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THE CONCEPT of the depressive position is generally accepted as a valuable one for use in actual analytic work as well as in the attempt to describe the progress of normal emotional development. In the analyses that we do we can reach the guilt in its relation to aggressive and destructive impulses and ideas, and we can watch the urge to make reparation appear as the patient becomes able to account for, tolerate, and hold the guilt feeling. There are other roots for creativeness, but reparation provides an important link between the creative impulse and the life the patient leads. The attainment of a capacity for making reparation in respect of personal guilt is one of the most important steps in the development of the healthy human being, and we now wonder how we did analytic work before we consciously made use of this simple truth.
Clinically however we meet with a false reparation which is not specifically related to the patient's own guilt, and it is to this that I wish to refer. This false reparation appears through the patient's identification with the mother and the dominating factor is not the patient's own guilt but the mother's organized defence against depression and unconscious guilt.
It may be that by expanding my title in this way I have said enough: certainly I do not feel that the idea is original or that it needs laborious development. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to illustrate my meaning briefly.
For 25 years a pageant of clinical material has been passing in front of me in my hospital Out-Patients Department. In the course of the years there is not much change in the general pattern. One type of child I remember well from the beginning. This child is particularly delightful and often talented above the average. If a girl, she is sure to be attractively dressed and clean.