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More than one patient has said my technique is not Kleinian. I think there is substance in this. I would put it as follows: I consider that the behaviour of the patient is a palimpsest in which I can detect a number of layers of conduct. Since all those I detect must, by that very fact, be operating, conflicts are bound to occur through the conflicting views obtaining contemporaneous expression. In this way, the conflict that is so important to the patient's sufferings and to theories of dynamic psychology is, according to me, accidental and secondary to two different views of the same situation.
Winnicott says patients need to regress: Melanie Klein says they must not: I say they are regressed, and the regression should be observed and interpreted by the analyst without any need to compel the patient to become totally regressed before he can make the analyst observe and interpret the regression. But by itself my theory will not do. That is to say that the patient feels he gains by being able to say, for example, “I am only a junior analyst”. It seems to me that as I have stated it, it does not give due weight to the transference – and this is the objection that would be made. But it could, I think, easily prove only to be a matter of adjustment.