ABSTRACT
In 1945, Joan’s husband Evelyn died. Her former patient, Susan Isaacs, asked her to write a chapter on ‘the bereaved wife’, which allowed her to express some of her own feelings. After a long gestation, Joan finished editing a book called Developments in Psychoanalysis, which contained up-to-date papers on Kleinian theory. Joan apologises for the inclusion of her 1936 paper on early development. However, it contains a radical new idea on how a baby projects difficult feelings into the mother. Joan uses the paper to pay tribute to the sort of mother she was unable to be. The modestly titled ‘Some notes on schizoid mechanisms’ by Klein, contains a radical theory of a very early stage in development in which the mother is split in phantasy into good and bad. She also describes a psychic mechanism, projective identification, which is very similar to the idea put forward by Joan ten years previously.
The chapter also discusses some of the reasons why Klein and Joan drifted apart.
