Reading Melanie Klein

Kleinian psychoanalysis has recently experienced a renaissance. Reading Melanie Klein responds to the upsurge of interest by bringing together the most innovative and challenging essays on Kleinian thought from the last two decades. The essays address Klein's distinctive readings of the unconscious and fantasy, death drive, anxiety, projection and projective identification and, most famously, her challenge to Freud's Oedipus complex and theories of sexual difference. The authors demonstrate that not only is it possible to rethink the epistemological basis of Kleinian theory, rendering it as vital as those of Freud and Lacan, but also that her psychoanalysis can engage in powerful and productive dialogue with diverse disciplines such as politics, ethics and literary theory.

Contributors include Juliet Mithcell, Eli Zaretsky, Maria Torok, Barbro Sylwan, Adele Covello, J.B. Pontalis, Mary Jacobus, Harold N. Boris, Jacqueline Rose, Judith Butler, Hanna Segal, Leo Bersani and Laura Mulvey.