Klein Correspondence

[Giorgio Aguilar]

Since then, Klein has kept at it, and he delivered another volley today. I told him that if he continued in this way, I would publish our private email correspondence so that our readers could judge him for themselves. His latest effort has convinced me that I should make good on that promise.

The list of prominent people on the Left who are willing to behave unethically in order to silence others continues to grow. If nothing else, readers of this exchange will understand how much harm these people are doing to honest conversation, both in public and in private.

But your view, as I understand it, is that there really is no valid dispute here, or at least no valid dispute the article brings up. In that case, the relevant question is number two. This is a moral panic, an effort to silence, a refusal to follow where the evidence goes, an issue where people lose their critical faculties and fall into a braindead feel-goodism, etc. In some ways, which side of the debate you fall on seems to be taken here as a test of legitimacy: The academics who agree with you are taken seriously, whereas you dismiss someone like Nisbett, who has done a lot of research in this space, very quickly.

Well, that podcast intro was recorded after our first volley. You have begun to seem far less reasonable on this issue in the meantime. If I spoke about it publicly now, there would be much more heat.

We hope we have made it clear that a realistic acceptance of the facts about intelligence and genetics, tempered with an appreciation of the complexities and gaps in evidence and interpretation, does not commit the thoughtful scholar to Murrayism in either its right-leaning mainstream version or its more toxically racialist forms. We are absolute supporters of free speech in general and an open marketplace of ideas on campus in particular, but poorly informed scientific speculation should nevertheless be called out for what it is. Protest, when founded on genuine scientific understanding, is appropriate; silencing people is not.

The left has another lesson to learn as well. If people with progressive political values, who reject claims of genetic determinism and pseudoscientific racialist speculation, abdicate their responsibility to engage with the science of human abilities and the genetics of human behavior, the field will come to be dominated by those who do not share those values. Liberals need not deny that intelligence is a real thing or that IQ tests measure something real about intelligence, that individuals and groups differ in measured IQ, or that individual differences are heritable in complex ways.

The conviction that groups of people differ along important behavioral dimensions because of racial differences in their genetic endowment is an idea with a horrific recent history. Murray and Harris pepper their remarks with anodyne commitments to treating people as individuals, even people who happen to come from genetically benighted groups. But the burden of proof is surely on them to explain how the modern program of race science differs from the ones that have justified policies that inflicted great harm.

Material includes correspondence, diaries, drafts of letters and publications, case material, photographs, files on the controversies within the British Psychoanalytical Society, 1939-1944; family correspondence and literary fragments (in German).

The collection is not considered to be complete; Melanie Klein retained very little of what must surely have been a great deal of correspondence generated during the course of her life. Extensive case material kept by her survives, but there are obvious gaps. Similarly although manuscripts and draft versions of much of her work survive, these are not exhaustive.

Some of the material (PP/KLE/A.1-7) is not only in German but written in 'Deutschschrift', which is difficult to decipher, and some of the early correspondence of Moritz and Libussa (Deutsch) Reizes includes extensive passages in Yiddish. The detailed listing of this material was undertaken by Jens Lazarus from the Karl Sudhoff Institut, Leipzig. It now forms Section F.

Titles in this list in inverted commas are those which were on the actual covers of the files as they were found: file titles not in inverted commas have been assigned by the archivist. Square brackets indicate that the matter within them can be reasonably deduced, and are used for cross-references.

The papers of Melanie Klein were given to the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre (known as Archives and Manuscripts following its merger with Western Manuscripts in July 2000) in January 1984 by the Melanie Klein Trust. They had previously been stored at the home of Dr Hanna Segal, Chairman of the Trust.

Further accruals were received from Klein's biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, as well as Miss Joseph of the Klein Trust, who presented translations of letters, currently in the possession of Klein's descendants, which were made for biographical purposes.

Further additions to the collection include photographs of the unveiling of a plaque in Pitlochry to commemorate where the analysis described in Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis took place. These were presented by Dr Paul O'Farrell of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in 1987(Acc 273).

Additional material relating mainly to Klein's earlier life and family was received from her grandchildren via James MacGibbon acting for the Melanie Klein Trust in November 1990. This material consists mainly of personal and family correspondence; some of these letters (written in German) duplicate the translated letters already donated by the Klein Trustees.

Originals of drawings by 'Richard' reproduced in Narrative of a Child Analysis, and photocopies of her letters to Georg Brandes about the posthumous publication of her brother Emanuel Reizes's writings, from originals in the Royal Danish Library Copenhagen received via Elizabeth Spillius of the Melanie Klein Trust, May 2005.

Melanie Klein was an influential figure in the 'British school' of psychoanalysis, devising therapeutic techniques for children that had great impact on present methods of child care and rearing and making an important contribution to both the theory and technique of psychoanalysis.

She read her first paper, "The Development of a Child," to the Hungarian [Psychoanalytic] Society in 1919, and on the strength of that paper became a member of the Budapest Society. She stayed in Budapest until 1919, before separating from her husband, eventually divorcing him in 1922.

Klein's views on psychoanalysis of children conflicted with those of her contemporary, Anna Freud, Freud's views were adopted by the Berlin Psychoanalytical Society, who considered Klein's work to be "unorthodox."

In 1925 Klein gave her first paper on the technique of child analysis at a conference in Salzburg and was subsequently invited to give some lectures on child analysis in England in the same year; these six lectures formed the basis of the initial part of The Psycho-Analysis of Children, her first book, published in 1932.

The papers had been kept in reasonably good order and the 1961 catalogue of the papers held by the Klein Trustees (PP/KLE/A.165) was used as a guideline. However on sorting, certain anomalies of arrangement were discovered; furthermore there was one large parcel of unsorted material, much of which was eventually incorporated with the rest of the records. Duplicate material and a small amount of ephemera was discarded.

The Subjects, Organizations, and Research series contains subject files on various publications, research topics, projects, and organizations with which Klein worked. There is teaching and committee material from his time at the University of Pennsylvania, files on his presidency of the National Academy of Sciences, and a redacted version of the FBI's file on him.

The Project LINK series contains meeting and research material, reports, and audio recordings related to that project, for which Klein served as principal investigator along with Bert Hickman, Rudolf Rhomberg, and Aaron Gordon.

The Correspondence series contains letters, memos, and faxes received or written by Klein. Much of the correspondence was exchanged with colleagues in the field of economics, and reflects collaborative research endeavors.

Lawrence Robert Klein (1920-2013) was a white American academic economist who was born in Omaha, Nebraska and died in Galdwyne, Pennsylvania. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942, and studied under economist Paul Samuelson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing his PhD in 1944. In November 1944, Klein was recruited by the Cowles Commission as a research associate to work on the construction of a macroeconometric model of the US economy. Over the following years, he worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, and the Institute of Statistics at the University of Oxford, before accepting a position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958. He became the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Economics and Finance at the Wharton School in 1968 and retired in 1991. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1959 and was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1980.

With the purpose of providing a scientific tool for policy analysis and economic planning, Klein led and participated in various projects to build large-scale macroeconometric models in several countries. Some of these important projects were the Wharton School models, the SSRC-Brookings model, and the multinational Project LINK. Throughout his life, Klein also built a vast international network of collaborators, visiting and working with economists from all around the world since the late 1940s. In these early years, Klein went several times to Norway, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, where he met with Ragnar Frisch, Jan Tinbergen, and Richard Stone, among many others. Later on, during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Klein continued his international activity, visiting not only European countries, but also establishing important relations with economists in Japan, China, Australia, Israel, and Mexico, among other countries. His earlier enthusiasm about Marxist theory was later reflected in his interest on the possibilities of building large-scale macroeconometric models of Soviet countries. He and his wife, Sonia, had four children.

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