Epilogue

Freud in ‘Mourning and melancholia’ stressed that the recovery of the lost good object relationship through mourning enabled that relationship to live in the internal world and support growth. Klein, whilst she gave the same emphasis, augmented this with her emphasis on the importance of reparation for damage done that reinstated the good elements.

In so many cases of psychopathology there is no accessible memory of the value of the good object relationship; instead that space is occupied by a harsh superego, idealisation and numerous other developments some of which I have mentioned in the papers in this book. What has struck me as common to all these conditions is that the gainful achieving relationship of valuing each other and getting to know each other, needing and helping each other, is overtaken by either omnipotence or the slavish worship of omnipotence.

However this has come about (for example, through deprivation, grievance, rivalry, envy, etc.), what I am underlining is the ubiquitous denial of the need for the good object. The slavish worship of omnipotence is the common denominator. I have described very different patients but they share this delusion. For example, the patient who ostensibly comes for help, but instead canvases the analyst’s love and admiration at the same time annihilating any belief that the analyst has anything to offer; or the obsessional who insists that his security in life depends on conforming to certain rituals and nothing else matters; or the schizophrenic who can maintain that he is Napoleon and/or Jesus Christ and in his paranoid delusion is convinced that he is robbed of recognition. In all these cases there is a persistent belief that a single object possesses all goodness and knowledge, etc. It follows that

there is no available human understanding (wisdom) that contains and helps to achieve and com