Intimate Relationships: Pain and Joy

If human life, as the author argues, is a constant and desperate bid to compensate for our mortality, then the desire to love and to be loved is our greatest imagined panacea against the fact of our death. In modern Western society our problems have changed: now, with our stomachs full, our need to feel we are struggling to survive has become increasingly focussed on a growing dissatisfaction and insecurity in our personal relationships.

Drawing on her 35 years' experience as an individual and group psychotherapist, Mavis Klein here elaborates her original theory of five basic personality types, ten compound types, and fifteen ways in which the basic types interact with each other in our relationships to others. She clearly elucidates the behaviours that disguise our often self-induced pains, and how these pains can be transmuted into our greatest talents and joy. This book addresses the reality of the world we are so often unwilling to accept: the irrational and violent world of shame, doubt, guilt, fear, love and hate.