Book
Our Adult World and Other Essays
A collection of four late essays by Melanie Klein, published in London by William Heinemann Medical Books in 1963, and in New York by Basic Books, three years after her death. The title essay, "Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy", began as a lecture given at Manchester University in 1959 and appeared that year in Human Relations. Written for a non-specialist audience, it holds that the individual's behaviour in society can be understood psychoanalytically only by tracing how the individual develops from infancy into maturity. "Some Reflections on The Oresteia" reads Aeschylus's trilogy through early guilt, the persecutory super-ego and reparation. "On Identification" examines Julian Green's novel If I Were You. "On the Sense of Loneliness" holds that a longing for complete understanding persists even under the best conditions and gives rise to an inner sense of loneliness. The essays on the Oresteia and on loneliness appeared here for the first time, and all four were later reprinted in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963.
Main ideas
- Adult behaviour in society has its roots in the individual's development from infancy, and can be understood psychoanalytically only by tracing that development.
- Aeschylus's Oresteia can be read through early guilt, the persecutory super-ego and reparation.
- Identification is studied through a reading of Julian Green's novel If I Were You.
- A longing for complete understanding persists even under the best conditions and gives rise to an inner sense of loneliness.
- The collection shows the range of subjects, social, literary and clinical, to which Klein applied psychoanalysis in her last years.