klein Today (1988), which brought contemporary Kleinian thinking to a wide readership, and wrote on projective identification, envy, and the development of Kleinian technique.
Details
- 1988
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 368
- 9780415006767