On Playing the "Goldberg" Variations ; or, Mothering In and Out of Context

Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context . Meira Likierman. London: Continuum, 2001. 202 pp. $35.00 (pb. $19.95).

Melanie Klein. Julia Kristeva. Volume 2 of the trilogy Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 296 pp. $29.95.

Once in a while, I come across a book that I long to read out loud, one sentence at a time, in the company of a fellow reader, someone who speaks a similar language, so the reading aloud becomes an extension of conversation into mutual poetry. The prototype of such a book for me was Sándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary (1988), and the earliest "fellow readers" were colleagues. ¹ A later example was Michael Krüger's The End of the Novel (1990), followed by José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), and David Grossman's Be My Knife (1998). Each of these books, introspective to a degree that renders inoperative the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, is densely evocative for me. All of them I have read in translation. The Ferenczi is notable for belonging (recently and idiosyncratically) to the canon of psychoanalytic writing.

"Throughout the nineteenth century . . .

To this small list I now add a second directly psychoanalytic referent, Meira Likierman's Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context; and this is as much for how it is written as for its content. In fact, the present review essay began as a desire to characterize that "how," a "how" that is a transcendent embodiment of what is best about psychoanalysis, an active demonstration of simultaneously holding, noticing, and understanding. Although technically this book is written in English, it amounts to another kind of translation. Originally I had wanted to write only about the Likierman, but Kristeva's Melanie Klein, translated and published in English at about the same time, was brought to my doorstep by a long, high editorial lob, from where it fixed me with its gaze until it, too, was taken up.

. . . 'Goldberg' Variations had been regarded as unplayable on the piano: ²

Not long ago, Gershon J. Molad (a "fellow reader" for some years now, at once colleague, friend, and writing partner) wrote to me, "How is Melanie doing? I look at you reading two other women's version of a mother/not-mother life struggle. What a beautiful piece this can be, putting the writer's 'position' into that." This interpellation touches the heart of his and my collaborative work with "the autobiographical dialogue" (Molad and Vida in press), namely, the usually unacknowledged way that our language, our manner, our personality inevitably reflect our personal being, and the way this inward being is in turn molded by its outward expressions. As the "how" of my reading was giving way to the "how" of writing about it, I wondered what would be manifest of my "position"—as psychoanalyst, wife, mother (not of daughters but of sons), soon-to-be mother-in-law, and of course, in the beginning, and always, as daughter—in what I would and would not say.

. . . . . . musically for its many polyphonic demands, . . .

Melanie Klein (1882-1960), ³ in the tersely eloquent jacket notes of Likierman's book, is "probably the most controversial and influential figure in British psychoanalysis. She left Germany in 1926 and settled in London where she soon quarreled with Anna Freud. Klein pioneered the psychoanalysis of children and applied her insights on the infantile origins of unconscious drives to adult analysis."

. . . and physically because the intercrossing of hands was regarded as impossible on one keyboard.

In the redundant, prolix jacket notes of Kristeva's, Klein was "the most original innovator, male or female, in the psychoanalytic arena. . . [and] celebrated here as the first person to see the mother as the source of not only creativity, but also thought itself, and the first to consider the...