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[Synopsis and notes of a paper given at a joint meeting of the Los Angeles Psycho-Analytic Society and Institute, and the Southern California Psycho-Analytic Society on 20 April 1967 in the Mount Sinai Hospital Auditorium. There is no record of the actual presentation.]
The Kleinian theory of the paranoid-schizoid position and its dynamic relationship with the depressive position can be seen to indicate a configuration that is constantly encountered in the realm of thought. I have drawn attention to the recurrence of this pattern in Learning from Experience. I shall indicate what I mean by two quotations, neither from psychoanalysts, which display it. The first is from a mathematician, Henri Poincaré, in Science and Method; the second from Eric Temple Bell in a chapter on Cause from his book, Men of Mathematics.
If a new result is to have any value, it must unite elements long since known, but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other, and suddenly introduce order where the appearance of disorder reigned. Then it enables us to see at a glance each of these elements in the place it occupies in the whole. Not only is the new fact valuable on its own account, but it alone gives a value to the old facts it unites. Our mind is frail as our senses are; it would lose itself in the complexity of the world if that complexity were not harmonious; like the short-sighted, it would only see the details, and would be obliged to forget each of these details before examining the next, because it would be incapable of taking in the whole.
… the theory of numbers, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been a miscellaneous aggregation of disconnected special results, assumed coherence and rose to the dignity of a mathematical science on a par with algebra, analysis and geometry.