ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein’s essay deals with the phan-tasies surrounding the child’s acquisition of the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic), arguing that the unconscious plays a part in graphic activity of all kinds; drawing, writing, and even sums, are all libidinally cathected. For all the seeming seductiveness of Klein’s interpretative method, the author wants to read the Narrative as her enquiry into the relation between the origins of signification and the maternal body, a contested site that is also, in this case, a historical atlas of World War II. Donald Meltzer reports Henry Reed as saying that Klein’s Narrative stood on his shelf beside Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which the larger movements of history similarly unfold alongside individual development, making love and war intertwined aspects of the same national drama. As a Kleinian himself, Meltzer offers a sympathetic (although not entirely uncritical) overview of Klein’s Narrative.
