ABSTRACT
One of the most immediately interesting things about Melanie Klein's notes on Citizen Kane is her sense that the film can be understood through and with psychoanalysis. The discovery of Klein's notes and her professional, if instinctive and tentative, understanding of Kane's character provides a new and fascinating corroboration of the film's psychoanalytic frame of reference. When Citizen Kane was released in 1941, it created a scandal in the United States. The press immediately spotted the correspondence between the fictional Charles Foster Kane and the greatest of the real, live press tycoons of the day: William Randolph Hearst. Klein sees Kane as out of touch with his depressive feelings, due to the fact that the 'rosebud' inside him is insecure and endangered. The first flashback of Kane's life story is the founding moment of his psychic history, the story's primal scene, as it were.
