• DOI:10.1002/J.2167-4086.2009.TB00431.X
• Corpus ID: 37917026

Melitta and Her Mother

@article{Spillius2009MelittaAH,
  title={Melitta and Her Mother},
  author={Elizabeth Bott Spillius},
  journal={The Psychoanalytic Quarterly},
  year={2009},
  volume={78},
  pages={1147 - 1166}
}

• E. Spillius
• Published 1 October 2009
• Psychology
• The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

I wonder what American readers thought about Melitta Schmideberg’s paper “‘After the Analysis . . .’” when it was first published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1938. Perhaps they saw it as a judicious description of the somewhat unrealistic expectations of analysts and patients about the benefits of psychoanalysis. British readers in 1938, especially psychoanalytic ones, would have seen it very differently. Watching the wrangles in their formerly peaceful psychoanalytic society, they would have recognized it as a very much toned-down version of a savage attack on Melanie Klein by her daughter, Melitta. In a letter to James Strachey, Joan Riviere, a close colleague of Klein, describes her own reaction to Melitta’s first presentation of “After the Analysis—Some Phantasies of Patients” to the British Psychoanalytical Society in February 1937: “Melitta read a really shocking paper on Wednesday, personally attacking Mrs. Klein and her followers and simply saying we were all bad analysts—indescribable” (Grosskurth 1986, p. 229). In her paper, Melitta describes the way patients may have unrealistic ideas about analysis, but the implication is that some analysts encourage such idealization. “In his over-valuation of analysis the patient often repeats his attitude to religion,” she says (Schmideberg 1938, p. 1132), and “these ideas are sometimes increased through the attitude of the analyst when for example the analyst displays an over-estimation of ana-