1st Edition
Encounters with Melanie Klein Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius
In Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius the author argues that her two professions, anthropology and psychoanalysis, have much in common, and explains how her background in anthropology led her on to a profound involvement in psychoanalysis and her establishment as a leading figure amongst Kleinian analysts.
Spillius describes what she regards as the important features of Kleinian thought and discusses the research she has carried out in Melanie Klein's unpublished archive, including Klein's views on projective identification.
Spillius's own clinical ideas make up the last part of the book with papers on envy, phantasy, technique, the negative therapeutic reaction and otherness. Her writing has a clarity which is very particular to her; she conveys complicated ideas in a most straightforward manner, well illustrated with pertinent clinical material.
This book represents fifty years of the developing thought and scholarship of a talented and dedicated psychoanalyst.
Roth, Rusbridger, Preface. Spillius, General Introduction. Part 1: From Anthropology to Psychoanalysis. Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: A Personal Concordance. Kleinian Thought: Overview and Personal View. Part 2: In Melanie Klein’s Archive. Introduction: The Archive. Melanie Klein Revisited: Her Unpublished Thoughts on Technique. Melanie Klein on the Past. Projective Identification: Back to the Future. Part 3: Interaction of Ideas and Clinical Work. Clinical Reflections on the Negative Therapeutic Reaction. Varieties of Envious Experience. Freud and Klein on the Concept of Phantasy. Developments in Kleinian Technique. Recognition of Separateness and Otherness.
Biography
Elizabeth Spillius trained originally in psychology and anthropology and then at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis.
"This is a fine book, both as a refreshing and illuminating account of Melanie Klein’s thinking, and as an expression of Elizabeth Spillius’s own attitudes to and work in psychoanalysis" – Michael Brearley, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, (2008) 89
"This fascinating, absorbing book is as much about how Elizabeth Spillius integrates her original discipline of anthropology into her thinking and practice as an analyst as it is about the theoretical contribution of Melanie Klein... I would recommend this book to any reader interested in the original works of Melanie Klein and the development of her theory, which would seem to confirm the richness of her original model." - Karen Stobart, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 53, 2008
