Volume 33, Number 8 · May 8, 1986
Psycho-Mom
By Rosemary Dinnage
Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work
by Phyllis Grosskurth
Knopf, 515 pp., $25.00
Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–1925
edited by Perry Meisel, edited by Walter Kendrick
Basic Books, 515 pp., $25.00
This is the Kleinian baby, in a graphic account written by one of Melanie Klein's followers. It is certainly a far cry from nursery life as it has been viewed through the ages. The quotation encapsulates the theories about early child development which Klein has contributed to psychoanalysis and which—in Britain—have caused immense dissension. It is a different matter in the United States. (An American would-be analyst who wanted to train in London in the Fifties was told, 'You will never be accepted in American psychoanalysis. Mrs. Klein's theories are all wrong.') In this thorough and scholarly biography Phyllis Grosskurth for the first time pieces together, with the help of Klein's son and the British analysts she interviewed, the life of this extraordinary woman and the factors in it that influenced her theories.
Review, 3888 words
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