Klein’s technique

ABSTRACT

Reading these heretofore unpublished works by Melanie Klein is certain to surprise their readers, regardless of their previous familiarity with her work. Bound though she was to an earlier vision of the psychoanalytic situation and to an epistemology that today may strike many analysts as archaic, Klein’s ideas remain fresh and provocative. In this commentary I sketch out the controversies in which she was involved at the time of the lectures and seminars, and discuss how we might think about them in light of contemporary developments.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalytic technique
• epistemology
• countertransference
• projective identification
• Melanie Klein

It is impossible to read this edition of Melanie Klein's previously unpublished lectures and seminars on technique (Steiner, 2017) without getting engaged with virtually every important conversation that is occupying psychoanalysts today. Klein has something to say about everything that we do with, think about, and feel for our analysands; confronting her often surprising and always provocative ideas leads us, inevitably, to confront our own. We come away from the encounter appreciating both what is timeless about our ways of trying to understand the unconscious and what is inextricably shaped by the intellectual and social climate of the times in which we live.

Because Klein's themes range so widely, a brief commentary cannot begin to address even a significant portion of what she has to say. Accordingly I have selected some themes that particularly touched or stimulated me, themes that resonate with issues that I struggle with in my practice and in my ways of thinking about it.

The analytic attitude and the object of study

Following Klein, I will begin with her thoughts about the “analytic attitude,” because she sees this as the foundation of her contributions, both clinical and theoretical. The Lectures and the Seminars clarify, in ways that are likely to surprise readers who are unfamiliar with the history and even some who are aware of its broad outlines, a crucial difference between the way Klein understood and implemented her vision of the psychoanalytic situation and the analyst's role in it and the ways in which her ideas have been applied in contemporary discourse. More particularly, viewed as a guide to practice—a characterization that she would have enthusiastically endorsed—her teachings have been used in ways to which she would have objected and did, as the 1958 Seminars illustrate, object strenuously.

In the Lectures, Klein is clear and forceful about what must occupy the analyst's attention, writing: “ … our whole interest is focused on one aim, namely, on the exploration of the mind of this one person who for the time being has become the centre of our attention” (p. 29). She elaborates this and surprises us when she insists that, because our interest is on exploring the mind of the patient, “everything else, including our own personal feelings, has temporarily lost importance.” If analysts are able to maintain this focus—Klein recognizes that anxiety might interfere—they will “be able to note undisturbed what the patient's mind presents to us” (p. 29, emphasis added).

This is the essence of Klein's vision of the analytic attitude as she formulated it in the Lectures of 1936 and as she defended it—in the face of her students’, at times irritable, challenges—more than 20 years later in the Seminars: the undisturbed mind of the analyst attends exclusively to the workings of the analysand’s mind. I will return to the various implications of this very condensed statement throughout my discussion.

To begin, the assertion requires some unpacking. Despite widespread differences about the specifics of therapeutic action, it is and has been agreed that benign analytic change (Klein, writing 80 years ago, speaks in a way that we no longer do of “cure”) hinges in one way or another on facilitating patients’ capacity to explore their minds. Accordingly, this sort of exploration is always the goal of treatment, but in these passages Klein is not talking about treatment goals. She is addressing analytic method, what the analyst must actually do; she is laying down a technical prescription.

Klein's understanding of proper technique was widely accepted, even commonplace, when it was written, the dissenting views of Ferenczi and his followers notwithstanding. Today though it has become controversial, paradoxically because of the work of analysts who are known today as contemporary Kleinians as well as the work of others who were (and some who were not) influenced by her ideas.

The controversies pivot on a changing psychoanalytic epistemology and on changing views about pathogenesis; I will discuss each of these in turn. Putting this in a nutshell, today there is great scepticism in many quarters that the analyst's mind either can be or should be undisturbed by what goes on between her and her analysand. Certainly the analyst's access to the mind of the patient is not, on most contemporary views, unmediated in the way that Klein believed it could be.

Of course this muddies the epistemological waters. As a result, despite Klein's frequent reminders that her interpretations are tentative hypotheses designed to facilitate exploration, her conviction that it is possible to observe our analysands dispassionately seems authoritarian or at least naïve. We may envy Klein (and her contemporaries) their clarity, but we cannot claim it for ourselves and it seems short-sighted to assert that our object of study can be exclusively the mind of the patient. In one way or another the mind of the analyst, always influencing and influenced by the workings of the dyad, must also become an object of investigation.

I say that we must study the mind of the analyst in one way or another because, for better or for worse, we have no agreed upon replacement today for Klein's ideas about our object of study. Instead we have competing versions of the nature of the psychoanalytic situation and, accordingly, of ideas about what the analyst should be paying attention to. It is worth noting two of these briefly, because doing so will help us to understand Klein's thinking as it is expressed in the Lectures and the Seminars.

By some contemporary accounts, the analytic encounter can be seen as a result of the interaction between two minds, each of which retains its own subjectivity and autonomy. Whatever the analyst can know about the workings of the analysand's mind—and however he or she responds to what happens in the course of treatment—is mediated through the analyst's subjectivity, and this subjectivity is inevitably shaped by history, conflicts, desires, fears, personal predilection, and so on (Jacobs 1986; McLaughlin 1991; Smith 2000).

On this view, the analyst is obliged—epistemologically, clinically, and ethically—to pay scrupulous attention to his or her own mind, as well as to the mind of the analysand. Klein's prescription of an analytic attitude seems narrow; the analyst must also be an object of study. Attending to countertransference would be an essential aspect of this, but it is only partial because analysts must be observers not only of their feelings but of their participation in the sessions. In putting things this way I am not addressing questions about whether the analyst's countertransference conveys information about the patient; as we will see, in the Seminars Klein vehemently rejects this possibility in the face of her students’ insistent arguments in favour of an altered approach. Rather, I am emphasizing that, on this view, the analyst's experience and participation (in contemporary terms, his or her subjectivity) must be studied in order to understand how he or she is influencing and is influenced by the unfolding treatment.

This epistemological turn was already underway during Klein's lifetime; after her death other approaches emerged that go further, subordinating the subjectivity of both analyst and analysand to a shared subjectivity emerging, uniquely, within each analytic dyad. There are many versions of this broad construction; each of them postulates that in one way or another the psychoanalytic situation is a “neo-creation” that encompasses but also transcends the individuality of each participant. Viewed through this lens, the “mind of this one person” who is our patient has, in a certain sense, disappeared. The object of study and the focus of the analyst's attention become the workings of the bi-personal field, and the theoretical framework guiding these observations requires what Madeleine Baranger calls a “metapsychology of the couple” (2005, p. 62). In practice this means that attention and interpretation must be directed toward “a neo-formation set up around a shared fantasy” (Baranger, Baranger, and Mom 1983, p. 2). This shared fantasy would not occur to either the analyst or the analysand alone, and it would not arise within any other dyad. Accordingly, it is not possible to observe the mind of the patient in isolation, and it is misleading for the analyst to claim that she has done so.

No contemporary psychoanalyst, whatever his or her theoretical or institutional commitments, is untouched by revised ways of understanding the nature of the analyst's participation. Aware of these changes and accustomed to the ways in which clinical material is presented today, reading Klein's vignettes is sure to be vexing. On the one hand they convey a vision of her patients’ inner worlds that is subtle, poignant, and always mindful of the depth and complexity of unconscious experience. Phantasy and reality, past and present, transference and life outside the consulting room all mingle in ways that are rare in today's accounts. However, at the same time, with some exceptions to which I will return shortly, we miss an equally nuanced account of the analyst's experience and of her participation.

Projective identification: The analyst’s response

Thoughts about the analytic attitude will lead readers to wonder about the key concept of projective identification, which in the minds of many has become the touchstone of contemporary Kleinian theory and technique. Because of this, many will be surprised to find that neither the term nor the concept “projective identification” appears in the Lectures. Although it had been coined years before by Edoardo Weiss (1925, cited in Spillius 2007), Klein herself did not use it until 1946, and when she did it was somewhat vaguely defined and limited in terms of its implications for clinical practice (Spillius 2007; Aguayo 2009).

As Klein framed it, in projective identification parts of the self—some feared, some treasured, perhaps some simply needing recognition—are deposited in internal object representations. This contributes to the ways in which the people are experienced, in some cases overriding what we might consider the “actual” characteristics of the object. Thus, projective identification is significantly responsible for constructing the world in which the subject lives.

However, throughout her career Klein insisted that projective identification is entirely an intrapsychic process, an unconscious phantasy. That is, projective identification gives shape to the subject's internal world of self and objects, and therefore will affect, for example, the patient’s experience of the analyst. However, it does not necessarily, and certainly does not by definition, affect the analyst him or herself. As Spillius notes, “she did not discuss the possibility that an individual's phantasies about projective identification might affect his behaviour in a way that would have an effect on his actual relationship with another person” (2007, p. 109). Perhaps because of this Spillius imagines that Klein would have been surprised by the interest in the concept, and that she was “not particularly enthusiastic” about it, at least in her published work (p. 106).

Today, of course, there is both great interest in and great enthusiasm about projective identification, but the enthusiasm hinges on a dramatic shift in both the definition and the deployment of the concept. The change which, if we do not take the term too seriously we might characterize as a “paradigm shift,” emerged in the work of theorists who were Klein's students and analysands, notably Bion, Rosenfeld, and Segal. These authors interpersonalized the concept, decentring it from the individual unconscious. On this revised view, not only unconscious phantasy was decisively shaped by its operations; other peoples’ experience was also affected. Again following Spillius, the understanding of both the motives and the impact of projective identification shifted in the work of these authors. The process could serve a wide range of vital psychodynamic functions: it may be a means of communication, a way of “controlling the mind and body of the other,” as a mechanism for “ridding the self of awareness of separateness,” and so on (2007, p. 120).

Once it was interpersonalized and once the object's response to projections was included in our understanding of the process, projective identification could be seen not simply as a phantasy, but as a transaction between two people that is central to both normal development and pathogenesis. The change was articulated most fully by Bion, who taught that, in order for the infant to learn how to think—that is, to move beyond psychotic functioning—he must be able to project feelings that are unbearable and that cannot be named into the mother. In turn, the mother must receive and contain what has been projected into her, returning them to the infant in ways that can be tolerated. When this sequence fails, whether due to the infant's excessive use of projective identification or to the mother's inability to receive, contain, and detoxify what is projected, psychotic mechanisms will develop. In some borderline and overtly psychotic cases these will be predominant. However, there is a psychotic core—an area in which unbearable protoexperience cannot be symbolized or expressed verbally—in all of us.

It is part and parcel of this revised view of projective identification that the analytic encounter offers a chance to reprise developmental experience and to repair what went wrong. Because of this, psychoanalysis can be of use to patients previously regarded as unreachable and—perhaps equally important—it can engage levels of experience and psychic functioning in so-called neurotic patients that could not have been touched by traditional technique. However, this requires that the analyst participate very differently from the way Klein had described it; it demands a drastically revised analytic attitude. Central to this is that it requires the analyst to offer a new kind of openness; she must receive, contain, and process the contents that have been projected. This allows her to eventually return to the patient a detoxified version of what has been put into her.

In two ways this implies a very different version of the analytic attitude than the one that Klein advocated so forcefully. First, recall her comment that the analyst must “be able to note undisturbed what the patient's mind presents to us” (p. 29, my emphasis). The revised view of projective identification claims, in stark contrast, that the analyst whose mind remains “undisturbed” cannot be of use to the patient because she has been unable to let in what the patient most needs to evacuate; Bion, among others, is explicit about this. Only the analyst who has been disturbed has been receptive to the patient's projections; this receptivity must precede containment and reverie. Second, it is no longer sufficient for the analyst to pay attention only to the workings of the analysand's mind. The analyst's mind—altered by her receptivity to the patient's projections—is a vital source of information about what is most central to the patient's psychopathology.

Put simply and familiarly, countertransference is not just inevitable, it is essential, both because it means that the analyst's mind has been appropriately disturbed (that is, she has served her developmentally necessary function) and because the particular nature of the disturbance is the best way of understanding what is most troubling to the analysand. Countertransference—insofar as it is shaped by what the analysand is trying to communicate or expel, to claim or control, to create or annihilate—is at least one royal road to the analysand's unconscious.

The reader who approaches the Lectures and especially the Seminars with these essential principles of “contemporary Kleinian” theory of technique in mind will be surprised to find that Klein firmly, even stridently, rejected these new ways of conceptualizing the analytic attitude. In the Seminars Klein holds to her way of understanding projective identification and, as a corollary, to her disinterest in the informational value of countertransference experience. Her attitude toward the ways in which projective identification can shape the psychoanalytic situation is especially striking: In response to her students’ insistence that the analyst's openness to projections is essential, she replies that “It is really only by knowing a good deal about the process of projective identification that the analyst can guard himself from the feeling of being intruded upon” (p. 113, emphasis added).

Klein does acknowledge that some patients (the most disturbed) hope to affect the analyst's state of mind; these patients, she says, will attempt to “push” unwanted feelings into the analyst. The analyst will take note of these attempts; under questioning in the Seminars she acknowledges that “one feels that they are pushing into one their whole depression, their whole anger, their whole envy, everything they have got” (p. 104). However, she quickly goes on to reiterate in a surprising way, the central premise of her analytic attitude:

One is aware that the patient is pushing something into me and it depends on whether I let him push it into me. I mean, there are two of us here, he pushes it into me, but I won’t have it pushed into me. (p. 105, emphasis added)

Klein's insistence that “there are two of us here” and soon after that, even when the patient wants to push something into her, the analyst is under no obligation to “follow the patient's wish” (p. 109), contrasts dramatically with contemporary trends, as formulated both within and outside of formal field theories. The demands on the analyst are, accordingly, vastly different. Far from guarding herself against being intruded on, many analysts today find appeal in Thomas Ogden’s (2015) advice that we must

engage in an act of self-renunciation … the act of allowing oneself to become less definitively oneself in order to create a psychological space in which analyst and patient may enter into a shared state of … being-at-one with a disturbing psychic reality that the patient, on his own, is unable to bear. (p. 234)

It is not only Kleinians who have concluded that effective analysis depends on analysts being willing and able to surrender some aspects of their individual subjectivity, or at least that they be willing to have their minds disturbed. This striking departure from Freud's prescription of a detached neutrality emerged independently in a number of psychoanalytic traditions during the later decades of the twentieth century. In this sense Klein's vision is as much a product of her time as it is of a particular theoretical framework.

Writing from an ego psychological perspective, but departing dramatically from its received wisdom about proper analytic technique, Dale Boesky asserts that “If the analyst does not get emotionally involved sooner or later in a manner that he had not intended, the analysis will not proceed to a successful conclusion” (1990, p. 573). Even earlier, Edgar Levenson—in a departure from his Sullivanian roots that is as striking as Boesky's break with his teachers—writes that analysts must experience the fear that “he will be converted into an object in the patient's world. This transformation is not merely a fantasy of the patient, it is a genuine threat to the therapist, and his reality” (1978, p. 574).

Neither Boesky nor Levenson ties his vision of technique to developmental forerunners as Bion did; for both it is a description of analytic process which leads to the prescription of an analytic attitude. The conceptual base aside, however, their views taken alongside of those who were directly influenced by Klein point to a sea change in our understanding of the analyst's participation that took place after Klein's death.

Containment and enactment

At times, reading the lectures drives home ways in which changes in our thinking about the psychoanalytic situation—conceptual and terminological—offer new tools for understanding old problems, thereby demanding that we reframe our central clinical and theoretical questions.

I have already mentioned that, in the Seminars, Klein insists that, although patients may try to push something into her (via projective identification) what follows “depends on whether I let him do it” (p. 105). Klein's claim that she can close herself to projections—not to mention her interest in doing so—is likely to surprise many readers; indeed in his introduction, Steiner acknowledges that “Initially I found it shocking to think that the analyst could say ‘no’ to the projective intrusions of the patient” (2017, p. 19). The surprise is understandable in a climate in which it is assumed that projections—certainly the analysand's and by some accounts the analyst's as well—play a central role in shaping the experience of both participants.

Steiner attempts to reconcile Klein's thinking with more contemporary assumptions by suggesting that she believed that, while the analyst needs to register and to contain her responses, she must avoid “being taken over by the projections.” He goes on to make a crucial distinction: “ … unless the analyst can prevent himself from being taken over he is unable to avoid enactments that interfere with containment” (p. 20). Steiner correctly sees this distinction between containment and enactment as a central pillar of Klein's vision of the analytic attitude, although the term “enactment” wasn't available during her lifetime.

In contemporary discourse, however—at least in a great deal of what has become mainstream thinking—the distinction appears much less clear-cut than it once did. Consider the increasingly accepted idea that enactment is ubiquitous. This view reflects a profound change in our vision of the psychoanalytic situation, paralleling the momentous shift in Freud's thinking from his original idea that resistance is episodic and avoidable to the evolved view that “resistance accompanies the treatment step by step,” however freely the patient is associating (1912, p. 103). Today, at least for those who believe that our object of study is the functioning of the analytic couple rather than the mind of the patient viewed in isolation, it appears that enactments are continuous and unavoidable; they are happening even when the projections are apparently being contained (Levenson 1978; Boesky 1990; Katz 2013).

Seen from this perspective the distinction between containment and enactment fades; in fact, at least in some circumstances, containment itself can be seen as a form of enactment. This point of view has been clearly articulated by the Bionian analyst Roosevelt Cassorla. For Cassorla (2012), there is a thin and perhaps vanishing line between what he calls “chronic enactment” and the building of a working alliance. In building a working alliance, analyst and analysand may collude to create a kind of sequestered dyad, freed from the pressure of triangular reality. Thus, he says of one analysand that she “was living this dyadic relationship with her analyst” (p. 73), adding that “analysts have a hard time undoing a dyadic collusion because they intuit that they will make their patients relive traumatic situations of helplessness if they come in contact with reality” (p. 66).

There is a dramatic example of this in Klein's fifth lecture. Her patient, Mr. D, was plagued by a sense that he had lost his mother's exclusive love following the birth of a sister. When Klein rearranged her clinical schedule, Mr. D for the first time crossed paths with another patient, a young boy. The patient reacted to this with great rage and anxiety; he began to feel that “the analysis was absolutely bad” (pp. 74–75). In addition to talking about his reactions Mr. D threatened to quit treatment and was frequently extremely late for sessions.

In response to Mr. D's distress, Klein offered to move his appointment time by 10 minutes to avoid the meeting and, when the patient was very late, she also extended the session. She acknowledges that she made these offers in order to convey the idea that she understands Mr. D's distress—that is, unlike his mother, she is a “good” object.

This material fits closely with Cassorla's vision. Cassorla would suggest that, in Mr. D's experience (at least), he and his analyst had created a sequestered dyad, immune to the intrusion of triangular reality that had affected him so profoundly when his sister was born and that was recreated when the young patient appeared. Was the maintenance of this dyad necessary for building a working alliance, or was it a chronic enactment which Klein and Mr. D were creating together? Klein, lacking the conceptual tools that she would have needed in order even to ask that question, offers to modify the analytic frame; she is willing to move the starting time by 10 minutes (an offer Mr. D refuses), and when he is very late she extends the sessions a bit (Mr. D evidently goes along with this change). In making these offers Klein suggests that she is showing support for what Mr. D needs. However, we must also wonder if she is supporting his dyadic phantasy and perhaps even her own? That is a question that comes more readily to the mind of the twenty-first century analyst that it could have for Klein.

This leads to a related question, also pivoting on Klein's belief that the analyst can control not only her behaviour but her countertransference feelings. She describes an exchange with a 5-year old patient, John. John plays a game in which the analyst must pretend to be asleep while he, taking the role of a lion, attacks and devours her. Klein interprets this as stemming from John's fear of being eaten by the analyst, a fear that derives from his wanting to eat her. This interpretation relieves John's anxiety, which in turn facilitates reality testing that allows him to learn that “the impulse is less dangerous than was feared, and that the object is very different from the phantasy object” (p. 58).

All of this sounds like the way a good transference interpretation is supposed to work. However, Klein goes on to say that the change hinges on a further piece of reality testing

… the child had realized that he had been projecting devouring tendencies on to the analyst, and that actually the analyst was quite a friendly and helpful person, which was proved by her friendly and understanding behaviour, i.e. the work being done, etc. (p. 59, emphasis added)

Klein's use of the word “actually” comes as a shock; it lacks her usual nuance. If we focus on the analysand's experience, to speak of how another person is “actually” is theoretically incoherent, because Kleinian theory tells us that all we know about the world is a complex and seamless mix of reality and phantasy. This is not to say that interpretation cannot lead to more benign experience, but it is impossible to imagine an outcome in which phantasy no longer influences the way people are seen. In this sense, as in other ways in which she understands analytic process (as opposed to interpretive content), Klein's view remains close to Freud's; she seems to believe that transference can be extinguished, leaving the analysand with a more or less unmediated vision of reality.

Perhaps more interesting is that Klein apparently believed that she was “actually”—and absolutely—friendly and helpful. She seems convinced that she can be entirely, or at least substantially aware of what she is feeling and of how what she is feeling affects how she is behaving with her patient. This is a striking way for a psychoanalyst—perhaps particularly a Kleinian analyst—to describe anybody, and especially herself. However, throughout, Klein has little to say about the ways in which the analyst's unconscious affects her participation; even when she talks about the analyst's possible countertransferential “involvement” she seems to be thinking mainly of conscious aspects of her participation. Thus, she warns against “feelings of power and superiority, and against any tendencies to seek rapid or magical results, such as attempting to make our patient as we should like him to be … ” (p. 31). However, she says nothing about the unconscious roots of these feelings and tendencies.

In his introduction, Steiner expresses surprise over this, noting that “I find it interesting that [Klein] does not discuss unconscious conflicts the analyst might have, say, over sadistic impulses or a wish to dominate” (p. 6).¹ In fact, in the Seminars she somewhat caustically remarks that interest in countertransference “has seen extremes of fashion in recent years” (p. 103). Spillius writes that Klein was concerned that any focus on the analyst's own reactions could reflect narcissistic self-interest; the analyst “was supposed to guard against his own involvement” (2007, p. 85).

Conclusion

Klein’s epistemology, a product of her time, focuses her attention on the intrapsychic in ways that are certain to provoke contemporary readers to wonder about and perhaps to be critical of what is missing. It is tempting to leave it at that, and to conclude that the intersubjective turn–including the important revisions introduced by contemporary Kleinians—has corrected Klein's own inadequacies. On this view, psychoanalysis moves forward and we read history mainly to deepen our appreciation of where we have come from.

That, I think, would blind us to the richness of what Klein has to teach. It might be impossible today to consider, as Klein demands, only the mind of the patient. However, perhaps we can, following her to some extent, imagine what we could discover if we focus on the transference—both in the here and now and in its historical dimensions—without becoming preoccupied with the analyst's contribution.

Consider, for example, her child patient. Klein movingly describes the ways in which his hatred, anxiety, guilt, projective defences, and so on transformed a loved and loving object into a feared, hated, and hateful one. We need not and should not follow Klein to her conclusion that the object (mother originally, then analyst) was “actually”—i.e. simply—friendly and helpful. However, Klein's deeper lesson is that the child could not hold his own experience of what was friendly and helpful about her, what was loving and loved, until the hatred, anxiety, and guilt were made consciously accessible.

It goes without saying—and it certainly reflects advances in our way of understanding not only the psychoanalytic situation, but the structure of the mind itself—that we must keep track of the analyst's unconscious hostility (regardless of its source), and also of the effects of aggression toward the child throughout his development. However, perhaps an unintended consequence of this broadened perspective is that we risk losing touch with Klein's nuanced and poignant ideas about the relationship between love and hate, especially as it emerges in the transference.

These ideas are often misunderstood, because Kleinian practice is typically associated with tenacious interpretation of hatred as it is expressed in the negative transference. Again however, she surprises us; noting that, in the early years of psychoanalysis, interpretation focused exclusively on libidinal transference, she expresses regret that a swing of the pendulum has led some analysts to believe that “there was not much else to be analysed beside hate and aggression” (p. 36). She immediately goes on to say that this does not mean that the importance of negative transference has been overestimated; rather, it reflects “insufficient understanding of the deepest connection between positive and negative feelings” (pp. 36–37). Then comes her assertion of the value of attending to aggression in the transference; only by doing so can we learn that “sorrow, guilt and anxiety are part and parcel of the complex relation to objects which we call love” (p. 37).

Steiner stresses the importance of this way of thinking in his Introduction, noting that Klein helps us to “recognize that love is not simply romantic and libidinal,” and that “if negative feelings fail to emerge, then the deeper feelings of love also fail to emerge” (p. 9). This is the core of her vision: hatred (whatever its origins) is inextricably intertwined with love. The sensibility, evoking Schafer’s (1970) concept of the “tragic vision” of psychoanalysis, conveys a depth and compassion that is often lost in more popularized renditions of Klein's thinking.

It can also get lost when our attention is divided so that we focus on two subjects, both of whom act upon, influence, and are influenced by each other in one way or another. However—and this is where her vision seems limited and limiting—Klein wrote we have learned that we must divide our attention lest we lose sight of the effects of interpersonal interaction, including the most damaging effects. Because of this, reading the Lectures and Seminars is both inspiring and vexing. We are always aware that, weighed down both by an archaic epistemology and by a model of the mind that constrains what she was able to see, Klein knew far less than we have learned. Yet, if we open ourselves to her, we see that focusing on what is missing in her account puts us at risk of losing a great deal of what she has to teach.”

Notes

1 Steiner does point out in a footnote that Klein's followers (e.g. Joseph 1981, 2003) and perhaps Klein herself acknowledged that the analyst may be provoked to become hostile, so that at times the patient's fear of the analyst is “realistic” (fn22, p. 93).