Melanie Klein in Frankfurt

320 JOHN C. CAIRNS tease out so many consistent and suggestive patterns); it also touches on genetic questions. There are passages in the Conclusion which betray a momentary insecurity, as if the author is on the defensive for having married two disciplines that have conflicted in the past, but I for one find this reconciliation of different perspectives necessary and desirable. Nattiez never reduces the text to the elements that went into its creation, but he does show very cleverly how a long meditation on Wagner contributed to the stages Proust delineates in the novel (chapter2). His discussion of the latent meaning of the sailor's song from Tristan, and the Good Friday music from Parsifal (ideas suggested by an ill-informed article, it seems), are most fascinating. Particularly significant here is the argument that the 're~elation' originally came through Parsifal, but that this was transformed into Vinteuil's Septet because Proust logically had to attribute redemptive power to an invented ratherthan a real work. For this he draws on the material of Cahier58, published in 1982 by Henri Bonnet, and dated 1910- 11. This precedes 'Un amour de Swann,' says Nattiez, and therefore the pages on the Vinteuil Sonata were always a quasi-preparation for the revelation through music experienced later in La Prisonniere, even if there was no Septet at that time. Unfortunately there is a counter-argument to be put here, for ifthe final revelation is indeed sketched out in 1910-11, recent research has made it clear that the first sketch of 'Un amour de Swann' goes back to twelve months before that. So the whole question of'preparations' (Nattiez uses the word more than once) needs to be examined rather more carefully. However, this reservation, and one or two minor errors of dating, such as the alleged abandoning of Sainte-Beuve on (instead of 'well before') 27 November 1909, and the statement that Jean Santeuil was first revealed in 1954 do nothing to diminish the importance of this exemplary study. Melanie Klein in Frankfurt PAUL ROAZEN C. Fred Alford. Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory:An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory Yale University Press 1989. viii, 232. us $25.00 The preface to this book seems to me off-putting, for Alford begins by telling us: 'My first reaction to Melanie Klein was that I could not imagine a psychoanalyst whose work is less relevant for social theory.' The implausibility of using Klein's concepts is then transformed, in the hands of this obviously cleveracademic, into 'really the strength of her theory.' So Alford has proceeded to give us what he considers 'a Kleinian version of Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.' Just as Marcuse chose certain Freudian concepts for the sake of developing a radical version of psychoanalysis, uniting Freud and Marx in an idiosyncratic way, so Alford wants to do something similarly synthetic on behalf ofsocialist thought by making use of Klein's concepts. MELANIE KLEIN 321 Alford tells us that 'the implications of a single question guide this book: What wouldbe the consequences for social theoryand philosophy if the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein is correct?' One would have thought that a sophisticated approach would assume something more cautious; most clinicians I know would think that even if some aspects of Kleinian theory are sound, others are not. Unfortunately the state of clinical research is such that almost no effort goes into testing different theories of psychopathology. Kleinianism poses exceptional problems in that much ofwhatKlein postulated about infantile developmentis in principle incapable of being verified. Klein proposed a starker version of original sin than anything Freud ever thought of, and few outside her most devoutly faithful followers have ever suggested anything as black and white as the conceit that her theory might be 'correct.' At one point Alford quotes a Kleinian as having maintained that her model of the mind was 'theological.' But he does not pursue the unsettling full possible implications ofthe imagery ofthis contention. Klein did, I thii-tk, have a far greater sensitivity to religious emotions than Freud. But some of her ideas were dotty. She thought at one point thatall childrenneeded...