It provides through close reading and sophisticated analysis a succinct and lively introduction to one of the founding figures of psychoanalysis.
Reading Klein sets substantial extracts from Melanie Klein's papers beside commentary from Margaret and Michael Rustin, two writers long engaged with her work. Each chapter takes a field of that work and traces its development across roughly forty years, so the reader follows the concepts as they emerged from clinical observation rather than as finished doctrine. The first part gathers the theoretical and clinical writing; the second turns to Klein's bearing on morality, aesthetics and the understanding of society, drawing in her associates alongside her own texts.
The Rustins read Klein primarily as a clinician, attentive to unconscious anxiety and willing to revise her account of the mind when the material demanded it. For the practitioner, the value lies in the guided encounter with the primary texts: seeing how Klein built her ideas from what patients showed her, and how her case writing can be read closely rather than summarised. It argues that her contribution remains central to how the field thinks about the inner world.
About the authors
Margaret Rustin
Margaret Rustin is a British child and adolescent psychotherapist and adult psychotherapist. She trained at the Tavistock Clinic under Esther Bick and Martha Harris, and in 1985 became head of the Tavistock child psychotherapy training. Working in the Kleinian tradition, she is known for her contributions to infant observation, child psychotherapy assessment, and the psychoanalytic reading of literature and narrative. With her husband Michael Rustin she co-authored several books, including Narratives of Love and Loss (1987) and Reading Klein (2016).
Michael Rustin
Michael Rustin is a British sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, where he has worked since 1964, and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. He is an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a founding editor of the journal Soundings. His work brings together psychoanalysis, particularly Kleinian thought, with sociology and political thought. With Margaret Rustin he wrote Reading Klein, Narratives of Love and Loss and Mirror to Nature.
Details
- 2016
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 206
- 9780415452939