The English grammatical formulation of psychoanalytic theories is one that employs a form in which succession plays the important role. ‘Dog bites man’ does not mean the same as ‘man bites dog’, and this gives a strong prejudicial colouration to all formulations in favour of the idea of events necessarily taking place successively – in the narrative formulation each event follows in a temporal order a preceding event, which follows another. In consequence it is supposed that mental events are similarly disposed in time – dreams, for example. But there is no real discussion of the importance attributed to ordered thinking that has any significance in the realms not of human thinking. The Kleinian paranoid-schizoid and depressive theories postulate another and quite different possibility.