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216 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 burdens of responsibility but few of the benefits, does autonomism have anything to say to her? Enter the spectre of Hume: "Tis not contrary to reason to prefer somewhat less autonomy to more.' Had Haworth been able to substantiate the anti-Humean claims of his descriptive account in part I, then perhaps he might have made a case for self-rule as issuing from pure rational inquiry of the open-ended sort which he there advocates. But as the discussion of chapter 11 makes clear, Haworth does not really believe that autonomy issues from unadorned Reason, any more than Hume does. It issues instead from 'characteristically human' desires to stand out and leave a mark, and from a 'natural' sense of responsibility. But it is much too late, at this stage of the game, to appeal to claims concerning the 'characteristically human' as being the ground of autonomism. As with all appeals to human nature, this one founders on the fact that agents who don't care over-much for autonomy are under no compulsion to care over-much about leading 'characteristicaIiy human' lives either. (ROBERT w. BRIGHT) Phyllis Grosskurth. Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work MeOelland and Stewart. x, 5'5. $35.00 Melanie Klein is a highly important but distressing biography. It is important for its investigation of the new image of human kind emerging from psychoanalysis, and distressing because of its counting the cost of producing this image. With all the scholarly thoroughness of her biographies of J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis, Phyllis Grosskurth takes on a still greater challenge in the child analyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960). Klein was one of the most gifted yet difficult of Freud's fractious followers. Claiming to be an orthodox Freudian, she did perhaps more than the celebrated dissidents Jung, Adler, and Rank to upset Freud's metapsychology and therapy. Surveying this dissent, Grosskurth is always balanced in its presentation. The drama of Klein's interplay with Freud, and his daughter Anna the rival child analyst, is recreated in a European setting, a drama which became most acute after Freud and Anna fled from Vienna to London in 1938, where Klein had been established sinceleaving Berlin in 1926. Klein's practice of child analysis led her to theorize about pre-Oedipal development, which produced in her own work, and in that of writersshe sparked, a series ofqualifications to Freud's original Oedipal formulation. (A useful supplement to Grosskurth's discussion is Juliet Mitchell's introduction to The Selected Melanie Klein, Penguin 1986.) Her biographer'S most difficult task is to make clear these fluctuations of ideas about the earliest human development; if Grosskurth's marvellous book is to be HUMANITIES 217 criticized it is for paying insufficient attention to disbelief among British analysts about certain of Klein's ideas. One expects resistance to orginality , but Klein's leading ideas about intrapsychic function have not been vindicated and psychoanalytic theory has taken another direction, while general psychiatry has hardly any place for them other than historical. Reactions from Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, Donald Winnicott, and especially John Bowlby would have helped to balance the presentation of Klein's insights. For example, in 'A Personal View of the Kleinian Contribution ' (1962) Winnicott calls Klein 'the fertilizing agent' of interwar psychoanalytic theory in Britain, yet says that she attributed too much innate psychopathology to the infant mind, almost neglecting the effect of 'good enough mothering' in a 'facilitating environment: as Winnicott terms them. In other words, Klein exaggerated pathological factors in infants and children at the expense of the normal; she indulged in fanciful conjectures especially about innate envy and projection of the 'death instinct,' giving a much more malign version of human nature than comes of empirical studies of mother-infant interaction. For instance, in 'Childhood Mourning and Its Implications for Psychiatry' (1961) John Bowlby took Klein to task for claiming a 'depressive position' in all infant development ; for Bowlby the issue in depression is one of actual separation from, perhaps loss of, the mother - opening inquiry about 'attachment' for which he is famous. Klein's neglect of environmental factors in producing childhood anxiety has...

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