Description
A training analyst and Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Elizabeth Spillius was one of the world’s foremost Klein scholars. She is remembered for her clinical work, her teaching in the UK and abroad, her work in the Klein archive, and for the wealth of books and papers she produced over many years.
She was always interested in the evolution and fate of ideas, and retained her anthropological ability to reflect on Kleinian ideas and their development, rather than falling into the ever-present danger of becoming tribally wedded to them. She wrote about the evolution of Kleinian technique, and about variations in the way her colleagues past and present formulated their ideas and used them clinically.
Her sympathetic and scientific observing stance was always fresh and this was particularly important when working in a field where the superego can all too easily become vicious and omniscient.
