The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought
The rewritten successor to Hinshelwood, mapping Kleinian concepts and post-Kleinian developments.
The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought rewrites R.D. Hinshelwood's earlier dictionary, setting out Kleinian and post-Kleinian concepts for the general reader and the practising clinician alike. It opens with twelve essays that trace major themes both historically and thematically: unconscious phantasy, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, projective identification, the Oedipus complex, symbol formation, and child analysis. An alphabetical section then runs from Karl Abraham to whole object, so a term can be checked quickly or followed into its longer treatment.
The authors, analysts working within the London Kleinian tradition, treat concepts as they have shifted in use rather than as fixed definitions. Entries show where an idea originates in Klein, how later writers reworked it, and what it now carries in clinical listening. Each cross-refers to the essays, so a single term opens onto the wider frame it belongs to. The result reads the tradition as a working vocabulary rather than a closed system.
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.
Jane Milton
Jane Milton (1954 to 2026) was a British psychoanalyst, a Fellow and training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She trained first as a psychiatrist and worked as a consultant at the Tavistock Clinic before moving to full time analytic practice. Within the Kleinian tradition, she co-authored The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought with Elizabeth Bott Spillius and others, contributing many of its entries. She also co-wrote A Short Introduction to Psychoanalysis and served as archivist to the Melanie Klein Trust.
Penelope Garvey
Penelope Garvey is a British psychoanalyst and a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She trained first in clinical psychology and worked in the NHS with children and adults before entering full-time private practice in Devon. She is a co-author of The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought and an editor of The Klein Tradition, and she wrote Melanie Klein: A Contemporary Introduction. Her writing sets out Kleinian concepts and clinical technique for practising analysts.
Cyril Couve
Cyril Couve is a psychoanalyst and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, working in full time private practice. He was formerly a senior psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic, where he has taught Kleinian theory and served as a training analyst. He is one of the five authors of The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (2011), the Routledge revision of Hinshelwood's dictionary, which sets out the central concepts of the Kleinian tradition through thematic essays and alphabetical entries.
Deborah Steiner
Deborah Steiner is a psychoanalyst and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, qualified in both adult and child and adolescent psychoanalysis. She has held senior posts within the National Health Service. She is one of five authors of The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, working with Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Jane Milton, Penelope Garvey and Cyril Couve. That reference work sets out the central concepts of the Kleinian tradition and traces how each idea developed through Melanie Klein and later analysts, offering practitioners a clear guide to the theory.
Details
- 2011
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 576
- 9780415592598