Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context

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Melanie Klein was probably the most controversial and influential figure that has yet appeared on the British psychoanalytic scene. She left Germany in 1926 and settled in London where she soon quarrelled with Anna Freud. Klein pioneered the psychoanalysis of children and applied her insights on the infantile origins of unconscious drives to adult analysis. Her relationship with her own children was highly troubled. In this critical yet sympathetic book Meira Likierman of the Tavistock clinic assesses the work, life and lasting influence of this brilliant figure.

Reviews

"Klein has been quoted but she has never, until Likierman's book been properly read. This book reveals with patient lucidity just what is fascinating about Klein as a psychoanalytic theorist. It recovers her work, in other words, from the sentimentality and moralism in which her so-called followers have buried her. Likierman's Klein is a Klein for a new generation of readers."-Adam Phillips, author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored
"A useful corrective. Likierman's volume is an intellectual biography, more balanced than Phyllis Grosskurth's....For the most part chronologically organized, it describes Klein's ideas in an integrated, coherent way, using the intellectual context of Klein's works to elucidate meaning otherwise painstakingly rendered from the originals."--Choice, November 2001

Author Bio

Meira Likierman is a senior staff member at the Tavistock Clinic where she has been leader of the Psychoanalytic Studies MA program and the Doctorate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She is a Fellow of the European Humanities Research Centre, Oxford University.