Reply to Comment

I was glad to receive Dr Blum's helpful comments on my paper and to note how wide an area of mutual agreement there seems to be. Certain points, however, need elucidation.

I cannot believe that the concepts of the part-object, the whole object and the inner object are part of a ‘world-view’ as such, let alone one that is by today in the process of disappearing. In my view such concepts belong not so much to a Weltanschauung as such but are theoretical entities —in Stein's sense—arising in the first place out of consulting room experiences, and designed to promote the understanding and handling of experiences that are postulated to belong to stages in infantile perception and to influence the mode of many of our experiences in later life. For instance, the passage from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position is, in the first instance, made possible by, though not effected by, a development in the range of perception whereby an awareness of part-objects gives way to one of whole objects as well. Incidentally, a specific Jungian contribution to this theme must surely be to recognise in it the presence of an archetypal pattern, connected with the enlargement of perceptual range, and as relevant to the middle or the end of life as to its first appearance in the early months of infancy. Thus the ritual death-bed confession of sin expresses an ability even in extremis to move from the perception of man as a victim of circumstances to the enlarged one of his limited but real responsibility for his own destructiveness and the acceptance of forgiveness and repair. Object relations theory, incidentally, seems to me to be essentially implicit in any study of the movement from the original self through deintegration to reintegration. It is also important for the individuation process.

There also seems to be the idea, in Dr Blum's note, that I reject Freud's view of dreams as the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. I do not, thou