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25th October 1966.
Dear Donald,
Thank you for your paper1 and the contribution it made to the scientific work of the Society. As I said before, I am glad you wrote on this subject. It was satisfactory from my point of view
that most of the speakers except Money-Kyrle were not Kleinians. From the chair one gets an over-all view of the functioning of the Society and it happens that if I look back on the last six scientific meetings the Kleinian contingent was either absent or else disappeared before the discussion in all the papers except that of Betty Joseph. As you remember, on that occasion the whole Kleinian contingent gathered together to give her support which she did not in fact need any more than you did.
I said I would like to write you about a few details and if I write now it will be simply a matter of bits and pieces. If I wait, however, I may find that there is too long an interval. Most of what I say will probably be critical because I am not writing to discuss what I feel to be good about your paper.
I really do feel worried about your reference in the middle of page 4 to dependence on the internal mother. I would like to suggest that this is sloppy thinking. The foundation of stable and healthy psychic structure is certainly related to a dependability of the internal mother, but this dependability is itself maintained by the individual. It is true that people spend their lives holding up the lamp-post that they are leaning against, but somewhere at the beginning there has to be a lamp-post on its own, otherwise, there is no introjection of dependability.
As I am writing this I can see that you may claim that the words dependence of the infantile parts of the self on the internal mother may be felt by you to cover this point, but I raise the matter because you bring in the word internal mother again near the top of page 6 and I felt that here you could have left out the word internal.
It seems to me that by exploiting to the full the useful concept of the i