New Beginning and the Paranoid and the Depressive Syndromes

Nearly all the papers in this number of the Journal are by those of Mrs. Klein's colleagues or pupils whose approach to psycho-analysis is known to be strongly influenced by her theoretical conclusions, so that their work will be widely taken as representative of hers. We are glad to include this paper by one old colleague and friend who had appreciated her work from the beginning. But we feel it should be made clear that his views on certain basic points are not the same as hers.

The divergence concerns the rôle of unconscious phantasy and early development, and so naturally also affects psycho-analytic procedure. It may be illustrated by one example:

Dr. Balint, unlike Mrs. Klein, believes there is a phase of primary object love in which aggressiveness, and the persecutory anxieties aroused by it, do not yet play an important rôle. But it is perhaps less about the priority than about the distorting influence of aggression that, in our view, far reaching differences lie. To Mrs. Klein, aggression inevitably distorts the child's picture of the world, making him feel attacked with hatred whenever he is at all thwarted or deprived. Early environment may do much to increase, or lessen, this sense of persecution; but a 'bad' home does not create it, nor does a good one prevent it from appearing.

To Dr. Balint, however, persecutory feelings seem to be something which, in a good home, would hardly arise at all.

A more extreme form of this view, and of the technique which corresponds to it, was originally adopted by Ferenczi. And, although Dr. Balint does not go as far as he did, the same objections would we think be made by Mrs. Klein to both: namely, that there is an over-emphasis on external factors which leads to an underrating of internal ones, and so to an underrating of the power of primary unconscious phantasies.

It follows from Mrs. Klein's views on the primary importance of the paranoid-schizoid position that with every patient it will reappear i