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INTRODUCTION TO PART II
Part I was not a history of psychoanalysis but a personal statement of a point of view about this history as background to what is now to follow. Part II is entirely made up of original contributions and the systematic tracing of their implications, in the light of Kleinian developments, for a revision of Sexual Theory. It will assume in the reader an intimate knowledge of psychoanalysis and its literature, and particularly of the work of Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal and the author.
While most Chapters of Part II contain extensive clinical exemplification of the theory described, a reading of “The Psycho-analytical Process” is probably essential to a full appreciation.
Those Chapters which have previously been published separately, namely Chapters 7, 9, 14, 15 and 20, have been left in their original form.
Surely, it will be said—and rightly—the analytic consulting room, in its heat of infantile intimacy, is not the place to study the social behaviour of adolescents. But it can, through clarification of the internal processes—of motivation and expectation, identification and alienation—throw a special and unparalleled light upon social processes to aid the sociologist, educator, psychiatrist, and all those persons of the adult community whose task it is to preserve the boundaries of the adolescent world and foster the growth and development of those still held within its vortex.
Our times reveal more clearly than other historical periods the truth of the existence of an “adolescent world” as a social structure, the inhabitants of which are the happy-unhappy multitude caught betwixt the “unsettling” of their latency period and the “settling” into adult life, the perimeter of which may not unreasonably be defined, from the descriptive point of view, as the establishment of mating and child rearing. From the metapsychological point of view of psycho-analysis, stripped as it is of social and moral evaluation, this passa