Is psychoanalysis knowledge? Is psychoanalysis a science, or is it hermeneutics? Can clinical material be considered research data? Psychoanalysis is ambiguous about whether it is about meaning or about truth, and the relations between these two compelling experiences. Psychoanalysts often think of their work as closer to the humanities than to medical and natural science. The wider the gap between science and psychoanalysis appears, the more psychoanalysts feel pulled to something that respects subjectivity, the humanity of their patients themselves, and move away from the procedures of...

Melanie Klein was the most innovative and influential child psychoanalyst in the first half of the twentieth century. Introducing Melanie Klein explores her progressive ideas. Her concepts of the depressive position and the paranoid-schizoid position are now in common usage, and her work is studied by psychoanalysts the world over.