[Undated - 1960]: α and Paranoid-Schizoid Position. Cogitations

To what extent is the constant transition from paranoid-schizoid to depressive position and back again the essential mechanism of learning throughout life? As I listen to a patient, am I not all the time thinking that I see ‘the point’, and then rejecting it to reassume paranoid-schizoid? And is this not a kind of regurgitation? A chewing of the contemplative cud? Should that not be the visual image – a cow, milk-and-calf producer, chewing the cud? It means then that in the chaos of unconnected incoherent facts I see ‘the point’ – the selected fact. If I am wise, I reject it and reassume chaos. I select another fact, or the same one. I reject it and reassume paranoid-schizoid position. And may not this also give rise to situations in which the patient appears enviously to reject an interpretation that he accepted the day before? (Melanie Klein, ‘Envy and Gratitude’, pp. 183-184.) That is to say that as well as envy it may be an example of failure to return to paranoid-schizoid, and a wish to make the analyst do so; he has to feel that the whole of the mass of discrete objects has again lost its coherence and cohesion.

The difficulty that the schizophrenic patient has in extricating himself from a state of mind means that he tends to have great difficulty in the rapid change from Ps to D that is necessary for α. This contributes to the analyst's impression of lack of progress because the slowness of oscillation hinders realization of oscillation. That is to say that the successful interpretation brings relief but takes the patient into the depressive position and confronts him with yet wider vistas of uncoordinated elements. In the next session he starts where he left off – he can do nothing towards returning to Ps and back to D. In other words, he is displaying a slowness of reaction comparable with the slowness of change at the beginning of analysis when the same mood may remain unchanged for months.