Discussion of Ronald Britton's Paper “Developmental Uncertainty versus Paranoid Regression”

It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to discuss this interesting paper by Ronald Britton on a subject, which is one of great topical relevance. He has provided us with an eloquent account of a psychoanalytic understanding of how our social and political world can, under certain circumstances, come under the powerful grip of paranoid forces, and the enormous destruction that can then be unleashed. His psychoanalytic thinking in this area is influenced by his considerable experience as a psychoanalytic clinician, working from within an orientation that is associated with the work of Melanie Klein, arguably the most important and influential psychoanalyst after Freud. As Ron tells us, Klein's theories have a great deal to say about the unconscious infantile origins of anxieties of a psychotic nature, and their vicissitudes, in all of us, including paranoid anxieties.

As he describes, in the earliest phase of development, which Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (Ps), the infant faced with the chaotic impact of internal and external stimuli attempts to create some order by engaging in a process of splitting whereby the object and self are each divided into an ideal representation and a bad one. By a process of projection the infant gets rid of what is painful or bad experience and places it outside itself and into its object, which has the consequence of increasing the badness of the object in the infant's mind. In a similar way good and constructive parts of the self may also be projected into a good object, which makes the latter more ideal but can also deprive the infant's ego of this good potential. If development proceeds well, accompanied by increasing cognitive maturity,