You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this monograph, published originally for the Melanie Klein Trust, the author depicts psychoanalytic phenomena from a novel point of view: as elements that fit into a grid. This is, to the reviewer, a kind of psychological Mendeléyevian table of elements in which the ordinate or vertical axis is represented by categories of thought or emotion arranged in the order of shift from primary to secondary process (the primitive to the most abstract thought) and the abscissa or horizontal axis by a set of functions or uses to which the thought or emotion is put. This reviewer finds himself unable to assess the value of this approach, since it depends not only on prior knowledge and definition of Kleinian concepts but also on familiarity with previous works by Bion. For example, he writes: 'I have already discussed the signs L, H, and K in Learning from Experience… The realizations from which they have been abstracted are usually represented by the terms "love", "hate", and "know". Using the notation R derived from the word "reason" … and I derived from the word "idea" and all realizations it represents including those represented by "thought", I is to represent psychoanalytical objects composed of a-elements, the products of