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A DETACHED HISTORIAN WILL SOME DAY be able to describe a natural history of the response of psychoanalysts to innovations. This may be similar to the response to the innovations that occur in other disciplines as well, but such group responses among psychoanalysts are intensified, perhaps, due to covert, unacknowledged identifications and counter-identifications with the attitudes held by one's training analyst—a much more complex relationship than exists between a student and a teacher. There is, initially, a period of polarization which may continue for generations. Gradually however, ideas that are clinically valid become unobtrusively incorporated into what is a generally accepted view, and the heretical source is conveniently forgotten. Something of this sort has happened with some of Melanie Klein's proposals. If one leaves her improbable time table of early psychic development aside, many of her observations have been quietly incorporated into the main stream of psychoanalytic thought: the importance of early ambivalence, the process of splitting and the significance of introjective and projective processes, and most important, the fact that a certain quantum of guilt will evoke the need to make restitution. Some authors who were in the main stream of psychoanalysis, such as Edith Jacobson (1964), did openly identify Melanie Klein as the source of some valued clinical observations, but others who also relied heavily on her work found it more politic to remain silent.
We know that theoretical and clinical studies of the self are within this first phase—issues are apt to be polarized and politicized. This process is compounded by an innate conservatism that treats innovative ideas as something to be guarded against. In the discussion that follows I shall propose that in addition to our customary