ABSTRACT
The history of psychoanalysis is the history of the struggle for emancipation, and the slow emergence, of personal theory or object-relational thinking. Outside the confines of orthodox psychoanalysis and its organizations, early breakaway members pursued lines of thought that might have helped theory to move in this direction. The work of Melanie Klein is the real turning point in psychoanalytical theory and therapy within the Freudian movement itself. Melanie Klein’s work is not at all a logical development of Freud’s psychobiology in the way Hartmann’s was. The Kleinian psychoanalytic technique and psychotherapeutic use of transference is a good subject on which to close our examination of her contribution. Transference is the phenomenon of the patient involving the therapist, who is part of his outer world, in the conflicts that constitute his inner world, and its analysis reveals the kind of interaction that is going on between his inner and his outer worlds, mainly by projection and introjection.
