How time slips by! Was it really way back in 1989 when I reviewed R.D. Hinshelwood's Dictionary of Kleinian Thought for this very journal (RR 1989/106)? I am sure that most of our readers like nothing better than curling up of a cold winter's evening with their back copies of Reference Reviews, browsing through book reviews from 20‐odd years ago, and are therefore fully familiar with what I said about it. Nevertheless, I will take the opportunity to rehash my former comments, to set the scene for this new version: “Melanie Klein is an important figure in the development of psychoanalysis. Since her death in 1960 there has been a flourishing Kleinian industry. Publishers such as Free Association and Virago are still scraping around for any of her writings that can be republished and there has been a steady stream of books about her. The controversies between different schools of psychoanalysis seem as obscure to outsiders as the distinction between Sunni and Shi'ites are to the non‐Muslim, but they obviously matter to the people concerned …
Kleinian concepts are very difficult to explain in words, because “these phantasies arise at a time when the infant has not yet begun to think in words” (Klein M., “Notes on some schizoid mechanisms” in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 3. Hogarth Press, 1946). R.D. Hinshelwood, as editor of the British Journal of Psychotherapy, is in a reasonable position to try …
This book is curiously structured. The first half consists of “main entries” – chapter‐length essays describing the development of Kleinian thought, arranged in subject order rather than dictionary order. The second half is in a more traditional reference format – shorter essays, arranged in alphabetical order, on assorted psychoanalytic topics, carefully defining the Kleinian view. Many entries have their own references, and there is also a bibliography at the end. As this is neither a complete bibliography of Klein's writings nor a complete bibliography of publications about her, this is not terribly useful to the general reader.
This is not the best book about Melanie Klein. I would recommend Segal (1964). Nor is it the best dictionary of psychoanalysis. I would recommend Laplanche and Pantalis (1973). Any reference library which already has these and feels the need for more books on psychoanalytic topics could well consider this one … ”
So much for 1989. The differences between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims have become rather more important to western readers over the past 20 years or so, and, dare I say it, interest in the differences between various schools of psychoanalytic thought has largely disappeared from the general reader's mind. Certainly the stream of new books on Melanie Klein is now down to a manageable trickle. The first edition of this one has been sitting on the Institute of Psychiatry's reference shelves since 1989 without, as far as I am aware, receiving any noticeable use. The Melanie Klein Trust decided, however, that there is sufficient demand to justify a new edition. R.D. Hinshelwood, who wrote the first edition single‐handed, declined the task of updating it, which therefore fell on a sizeable committee of Kleinian therapists, chaired by Elizabeth Bott Spillius. This committee decided to retain the basic structure of the book but to rewrite all the entries. I would just as soon have had it the other way round: as a reference librarian I dislike having two separate sequences in one book – if Klein said more about the superego than she did about the ego or the id, then it is reasonable to give the superego a longer entry, but there is no reason why it should be in a separate part of the book. This is really two different small books crammed into one volume – an introduction to some key aspects of Kleinian thought in a dozen chapters, and a separate mini‐encyclopaedia of assorted psychoanalytic terms looked at from a Kleinian angle. The first half should be on the library's lending shelves, and the second half belongs in the reference section. Tearing it in half might be a bit tricky, however.
I was critical of the bibliography in 1989. The decision simply to republish it without adding anything published since that date seems to me to be an act of disgraceful laziness. A complete bibliography of everything written by or about Melanie Klein would obviously be unmanageable in size and would perform no useful function, but a guide to Klein's own writings and a short list of those information sources that the expert committee regarded as authoritative would be extremely useful. To simply republish an incomplete bibliography stopping in 1989 is wasteful and silly.
There are still some new books on the Kleinian approach coming out. I had a brief look at Waska (2010) and the two volumes of the oddly titled But at the Same Time and on Another Level (Grotstein, 2009). The first half of this book seems to me to fit naturally in with those two. The second half seems to me to be more of an encyclopedia than a dictionary. A dictionary defines terms, which this does not. A dictionary, for example, would define “Hysteria”. This book assumes that the reader is quite familiar with the term as used by psychoanalysts, and leaps straight into a two‐page discussion of the Kleinian approach to it, kicking off rather disconcertingly with “Melanie Klein herself writes very little about hysteria … ” There is a new Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis out (Akhtar, 2009) and there is a fairly recent small encyclopaedia (Skelton, 2006). The second half of this book seems to me to complement those two very well. Any library catering largely for Kleinian analysts or for child psychoanalysts in general will want to buy this book as a useful updated summary of Kleinian thought. For most other libraries this would not be my first choice when looking for a new psychoanalytic reference book, though it may be worth considering as a specialized back‐up.
