Melanie Klein

`The book is very intimate; the first chapter on Klein's personal and professional life is extremely candid and enlightening.... Will be enjoyed by pre-professional students and psychoanalytically oriented theoreticians and practitioners' - Choice

Melanie Klein devoted her life to the study and treatment of children. She saw babies as capable of powerful emotions of love and hatred and traced some of the links between the relationships of earliest infancy and adult ways of relating to others through eating, sexuality and speech.

Her insights have influenced child-care practices and teaching for the last sixty years and her work, also influential in feminist theory, has led to a better understanding of psychotic processes and the part they play in `normal' behaviour. Julia Segal takes up the often controversial implications of Klein's work for counsellors and psychotherapists today and traces her influence on therapists in Britain and abroad.