ABSTRACT
Klein’s understanding of loss and the mourning process is perhaps the most widely cited and admired of her contributions to psychoanalysis. Just as Freud’s paper on mourning and melancholia captured and ordered immediately comprehensible and universal aspects of human experience, so do Klein’s 1935–1940 papers on depression and mourning illuminate hitherto mysterious or unrecognised features of our responses to loss. Freud’s personal bereavements and a world at war were the context for his thinking, and Klein’s work too has the background of both tragic personal loss and the deeply troubled Europe of the 1930s, suffering the impact of severe economic depression and the rise of Fascism. Klein’s writing does not make reference to any of this, and is closely focused on psychoanalytic theory and clinical observation, but perhaps some of the powerful resonance of her writing is nonetheless linked to the reader’s awareness of her personal losses and the unbearable world events of the time.
