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Recent articles by Kleinian-trained psychotherapists seem to show a resurgence of attention paid to the positive: a new, or perhaps I should say renewed, interest in the forces for good in the personality and the possible benignity of mental processes rather than in pathology and destructiveness.
For example, in her paper Beyond the Unpleasure Principle, Anne Alvarez (1988) asks us to look more carefully at the ways in which play contains the hopes and aspirations of children, and their capacity to have fun, rather than stressing only the way in which play is the evasion of reality.
Meira Likierman (1988) invites us to look at a little emphasised aspect of maternal psychic nourishment for the infant: mother's primitive, narcissistic positive projective identification that gives the baby an important experience of love and goodness being put into him.
In a different way, Anne Alvarez's paper on Latency (1989) is also in this category, by emphasising the healthy use of defences, the protective function of mechanisms which are very often, she seems to imply, automatically taken to be pathological and as needing to be removed in the analysis. She stresses that defences are at times necessary steps on the way to inner strength. (A telling example given in supervision was to look at a little boy's attempt to build a tower not as a defensive illusion that he was big and strong, but as a way of saying, “At least here I can have a go at being big and strong”.)
When I first heard or read these papers, it has to be admitted that amongst my appreciation I experienced some disquiet at the apparent assumption that Kleinian therapists would naturally see these positive elements very differently. There seemed to be an underlying assumption about “Kleinians” that was disturbing. Were we really not able to value the fun in play, to see the positive trying-out of roles rather than just the evasion of grim reality? Were we not aware that babies needed their mothers to idealise