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If a formula, or rather a calculus, is available, it may bring order to events that otherwise appear to lack any relationship. Thus a patient makes two remarks, and then makes two more; they appear to be entirely without any connecting link. It could be said that the two remarks, together with the other two remarks, make four remarks, and therefore that these facts could be seen to be related to each other in that together they made four facts. But it would be very unlikely that the mathematical application had served to effect the illumination of a relatedness of any consequence. Nor is it easy to see how, as things are at present, any calculus that has been constructed, or is likely to be constructed in the near future, would illuminate the relatedness of a series of disjointed associations of the kind with which we are familiar in analysis, particularly perhaps in the analysis of a psychotic patient. Moreover, it has to be remembered that we are always concerned with seeing the relatedness of the apparently disjointed and unconnected aspect of the elements in the analytic situation; the observation that two remarks and two other remarks make four remarks produces no flash of recognition because it effects no illumination of the point of intersection between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.
I use this phrase deliberately so as to emphasize a peculiarity in the use I am making of these two Kleinian concepts. I am here regarding them as comprising classes of events, and I am suggesting that no interpretation is of value unless at the moment at which it is given it involves, partly through the element of contrast which is inseparable from the juxtaposition, the illumination of the disorder of scattered, familiar, and apparently unrelated elements, and the order, cohesion, and relatedness of those same elements. Furthermore, this interpretation is not psychoanalytically effective unless, when given, it is common sense, i.e. one that involves agreement in two