Abstract

Much hard work was done for this biography, the first written about Melanie Klein. Phyllis Grosskurth consulted many documents and letters, conducted many interviews, and made her acquainted with much psychoanalytic theory. The reader is likely to be made uneasy on the first page: Melanie Klein was a woman with a mission. Professor Grosskurth relates Melanie Klein’s fictional writings to the literary milieu Klein knew, and here the author can be critical and yet in sympathy with her subject. Part one of the biographies closes when Melanie Klein has been analysed and encouraged by Ferenczi to start analysing children. Segal described the analysis of a schizophrenic; she also, in a seminal paper, connected the development of symbol formation with the depressive position, and, working in another direction, used Melanie Klein’s ideas for a new psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics. Yet for all this attention the biography does not convey that Melanie Klein was rare.