Introduction to
Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius
Elizabeth Spillius

GENERAL INTRODUCTION


My encounters with Melanie Klein have taken many forms: reading her books and papers, my two personal analyses, supervision and various other forms of learning from senior colleagues, my own clinical work, discussions with colleagues of my own generation and later with students and supervisees, explorations in the Klein Archive – everything, in fact, except direct exchanges with Klein herself. The closest I came to direct contact with Klein was watching her from a distance at the British Society of Psychoanalysis when I first started psychoanalytic training in 1956. After my first year I went away for nearly three years on an anthropological field trip and when I returned in the autumn of 1960 she had just died.

In spite of their indirectness my encounters with Klein have been deeply stimulating and it is because of the thoughts engendered by these contacts that I eventually began to write the papers of the present book.

Becoming an analyst is a slow process, first the training, then the uneasy period of starting to practice. Gradually I began to learn from my patients, especially from several gifted but troubled patients who came to analysis soon after I had started in private practice. They helped me to realise that under a spectacular display of symptoms there may be another person with special talents all his own. ‘I deaden myself so as to avoid the feeling of dying,’ said one of my early patients. ‘I am a crustacean, not a vertebrate’, said another. I was impressed by the way they could describe their dilemmas so succinctly. Those patients, and others too, described me as well as themselves. They showed me that I had been trying to talk to them in psychoanalytic jargon, and their criticism helped me realise that simple thinking and straighter talking would be better for everyone.

I found myself quite intrigued by the formal and informal structure of the British Society, with its complex history, its great proliferation of committees and its three Groups, but one of the first things one learns in anthropology is that it is impossible to make a good study of a group that one is deeply involved in, and so research of that sort was relinquished before it had begun.

Instead of thinking about the Society I started teaching in it, first in small seminars on infant/mother observation which had been initiated by Esther Bick (Bick 1964) and which were later recognised as part of the British training, then on various Freud and Klein courses, and finally on the development of technique in the British Society, a course in which I had the help of many colleagues from all three Groups. All of this teaching helped me to think about ideas and psychoanalytic theory more systematically.

And so I began to feel at home in the world of psychoanalysis and to realise that the sorts of feeling and thinking that were useful in other parts of my life would be useful here too. I had learned in anthropology that one needed to be deeply involved in one’s field work while at the same time staying emotionally and intellectually somewhat outside it, and I found that this binocular vision was equally necessary in psychoanalysis – essentially this is a main theme of the first chapter of this book, ‘Anthropology and psychoanalysis: a personal concordance’.

When I started writing papers it was initially because someone asked me to. Towards the end of the1970s Joseph Sandler, a senior analyst of the Contemporary Freudian group, asked me to give a paper for a conference on the negative therapeutic reaction, which eventually became what is now Chapter 6. Then I was asked to take part in Melanie Klein’s Centenary by writing a paper on the development of Kleinian thought (Spillius 1983), which focused especially on the work of contemporary Kleinians and eventually led to my editing Melanie Klein Today in 1988. By this time I had been appointed as the Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis which made it difficult to do anything but editing for ten years, although I did put together two papers, a more detailed one on Kleinian Thought (Chapter 2) and the other on Envy (Chapter 7), which I had been thinking about for many years without quite realising it.

As soon as my stint as editor was over I started exploring the Melanie Klein Archive, which led to the discovery of a new Melanie Klein. The person I found in the Archive was surprisingly different from the stereotypical Klein of the British Society. In the Archive she emerged as a kindly analyst, extremely conscientious about keeping notes, not very good as a lecturer but evidently brilliant as a supervisor, not good at writing – of course we knew that already – but suddenly she would make an intuitive leap into a new idea when one least expected it. Rummaging about in the Archive led to three papers (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) on Klein’s technique, her view of the past and on projective identification.

For the last five or six years I have been writing about other matters – phantasy, technique again, and separateness (chapters 8, 9 and 10) – and I realise once again that I have been thinking about these topics for a long time without being fully aware of it.

One theme of particular interest that has arisen from writing these papers is the relation between theoretical ideas and clinical work. At first sight it looks as if papers arise out of clinical material, but this description is not quite accurate, at least not for the way I experience it. The process starts with a very nebulous idea about something that I have been thinking about without realising it. This half-formed thought interacts with clinical material in such a way that more clearly articulated thoughts emerge as if arising spontaneously from the clinical material, and then further clinical experiences become enlivened by the theoretical thoughts. Out of this circular process a clearer idea may present itself in a form that can be written about and that may lead to discussion with a few colleagues and sometimes with a friend or two who are not analysts, which gives yet another and very welcome outside view.

The chapters of this book represent my efforts, in the words of my former patient, to be a vertebrate not a crustacean.


Elizabeth Spillius



Copyright © 2007  Elizabeth Spillius

Read review by Michael Brearley

New Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius
by Elisabeth Spillius
Review by Michael Brearley
 

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Copyright © 2007  The Melanie Klein Trust