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The ideas that I discuss in this book have become so important to me that they are part of me, just as the language I speak is part of me. I can remember the excitement I felt on first reading Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott, whose work are the foci of this book. Their ideas represent creative elaborations of Freud's thinking. While Freud is interested in the symbolic meaning of dreams, Winnicott is interested in the experience of dreaming. Klein's concept of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions provides ideas concerning very early development (the earliest months of life), which is an aspect of human experience virtually untouched by Freud. Bion's elaboration of Klein's idea of projective identification revolutionises clinical practice in that it provides a way of understanding how two people—beginning with the mother and infant—think thoughts together that neither alone is able to think. Fairbairn contributed a conception of internal object relationships that is indispensible to contemporary thinking about the multiplicity of selves that each of us brings to our experience in the external world.
One first must learn psychoanalytic ideas from books and teachers, and then, after about a decade of practising psychoanalysis, one must forget what one has learned in order to develop a way of one's own to work with one's patients. This must not be rushed, for to do so would be akin to reinventing a wheel that doesn't work. After accruing much analytic experience, it may become possible for the analytic psychotherapist to generate his or her own ways of creating with the patient a genuinely personal conversation, one that is open and honest, a conversation that only these two people could have. If there is one principle of analytic practice that I value above all others, it is the idea that one must invent psychoanalysis with each of one's patients. What I mean by this is that I talk with each of my patients in a different way, with different tones of voice, diff