This important book provides a concise introduction to Melanie Klein and the key concepts and theories she founded, outlining their application to psychoanalytic technique, and explaining how her ideas have been further developed.
As Klein’s ideas have opened the exploration of deeper and more primitive areas of the mind, they have led to extensive theoretical and technical developments across the world, in various schools of psychoanalytic thought. This book addresses Klein’s early papers on her work with children and her extensions of Freud’s ideas, as well as her divergence from them, highlighting Klein’s emphasis on loving relationships in the mitigation of hatred, in children’s overall development and in the drive for reparation. Examples from Klein’s clinical work with children and adults are included to illustrate and illuminate her points.
Offering clear expositions of complex concepts and linking to more detailed sources of information, this book is important reading for all clinicians, trainees and students interested in emotional development and in the analysis of children and adults.
Biography
Penelope Garvey is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She worked with both children and adults in the NHS as a clinical psychologist before going on to qualify as a psychoanalyst. She works in private practice in Devon and teaches in the UK and abroad. She is one of the co-authors of the New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (2011), co-edited with Kay Long The Klein Tradition (2018) and has recorded a short e-learning course, ‘Introduction to Melanie Klein’, which can be found on the website of the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
'It is the depth and clarity of this account of the work of Melanie Klein that will impress professional analysts, psychotherapists, as well as the curious general reader. They will find readily accessible descriptions and explanations of many of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis - internal objects, splitting, projective identification, introjection, and pathological organisations, and learn how important processes such as mourning lead to changes in the super-ego which enable arrested development to resume.Even experienced psychoanalyst will be impressed to find old concepts presented in new ways, often amply illustrated with clinical material, sometimes from Klein and sometimes from Garvey’s own work.
This book is a major contribution to the definition of Klein’s place among the pioneers of psychoanalysis.'
John Steiner, Training analyst British Psychoanalytical Society, author of Psychic Retreats, Seeing and Being Seen, Illusion, Disillusion and Irony in Psychoanalysis
