ABSTRACT
Both Joan and Melanie Klein were training analysts of the British Society. They psychoanalysed those doing the analytic training. Joan was the analyst of Bowlby, Winnicott and Susan Isaacs. Although part of the analytic establishment, both Joan and Klein began to develop increasingly radical views. Klein assembled her case histories into her first book, The Psychoanalysis of Children. At this time Klein’s daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, came to live in Britain. Beautiful, brilliant, and a psychoanalyst in her own right, Melitta caused endless difficulties for her mother. The chapter describes the death of Klein’s son, Hans, in a climbing accident. Mourning Hans led Klein to write a paper introducing a new psychoanalytic model – the depressive position. Joan used her own experience together with Klein’s model to write a paper on the negative therapeutic reaction. The same year, Joan went on an exchange lecture to Vienna to describe the new British ideas.
