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In 1956 Peggy Volkov, editor of the educational magazine The New Era, arranged a weekend when a Freudian, a Jungian, and an Adlerian were asked to give papers on what they felt their particular viewpoint could offer to schoolteachers.1 I chose to talk about Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, feeling it was the only possible way of presenting what I really wanted to say.
I remember now (1986) that I had sent a copy of this paper to Melanie Klein and that she had written back saying that she liked it, but why had I not mentioned the Depressive Position? I might have answered, but doubt if I did, first that I did not think it was the kind of paper for which technical terms would have been appropriate, and second that the Depressive Position is actually described, I should have thought, in Blake's quoting the text ‘And the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his friends’. However, the illustration (xviii) containing this text is not included in my paper.
‘Without contraries is no progression.’
When I tried to think how psychoanalytic ideas could best be put into a form that would make any sort of bridge between the experiences of the teacher and the experiences in the consulting room, I remembered Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job. It is now ten years since it first occurred to me that this series of engravings seemed to be dealing with the same kinds of facts about human