Description
Spanning six decades, this collection, Journeys in Psychoanalysis: The selected works of Elizabeth Spillius, traces the arc of her career from anthropology and entering psychoanalysis ‘almost by accident’, to becoming one of her generation’s leading scholars of Melanie Klein.
Born in 1924 in Ontario, Canada, Elizabeth arrived at the London School of Economics for postgraduate studies in the 1950s and soon embarked on a groundbreaking study of family life in the East End of London that produced a PhD and her first book, Family and Social Network, under her maiden name Elizabeth Bott. Published by the Tavistock Institute in 1957, it remains one of the most influential works published on the sociology of the family.
These papers are a testament to the luminous intellect and understated compassion that Elizabeth has always brought to her work. They vividly map not just the evolution of Elizabeth’s career but the development of Melanie Klein’s thought, often drawing in compelling fashion on the writer’s own experiences with her patients. Each is written with the clarity and concision that makes difficult concepts eminently comprehensible to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and laymen alike.
Table of Contents
Introduction; Asylum and Society; Clinical experiences of projective identification; On formulating clinical fact to a patient; Developments in Kleinian thought; Totem and Taboo and professional correctness; Conflict of goals in psychoanalysis; Understanding oneself and being understood; Melitta and her mother; Ten drawings by one of Melanie Klein’s child patients; Melanie Klein Today.
