ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Melanie Klein, in working through a troubled, adversarial phase of British psychoanalytic history, assigns anxiety the role of psychic agency. This chapter discusses the extent to which archival work can produce new contexts for thinking through Klein's writings as well as for the role of psychoanalytic theory. Klein's clinical and theoretical work begins with anxiety. Freud's first detailed case-history of a child, 'Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old-Boy' brilliantly details the interplay between anxiety and the formation of phobias in the horse-dreading Little Hans. Klein departs from Freud by being faithful to the complexities of his final theory of anxiety. Stonebridge concludes with the suggestion that anxiety in Klein may be read as a form of possibility, which she links, in another telling configuration, to Klein's response to the wartime situation. By reality testing, argues Klein, the child outwits the super-ego and gains proof of the essential goodness of its 'real objects'.
