ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses exchange between psychoanalysts of the Lacanian and Kleinian persuasions, despite the commendable efforts of the organisers of the Lacan-Klein Dialogues to encourage these. Melanie Klein appears to have destroyed most of her correspondence with psychoanalytic colleagues, little of which appears in the Archive. Even when Klein was under bitter attack from her own psychoanalyst daughter Melitta Schmideberg, she refused, as Elizabeth Spillius (2009) has pointed out, to respond to her in personal terms. Jacques Lacan admired Klein’s insistence in her psychoanalytic work with children on boldly addressing the phenomena of the unconscious, and applauded her recognition of the intensity and sometimes violence of infantile phantasy. It would be tempting, though mistaken, to seek explanation for these intractable barriers to communication largely in the institutional issues that led to the exclusion of Lacan from the International Psychoanalytical Association that Lacan regarded as an anti-psychoanalytic bureaucracy.
