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Ingrid Newstadt introduced the panel's interest in London Kleinian conceptualizations regarding clinical narcissism as understood by the panellists who represented the three IPA continental regions. One over-riding question related to the main theme of the IPA Chicago Congress: is an inter-regional dialogue possible on the various ways in which Kleinian thought regarding narcissism is articulated in the UK, North and South America?
In terms of covering both Abraham and Klein's work, the panel began with Robert Hinshelwood's paper, which described their work and how it set a framing context for later London Kleinian contributions. Klein carried on Abraham's commitment to investigate deeper, unconscious ‘primitive’ mechanisms' associated with the earliest years of life. Klein's emphasis was more on a ‘psychotogenic’ layer from which both neurotic and psychotic disorders develop. Unlike the American ego psychological approach, which evolved from a more ‘neurotogenic’ matrix, Kleinians focus (in Hinshelwood's view) on the “… incapacities of the ego, rather more than the conflicts within the ego.” This includes “… narcissistic issues, akin to psychotic functioning and other difficult personality problems.” This idea was strengthened by the considerable amount of clinical and conceptual work done on psychosis by the Kleinians in the 1940s and 1950s.
Hinshelwood elaborated how Klein expanded Freud's (1914) notion of narcissism, where the patient oscillated between ‘narcissistic’ and ‘object-related’ poles of experience as represented in the ‘paranoid—schizoid’ and ‘depressive’ positions. While Hinshelwood also endorsed an inter-regional discussion of varying perspectives on narcissism, he remained cautious about the risk of oversimplifying comparisons between the London Kleinian formulations and the work of analytic authors from other regions. Bringing together diverse points of view can also lend itself to neglecting an “unrecognized diversity of underlying assumptions.”
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