ABSTRACT
Lecture 1, ‘Guiding principles’, is the most complete and coherent of the six lectures. It is as if Klein worked on it not only to be able to read it to the students but to prepare it for publication. The finished product can give the reader an idea of how the other lectures might have looked if she had had time to complete them for the book that she was planning. This lecture begins with a detailed discussion of the psychoanalytic attitude and provides a fascinating summary of the features Klein sees as central to her approach to psychoanalysis. The second main theme of Lecture 1 is Klein’s discussion of the relative importance of the positive and negative transference. This leads her to an analysis of the way love can become hidden beneath hatred. The task is to understand the relationship between positive and negative feelings rather than to encourage one or the other. Klein concludes that, ‘sorrow, guilt and anxiety are part and parcel of the complex relation to objects which we call love’, and that these are often only revealed if the hatred and aggression have been analysed. This is clearly more than just a discussion of technique and represents a fundamental advance in our understanding of love and also of the complexities of transference.
