A Kleinian Point of View

As the title of this paper indicates, the views expressed here are my own and not meant to be representative of any fixed “Kleinian” body of opinion. Indeed I should hope that every analyst, of whatever theoretical persuasion, would have his own individual way of observing and understanding the analytic process. Having said this there is no gainsaying the fact that there are differences of opinion about the validity of cerain ideas common to the colleagues and pupils of Melanie Klein; although clinical discussion, at least in the British Society, indicates that these differences are generally fewer than supposed, especially amongst child analysts. Broadly speaking I would imagine that all analysts subscribe to the fundamental theories of Freud; namely the theory of the life and death instincts, the Oedipus complex, the pleaure-pain principle, and the transference. The additional theories of Melanie Klein centre around the notions of the paranoid/schizoid and depressive positions, and the concept of projective identification. In more recent years I myself have drawn on the views of Bion, especially with respect to the relationship between the container and the contained, and the consequent clinical agoraphobic/claustrophobic phenomena. Following Bion I would also add the importance of dualism and the oscillation between opposites, for example, between omnipotence and helplessness, omniscience and ignorance, infantile and adult, neurosis and psychosis, etc.

In this context I would prefer to use the word “personality” to the word “self” as it has always seemed to me that there has been a danger, in discussions