ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that one aspect of Melanie Klein's importance lies in her ability to identify with what she observes in order to follow what is going on and to describe it. It distinguishes between the ideas of Sigmund Freud and those of Klein in a way that denies the need to engage at length with their endlessly controversial differences. The chapter provides an eloquent account of the main principles of Freudian development by focusing on what in Freud has most relevance to Klein's own development- centrally, his theory of infantile sexuality and his account of the unconscious as 'a hypothetical area that is always unfathomable.' It emphasizes the importance of Freud's later theories of the death drive and the super-ego, which were new to psychoanalysis when Klein was developing her own analytic technique, and which are crucially transformed notions in Klein's writings.
