Shall we tell the children?
Paul Seabright
- Melanie Klein: Her World and her Work by Phyllis Grosskurth
Hodder, 516 pp, £19.95, June 1986, ISBN 0 340 25751 2
- Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-1925 edited by Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick
Chatto, 360 pp, £14.95, February 1986, ISBN 0 7011 3051 2
When Alix Strachey, translator of Freud, went to Berlin in 1924 to seek psychoanalysis with Freud’s colleague, Karl Abraham, her most momentous acquisition, in an accumulation consisting inter alia of books, antique knick-knacks and (to a compulsive extent, on the evidence of her letters) of Apfeltorte under lashings of cream, was a then little-known child-analyst of Polish-Slovakian extraction named Melanie Klein. It was largely thanks to the efforts of Alix and her husband James in bringing Klein to the attention of the British Psycho-Analytical Society that she moved to London in 1926 after the death of Abraham. He had been Klein’s mentor and analyst, and without him she had little defence against the hostility that was surfacing in the Berlin Society and that she was to provoke in one form or another throughout her career. Klein was, by general consent, not an easy person, but Alix Strachey (no pushover herself) quickly came to a warm appreciation of her qualities of mind even while considering her a testimonial to the effects of psychoanalysis on the grounds that ‘she’d be almost intolerable if she had’nt [sic] been well basted by it.’ In personal matters Alix was intolerant: Klein, she said, ‘dances like an elephant’ – a severe handicap when the major preoccupation in Twenties Berlin was party-going. Alix clearly found vulgar Klein’s penchant for dressing up for these parties ‘as a kind of Cleopatra – terrifically décolletée – and covered in bangles and rouge’ and for being ‘frightfully excited and determined to have a thousand adventures’. But ‘my respect for her continues to grow. She’s got not only vast hoards of data, but a great many ideas, all rather formless and mixed, but clearly capable of crystallising in her mind.’ Alix sent a résumé of one of Klein’s papers for discussion in the British Society (fertile ground already since an interest in child analysis had been evinced by several of its members, including Nina Searl, Ella Sharpe, Susan Isaacs, Donald Winnicott and Barbara Low). Ernest Jones, the President and later Freud’s biographer, was enthusiastic (‘absolutely heart-and-soul whole-hogging pro-Melanie’, according to James Strachey). In July 1925 Klein visited London to give a course of lectures on child analysis, and her arrival for good in 1926 was a most natural consequence. Britain was to remain her home until she died in 1960, and the British Psycho-Analytical Society the vehicle for an extraordinarily creative and controversial career, a vehicle which was nevertheless driven almost to disintegration by the wrangles and bitterness that career provoked. That these animosities and the gossip on which they fed persisted for so long makes especially welcome Phyllis Grosskurth’s scholarly book, the first full biography of Klein.
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 14 · 7 August 1986
From Phyllis Grosskurth
SIR: I feel compelled to reply to Paul Seabright’s review of my biography of Melanie Klein (LRB, 3 July), in which he questions, not only my interpretations, but events I present in connection with Klein’s early life.
Seabright speaks of a ‘brief’ autobiography left by Klein, but informs his readers that I do not mention ‘how brief’ it is. He goes on to speak authoritatively of a certain 22-page autobiography. I understand that such a document is circulating in England, but I worked from a 32-page version, although I have a rambling account that ends at page 48. Seabright says the autobiography is ‘rambling enough … to be of limited value as a source’, yet Hanna Segal accepted it unquestioningly as the basis of her account of Klein’s life. I also possess a copy of a letter (dated 7 March 1962) from one member of the Klein Trust to another in which the former says that she has reduced the length of the autobiography from about 16,000 words to 14,000 words. In addition, she adds that she has ‘censored one passage about Hug-Hellmuth’. Incidentally, in the 32-page version the following passage in the handwriting of the same trustee is inserted: ‘When I abruptly finished my analysis with Abraham there was much that had not been analysed and I have continually proceeded along the lines of knowing more about my deepest anxieties and defences.’ Mr Seabright says that on page 9 of his typscript Klein refers to the death of her son Hans. Sorry, but it is not in my version; and he cannot fault me for misquoting other sections when he seems to have a ‘sanitised’ one of his own. In the light of these discrepancies, and in view of the fact that we have nothing to go on but typescripts, I am assailed by a disturbing thought: how much of any of this was written by Melanie Klein herself?
Mr Seabright also speaks confidently about early letters, but I cannot believe that he has actually examined the two hundred-odd letters covering a ten-year span (plus fictional material) or he would not dismiss them so lightly as ‘a bundle of family letters’. From a passage on page 62 of my book Seabright concludes that I have inferred Melanie Klein’s envy of her sister Emilie from a single reference in one of the letters. In actual fact, my conclusion was based on a number of sources, including information supplied by relatives. Seabright totally ignores a passage on page 250 of my book where I quote Klein’s autobiographical fragment saying that she saw her sister die ‘full of anxieties and persecution’. At the time of Emilie’s death in 1940 Klein was in Cambridge, her sister in hospital in London. According to Emilie’s daughter-in-law, Hertha Pick, who was with Emilie during her last illness, Klein never visited her sister before her death.
I much appreciated Mr Seabright’s later reflective remarks about my book, but I feel that he himself has succumbed to some rather gullible speculations about Klein.
Phyllis Grosskurth
University of Toronto
Paul Seabright writes: n the light of the fact that Professor Grosskurth and I were supplied by the Melanie Klein Trust with different versions of the Autobiography, I unreservedly withdraw my remarks about misquotation. The Trust did not inform me of the discrepancy, and by telling me that the fragment had not been published because it ‘would need a lot of editing’, implied that it had not previously been tampered with. I concur with Grosskurth’s ‘disturbing thought’: this makes the Autobiography all the more questionable as a source, whether Hanna Segal accepted it or not. I don’t see how the remark about ‘anxieties and persecution’ constitutes evidence of envy; Grosskurth herself says Klein dreaded the thought of dying in a state of anxiety, and attributes Klein’s failure to visit her sister as due to fear of tuberculosis. It may be that other evidence supports Grosskurth’s judgment, but if so it is not cited in her book.
Vol. 8 No. 19 · 6 November 1986
From Hanna Segal
SIR: As the correspondence between Phyllis Grosskurth and Paul Seabright (LRB, 7 August) appeared at a time when no Trustee of the Melanie Klein Trust was in London, we could not respond to clarify the position. On our return we checked in the archives with the help of the archivist, Lesley Hall, after her letter to you was sent off but before it was published (LRB, 18 September). We found that the two texts, Paul Seabright’s 22 pages and Phyllis Grosskurth’s 30 pages, are in fact identical, but one is a retype (from those pre-photocopy days) on different paper with different spacing. The reference to ‘Hans’ on page 9 of Seabright’s copy which Grosskurth says is missing in her text is there at the bottom of page 11. It is true that on Grosskurth’s copy there are some comments by a Trustee. This is because some years ago, probably in connection with the publication of Melanie Klein’s Writings, we tried to edit the notes to make them suitable for publication. The sentence about Abraham was not ‘added’ by a Trustee but was a suggestion for its transfer from page 29 to 26. We have abandoned the project as impossible, but had we proceeded with it we would have made it quite clear that it was an edited text.
About the 48-page text: Melanie Klein in 1959 shortly before her death dictated a series of notes to her secretary on a number of different occasions, which she never put together and which were therefore very repetitive. The resulting 48-page manuscript is, as Phyllis Grosskurth describes, a rambling account, and the last 16 pages are mainly repetitions, sometimes verbatim, of earlier pages. We have therefore removed most of the last pages and removed some of the rambling repetitions from the body of the text. This is the text we lend to people to use as a reference, but the 48-page text is in the archives available to scholars. Grosskurth had access to it, but wisely chose to use the text we had made more readable. So there are not ‘many versions’ of the autobiographical notes. So far as we know, there is the original 48-page text and the slightly shortened and edited version of either 22 or 30 pages, those two being identical. There is no question of ‘sanitising’ or changing Mrs Klein’s notes, as both versions are easily available for inspection.
Hanna Segal
Chairman, Melanie Klein Trust, London NW8
