A Discussion of Salman Akhtar's “Things”

I welcome the opportunity to offer some comments on Dr. Akhtar's paper “Things: Developmental, Psychopathological, and Technical Aspects of Inanimate Objects.” Two separate lines of development for this topic are suggested by the author. One of them constitutes the main text. The other is briefly alluded to in the dedication, the two epigrams, and the concluding parable; their position at the beginning and at the end of the paper allows us to think that they assume a container-contained relationship to the main text (Bion, 1970). While the contained portion has been developed by Dr. Akhtar, I shall attempt to elaborate on the container aspects that are alluded to throughout his text but not explicitly conceptualized.

Dr. Akhtar presents us with an Ericksonian perspective, which stresses the notion of an ongoing development throughout the life cycle and the necessity to face the new challenges that each period of our life brings. This perspective is in line with and an extension of Freud's notion of orderly stages of development. It carries a clarity of exposition and allows for a widely embracing perspective. By its nature, it emphasizes linearity and the natural tendency to remain within the boundaries of a two-dimensional model. The notion of linearity contains a directionality that tends to be either progressive or regressive. It does not easily accommodate notions of transformations, that is to say, how the newly emerged element transforms what was there before and the shape it assumes as it meets what it finds, resulting in the configuration of a new entity.

Klein shows some aspects of this difficulty as she eschewed the notion of stages for the one of positions. But for some time it appeared that her positions were not clearly demarcated from their developmental perspective. Her emphasis on projective and introjective mechanisms, however, gradually added a different dimension to these mechanisms. Thus, projection for her includes that part of the ego that contai