ABSTRACT
It is often assumed that Melanie Klein leaves external reality more or less unconsidered in her works. With reference to some unpublished Klein archive documents from the 1930s and 1940s and held in the Wellcome Library, Claudia Frank reveals this assessment to be a prejudice. During the Second World War years, Klein did not focus exclusively on the inner world but examined the interplay between the external and internal worlds. In her treatments, particularly in the transference and countertransference, Klein regularly considered the political situation and the ‘Hitler in us’, as well as indicating how, in politically critical and extreme situations, internal fears and destructive identifications are connected with outside events. With detailed quotations from unpublished documents from Klein’s estate concerning the Austrian Anschluss, the Munich Crisis, and documents from 1940, Frank largely allows the texts to speak for themselves.
