New Directions in Psycho-Analysis: The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour

The unifying argument is that infantile conflict is not a phase to be outgrown but a persistent structural pattern that shapes adult behaviour, including its pathological forms. The volume's subtitle—'The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour'—states the thesis explicitly. In Klein's framework, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions established in the first year of life determine whether the adult achieves stability or liability to illness, and two of Freud's great discoveries, the superego and the Oedipus complex, are rooted in these early periods . The essays test this claim across clinical psychoanalysis, applied psychoanalysis, and the psychoanalytic study of social processes. The book thus functions as a demonstration of the school's reach rather than a single authored argument.

The book is a revised reproduction of eleven essays from a special issue of The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis published in March 1952, dedicated to Melanie Klein on her seventieth birthday. To these were added ten more essays, including two by Klein herself, bringing the total to twenty-one . The contributors were analysts either associated with Klein's work from the beginning or numbered among her pupils. This assembly history matters: the volume is not a planned treatise but a commemorative collection that became a de facto statement of the Klein group's position during the period of the Controversial Discussions. Its coherence derives from shared concepts, not from coordinated authorship.

Projective identification is central to the volume's clinical papers, but it was introduced earlier—in Klein's 'Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms' (1946), and the crucial definitory phrase appeared in the 1952 version published in Developments in Psycho-Analysis . In the 1955 collection, contributors extend the concept. Paula Heimann's paper on countertransference encouraged analysts to use their affective responses to patients as a probe for understanding projective identifications, a position Klein herself rejected out of suspicion that analysts might attribute all their feelings to the patient . Herbert Rosenfeld's later work would distinguish communicative from destructive forms of the mechanism, but the groundwork is visible in these essays.

Joseph J. Michaels, reviewing in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in 1958, observed that one gets the impression the processes of the id and superego are elaborated to a much greater extent than those of the ego—a concentration that may account for the volume's relative neglect of ego psychology . He acknowledged many positive aspects in Klein's work and noted that considerable evaluation and validation remained to be done, adding that her pioneer work probably encouraged psychoanalysts to study and psychoanalyze psychotics . Michael Fordham reviewed the book in the Journal of Analytical Psychology in 1957 . The reviews thus register both the volume's clinical ambition and its theoretical imbalance.

The volume belongs to the immediate aftermath of the Controversial Discussions (1941–1945), the institutional conflict that reshaped British psychoanalysis into three groups: Kleinian, Anna Freudian, and Independent. By 1952, when the special journal issue appeared, the Klein group had consolidated its position, and the 1955 book presented that position to a wider audience. The collection's structure—clinical papers in Part One, applied papers in Part Two—demonstrates the school's dual claim: that Klein's discoveries are clinically grounded and that they extend beyond the consulting room into social theory. The essay on social systems as defence against persecutory and depressive anxiety is a notable example of this applied ambition .

The volume was first published in 1955 by Tavistock Publications in London, with an American edition by Basic Books in the same year, and a preface by Ernest Jones . It ran 534 pages with a portrait frontispiece. A Social Science Paperbacks edition appeared in 1971 . In 2001, Routledge reissued the volume as part of The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press, a facsimile reproduction of the original . A 1985 Karnac Books edition appeared under the Maresfield Library imprint . The volume has thus remained in print in various forms, though the Routledge facsimile is now the standard scholarly access point.