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This week of the Narrative is an important one and brings up some very interesting problems, giving us the opportunity to investigate the history of the paranoid-schizoid position. It is again a week that has certain outside interferences. The mother is ill again and she goes home to visit Paul, while the nurse comes to look after Richard. He is furious about it, and by the end of the week he is ill himself and misses the Saturday session, and the next three sessions up to Thursday of the following week. It is a week in which his seductiveness and his placation and his trickiness are fairly in abeyance. Instead, what emerges is something very paranoid in the boy. In the context of much greater co-operation with Mrs Klein, he is able to admit to her something that must have been quite unknown, not only to Mrs Klein, but to his mother as well, absolutely secret, namely his paranoid fears of being poisoned by Cook and Bessie.
The material develops on the heels of the previous week's work, with its extremely valuable dream about the fishes inviting Richard to dinner. Somehow the tension was lost a bit toward the end with the Empire drawings. But he returns this week more deeply involved in the transference, although Mrs Klein's technique does not quite take into account the increased engagement. She is still inclined to relate the material back to his mother and father and Paul and not to acknowledge its gathering towards herself. This gathering and intensification partly results from her planned trip to London hanging as a threat over the sessions. She has not given him a date yet. In contrast, his mother's illness seems to have very little impact on the material in spite of that little dream in which Richard is having his throat operated on three times.
What impact his mother's illness does have, along with her going back home to see Paul, is switched quickly to compound an increasing preoccupation with Mrs Klein, the danger of her being bombed, her relationships with J