The Kleinian Development

Lectures given at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Tavistock Clinic between 1965 and 1978, published in three parts and later collected in one volume. Meltzer traces one line of development and presents its three stages as those of a single developing method and theory. The first part follows Freud's clinical development; its publisher stresses the tension it finds between Freud's truthful clinical observations and a theory not always able to take them in. The second reads Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis, the case of Richard, week by week; the publisher calls it probably his most personal and passionate book, a tribute to his own analyst. The third sets out the clinical significance of Bion's theory of thinking. Meltzer described the lectures both as a search for integration into a combined internal psychoanalytic object and as a handbook for students.