ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows that one of the greatest ironies in the history of psychoanalytic theory is its biographical analogy to the biblical account and myth. It is the story and legend of Melanie Klein, who, she believe, similar to Moses, foresaw the vivid outlines of a promised land, a psychic land, which she herself could not enter or could enter only to a minor degree. The author also shows that Klein’s tenacious clinging to the metapsychology of her own version of the “death instinct” can be seen as a symptom of her own arrest in a state of pathological mourning. By the time Klein discovered the critical significance of mourning, she was a leading figure in the British Psychoanalytic Society in London. Father and mother are also a combined figure in Kleinian theory during her early oedipal phases, which predate the oedipal era of Anna Freud.
