Melanie Klein

<p>We rarely see Melanie Klein at work, at least not quite like this. It is as if we are looking over her shoulder as the contours of her theorization trace themselves across the page. When we think of Klein, the first image that comes to mind is not that of hesitancy. She had a supreme confidence, famously in her clinical interpretations, even if some of us have always suspected that such confidence was the other side of—her way of managing— the deep mental trouble and energies that she saw it as her task to excavate. More perhaps than any other of Freud’s legatees, her work has become a corpus, solidified into its basic concepts—paranoid-schizoid, depressive, projective identification—the last of which receives one of its fullest and most interesting elaborations in this paper of 1955. But here we see a different image—at once assured but also at moments faltering on the page. We see her, that is, as a writer. Reading this paper, we watch the struggle and strain of thinking that she herself did so much to theorize. Perhaps the publication of these excerpts and notes might, therefore, play its part in returning to her a vitality lost in what often feels, to the outsider, at least, as the ossification of her school. It is after all central to Klein’s vision of the mind that thinking is anguished. It never completely loses touch with the anxiety out of which it was born…</p>