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This panel set out to discuss what has happened to Kleinian ideas and the Klein group in recent years. Albert Mason of the Psychoanalytic Center of California opened the panel with a detailed and systematic account of the cohorts of psychoanalysts and their contributions in the generations after 1960. The concepts originated by Klein have been expanded in certain respects but not replaced. The basic tenets of (a) the origins and initial harshness of the super-ego, (b) object relations from birth or before, and (c) projection, introjection and identification as the fundamental processes of development, all remain. They have, however, developed in themselves in the course of application to psychotic patients, with the energetic investigation of the paranoid—schizoid position by Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion, and also in the application to understanding symbols and aesthetics (Segal), the nature of thinking (Bion), and to social studies (Elliott Jaques). Mason also included the development of the work of Kleinians in Los Angeles, following Bion's decade of residence there, notably James Grotstein's move towards intersubjectivity, Judith Mitrani's work on autistic states in adults as well as children, and Albert Mason's work on folie à deux.
He then listed the distinctive features of Kleinian thought and practice as they appear today:
The emphasis on the here-and-now
A stress in interpretations on functions rather than parts (particularly bodily ones)
The relationship between the paranoid—schizoid and depressive position states of mind
The constant fluctuation of those states analytically from session to session (even within a session)
The occurrence of paranoid—schizoid anxiety and defences as a fluctuating normal aspect of mature development
Rosenfeld's understanding of the psychotic's ‘living inside the object’
And Rosenfeld's development of a pathological organization when the negative aspects of the ego split off and attack and terrorize the infantile sel