1st Edition

Journeys in Psychoanalysis The selected works of Elizabeth Spillius

By Elizabeth Spillius Copyright 2015
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Introduction; Asylum and Society; Clinical experiences of projective identification; On formulating clinical fact to a patient; Developments in Kleinian thought; Totem and Taboo and professional correctness; Conflict of goals in psychoanalysis; Understanding oneself and being understood; Melitta and her mother; Ten drawings by one of Melanie Klein’s child patients; Melanie Klein Today.

    Biography

    Elizabeth Spillius is a training analyst and Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

    ‘These papers of Elizabeth Spillius’s are typical of her in that they are both absolutely clear and clinically imaginative and sensitive.  She trained originally as an anthropologist, and she brings the same curiosity, warmth and intelligence to her work with patients and psychoanalytic institutions that she brought to Tongan society and to families in London’s East End.’  - Richard Rusbridger, Training Analyst, British Psychoanalytical Society