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New publication

Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius
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regards as the important features of Kleinian thought and discusses the research she has carried out in Melanie Klein’s unpublished Archive, including Klein’s views on projective identification.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.

  The General Introduction to this book can be read by clicking the link below. We are grateful to Mrs Spillius for allowing us
   also to reproduce the Preface to her book.

   Read General Introduction

  PREFACE

Elizabeth Bott Spillius occupies a unique position among contemporary Kleinian psychoanalysts. She is a renowned training and supervising analyst, teaching for many years at the British Society and also in Europe and North and South America. But anyone familiar with the literature of Kleinian psychoanalysis over the last 20 years realises she is more than that as well – in her capacities as chronicler, archivist, editor and historian, she is Boswell to the Kleinian Dr Johnson. How, in the future, psychoanalysts think about the development of post-Kleinian thought will be profoundly affected by Spillius’ description, understanding and organisation of these ideas.

Her history and her training have predisposed and prepared her for this role: she grew up in Canada in an academic family with ties to the wild Canadian countryside as well as to University life. She graduated from the University of Toronto and then went to graduate school in Anthropology in Chicago, arriving in London in 1949 to do further work in anthropology at the London School of Economics and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. What this has meant is, first of all, that she has never really lost her North American voice – she is direct, unfussy, open-minded and straight talking. Her writing is at the same time personal and matter of fact.

Secondly, she consistently writes from the dual viewpoints of a psychoanalyst who is also a social scientist: in everything she studies she is by temperament and by training both a participant and an observer. In the first paper in this book, Anthropology and Psychoanalysis she describes the relationship between these two disciplines, but as one reads through the book, one can see this complex interrelationship running through all her work. Development always interests her – her own, that of her patients, and the development of her two fields of study. She is interested in how and also why one idea develops out of another, expanding the original or diverging from it. This interest has both anthropological and psychoanalytic aspects as she explores layers of theoretical meaning, unpicking the different roots and the differing paths taken by different writers. The trajectory of her life interests her and leads her to an interest in the trajectory of her patients’ lives and that of each analysis she undertakes; her interest in the course of each analysis is also mirrored by her interest in the trajectory of Kleinian psychoanalysis: how it got here from there. It is also interesting that her lifespan parallels the years of a great development and flowering of the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis; her generation of British analysts developed as the Kleinian movement developed.

Her ability to be both participant and observer, both inside and outside what she is studying, manifests itself in a number of ways. In the first place it is clear in her clinical work with her patients, and, of course, this is the position most psychoanalysts wish to occupy. Spillius explicitly describes the way she adheres to a view of technique whereby she allows herself to be fully engaged in her patient’s material, subjected to whatever pressures and pulls the material brings, and simultaneously, or from time to time within the session or afterwards, or when it is important that she do so, she emerges from this identification with the patient and/or his objects to observe the process that has been going on. She notes that this technique has its roots in Freud’s views of the countertransference, was developed in the work of Racker and Heimann, and, while it has become characteristic of many of her Kleinian colleagues, is not at all a technique adhered to by all contemporary psychoanalysts.

Beginning with her editing of the two-volume Melanie Klein Today, Spillius has looked at the work coming out of the Kleinian and contemporary Kleinian school with a similar binocular vision. She is a participant in the rich and growing body of work from Kleinian analysts (her papers here –Varieties of Envious Experience, on the Negative Therapeutic Reaction and Recognition of Separateness and Otherness - demonstrate this) and at the same time she is its chronicler. It is in the rich interplay of these two positions that her work has unique and special value. She has written about being outside as well as in – ‘just visiting’ – not wanting to be a member of a Tribe. And yet she has found her intellectual home amongst British Kleinians whose work she contributes to, describes, clarifies and enhances. She has developed her own firmly held point of view, but is endlessly curious about the points of view of others. Her stance is never moralising; this is consistent with her anthropologist’s take on things – she is interested to see how this latest tribe works, whether it's a set of London families, a group of contemporary psychoanalysts, or the latest patient on her couch. She's more interested in describing things as they are than in moralising about them.
Spillius describes differences and defines individual positions within the history of psychoanalysis: her Freud and Klein on the Concept of Phantasy, and Melanie Klein Revisited from this collection are particularly notable in this regard and she also clarifies distinctions among the works of her contemporaries. In papers such as Projective Identification: Back to the Future she increases our awareness of differentiation, delineating the subtleties of alternate meanings, and by doing this enhances the structure of the discipline. She categorises and clarifies, showing an opposition of positions and ideas. In each of these papers she is parsing for individual meaning, comparing one set of ideas with another, juxtaposing and differentiating. She does this with the cool eye of a scholar and, in a scholarly way, she repeatedly returns to the facts as she observes them: We do not know what babies think, she reminds us. These ideas are theories, not ‘facts’.

In the first of her papers included in the present book, Anthropology and Psychoanalysis, she relates the circumstances behind her much admired 1957 work (as Elizabeth Bott) Family and Social Network and comments that ‘one part of it is important’. She writes,

’I thought that the internal culture and social organisation of a family depended on the particular way they were connected with the people and organisations outside the family. These external contacts formed what I called a ‘network’, not a group and not a ‘community’. Further, I showed that the internal organisation and culture of the family were affected by the way the people and organisations of their external network were linked (or not linked) with one another. . . . And the structure of the network was itself affected not only by external economic and demographic factors but also, though to a limited extent, by the choices of the family members themselves. It was not entirely determined from outside’.

This seems to be a useful description of families in society, as Spillius understood and demonstrated, and, as well, of her understanding of the place occupied by herself and her contemporary Kleinian colleagues in the larger society of British, and then international psychoanalysis; we could also see it as a description of her understanding of the continual interplay between inner and outer worlds which forms the basis of the psychoanalytic theory to which she adheres. At the same time it describes the way in which during the years of her working life Kleinian psychoanalysts have influenced and been influenced by each other and have influenced and been influenced by the larger psychoanalytic community – their forbears, back to Freud, and their contemporary colleagues from other theoretical positions. This ‘network’, with its many interacting, mutually enriching strands, comes to life in her work.
 

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Copyright © 2007The Melanie Klein Trust