You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is an ambitious enterprise and many will think it very necessary. Perhaps only a fellow analyst of the same school can fully appreciate how formidable an undertaking it is. To convey the sense and vitality of essentially clinically based concepts with a scholarly approach to their place in the history of psychoanalytic ideas is to demand rigour in two dimensions and in the main Bob Hinshelwood has succeeded. The term ‘Kleinian Thought’ suggests a degree of coherence and uniformity which does not really correspond to the reality of the ‘thoughts’ of Kleinian analysts who are more individualistic than most and who make a virtue of having a ‘loose end’ approach to analytic theory. They tend as a group to distrust systematic approaches to theory and to use certain basic concepts such as the ‘Depressive Position’ simply as organising ideas. As a result other theories and observations proliferate around these often in the personal language of individuals who do not always relate them to the usage of their closest colleagues. An exception to that will illustrate what I mean. Roger Money Kyrle wrote that his concept of ‘imageless expectations’ and Wilfred Bion's notion of ‘preconceptions’ was probably the same and his customary modesty led him to adopt Bion's usage. In other cases some concepts arrived at with great clinical perspicuity and rigour are linked in a vital way to their clinical context and how exactly they relate to a closely related theory may well remain problematical. I think an example of this is Segal's theory of ‘symbolic function’ and Bion's ‘theory of thinking’ which were developed at the same time by colleagues who shared a common approach and who felt they were saying similar things. Hanna Segal like all her successors has incorporated a great deal of Bion's thinking into her own and yet I do not think that his formulation covers the ground delineated by her own concept of ‘symbolic equations’. It has become common to equate these ‘symbolic equat