ABSTRACT
In 1927 Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein's early advocate in Britain, wrote to Sigmund Freud to tell him about the successful analysis of his children. Unable to name Klein as Freud's theoretical inheritor in the analysis of children, Jones, in a logic familiar to psychoanalysis, turns to attack the 'rightful' heir. Masters of psychoanalysis both, neither Freud nor Jones seems quite able to master the affects that Klein's work produces. In the late 1980s Nicholas Wright's play Mrs Klein and Phyllis Grosskurth's biography put Klein on the cultural stage on both sides of the Atlantic. Reading Klein often feels like an attack on our own voyeurism as well as an invitation to peer into forbidden spaces. Reading Melanie Klein, in other words, need not necessarily be an alternative to post-Lacanian theory, but a different way of approaching the same problem. Klein can be seen as theorizing a deeper determination, something at once more radical than and less assimilable to existing paradigms.
