Elizabeth Spillius – författare

In Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius the author argues that her two professions, anthropology and psychoanalysis, have much in common, and explains how her background in anthropology led her on to a profound involvement in psychoanalysis and her establishment as a leading figure amongst Kleinian analysts.

Spillius describes what she regards as the important features of Kleinian thought and discusses the research she has carried out in Melanie Klein''s unpublished archive, including Klein''s views on projective identification.

Spillius''s own clinical ideas make up the last part of the book with papers on envy, phantasy, technique, the negative therapeutic reaction and otherness. Her writing has a clarity which is very particular to her; she conveys complicated ideas in a most straightforward manner, well illustrated with pertinent clinical material.

This book represents fifty years of the developing thought and scholarship of a talented and dedicated psychoanalyst.

In Encounters with Melanie Klein: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Spillius the author argues that her two professions, anthropology and psychoanalysis, have much in common, and explains how her background in anthropology led her on to a profound involvement in psychoanalysis and her establishment as a leading figure amongst Kleinian analysts.

Spillius describes what she regards as the important features of Kleinian thought and discusses the research she has carried out in Melanie Klein''s unpublished archive, including Klein''s views on projective identification.

Spillius''s own clinical ideas make up the last part of the book with papers on envy, phantasy, technique, the negative therapeutic reaction and otherness. Her writing has a clarity which is very particular to her; she conveys complicated ideas in a most straightforward manner, well illustrated with pertinent clinical material.

This book represents fifty years of the developing thought and scholarship of a talented and dedicated psychoanalyst.

In this book Elizabeth Spillius and Edna O''Shaughnessy explore the development of the concept of projective identification, which had important antecedents in the work of Freud and others, but was given a specific name and definition by Melanie Klein. They describe Klein''s published and unpublished views on the topic, and then consider the way the concept has been variously described, evolved, accepted, rejected and modified by analysts of different schools of thought and in various locations – Britain, Western Europe, North America and Latin America.

The authors believe that this unusually widespread interest in a particular concept and its varied ‘fate’ has occurred not only because of beliefs about its clinical usefulness in the psychoanalytic setting but also because projective identification is a universal aspect of human interaction and communication.

Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept will appeal to any psychoanalyst or psychotherapist who uses the ideas of transference and counter-transference, as well as to academics wanting further insight into the evolution of this concept as it moves between different cultures and countries.

In this book Elizabeth Spillius and Edna O''Shaughnessy explore the development of the concept of projective identification, which had important antecedents in the work of Freud and others, but was given a specific name and definition by Melanie Klein. They describe Klein''s published and unpublished views on the topic, and then consider the way the concept has been variously described, evolved, accepted, rejected and modified by analysts of different schools of thought and in various locations – Britain, Western Europe, North America and Latin America.

The authors believe that this unusually widespread interest in a particular concept and its varied ‘fate’ has occurred not only because of beliefs about its clinical usefulness in the psychoanalytic setting but also because projective identification is a universal aspect of human interaction and communication.

Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept will appeal to any psychoanalyst or psychotherapist who uses the ideas of transference and counter-transference, as well as to academics wanting further insight into the evolution of this concept as it moves between different cultures and countries.

Spanning six decades, this collection, Journeys in Psychoanalysis: The selected works of Elizabeth Spillius, traces the arc of her career from anthropology and entering psychoanalysis ‘almost by accident’, to becoming one of her generation’s leading scholars of Melanie Klein.

Born in 1924 in Ontario, Canada, Elizabeth arrived at the London School of Economics for postgraduate studies in the 1950s and soon embarked on a groundbreaking study of family life in the East End of London that produced a PhD and her first book, Family and Social Network, under her maiden name Elizabeth Bott. Published by the Tavistock Institute in 1957, it remains one of the most influential works published on the sociology of the family.

These papers are a testament to the luminous intellect and understated compassion that Elizabeth has always brought to her work. They vividly map not just the evolution of Elizabeth’s career but the development of Melanie Klein’s thought, often drawing in compelling fashion on the writer’s own experiences with her patients. Each is written with the clarity and concision that makes difficult concepts eminently comprehensible to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and laymen alike.