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Our world seems to be getting increasingly more complex. First Freud taught us that the mind was not a unitary entity, but that it could be divided into various components, each of which bore a dynamic relationship to the other. Then Klein showed us how the mind was not limited to the individual concerned, but that fragments of it seemed to be located in others as well. Then to compound things further, Bion talked about the dispersal of these fragments, not only in space, but in time as well!
The evolution of these ideas spawned numerous other notions as well. For instance, there appears to be a radical departure from the biological notion of development being linear and progressing from smaller and simpler organizations to larger and more complex organizations. Our conscious mind can be said to adhere to these biological principles, but the same cannot be said of its unconscious components. It appears we begin life with certain “givens,” which through experience are constantly coalescing and organizing themselves, only to disperse and fragment again. It is this ebb and flow of mental life that I am seeking to explore and describe. Clearly the term “development” is a misnomer in this context, because it carries connotations of linear progression. However, I will continue to use it for want of a better term.
From a structural point of view, as developed by the object relations school, there are basically two dimensions along which object relations can be described, spatial and affective. The third dimension, temporal, is beyond the scope of this paper.
The spatial relationship between objects can again be divided into degree of fragmentation, and distance between fragments.