Why Read Klein? explores the importance of Melanie Klein’s work to contemporary psychoanalysis, her contributions as a key early psychoanalyst and continued influence on contemporary psychoanalysts.

Why read Melanie Klein? And why today? These are the questions that illuminate this book. Thinking about the transmission of Klein’s legacy leads directly to the effects which her writings have been producing and to the infinity of authors that have followed her around the world. It is, therefore, a seminal work, whose conceptions contain seeds of future thoughts, arousing, nourishing, and creating a living posterity. There is no doubt that the reach of an author is measured in their posterity, in their ability to nourish thought and arouse new forms of therapeutic action and conceptual understandings. Driven by all this fecundity of Klein, we present, in this book, the reverberations of her work in various authors, classic and contemporary.

This book is essential reading for both practicing and in training psychoanalysts and psychotherapists seeking a comprehensive understanding of Klein’s work and its relevance to contemporary clinical thought.