Chapter III. The Schizophrenia Papers

It is perhaps difficult for people unaquainted with the use of the concepts of splitting and projective identification, as well as for those who have become perhaps a little blasé about them, to realize the electrifying impact of Mrs Klein's 1946 paper, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, upon the analysts who were working closely with her. With the notable exception of Bion's later work it could be said that the history of the next thirty years of research could be written in terms of the phenomenology and implications of these two seminal concepts.

Thus in approaching the papers written by Bion in the years 1953 to 1958 one immediately is struck by this aspect of the content in its application to the phenomena of the psychotic, and especially the schizophrenic patient. The 1950s were in a sense the heyday of psycho-analytical interest in the psychoses and the literature swells with contributions to their metapsychology and reports of successful treatment by psychological methods. In the latter category, especially the work done in America at that time by people like Frieda Fromm Reichmann, John Rosen, Milton Wexler; or in France by Mme Sechehaye, turned largely upon the modification of the psycho-analytical method to the treatment of these disorders. While this was intended to be an adaptation in the technical sense, by which means the analytical method had been made suitable to the treatment of children by Mrs Klein and Miss Freud, for instance, a great deal of methodological confusion reigned. It was not perhaps realized that, at least as far as Melanie Klein's adaptation of the method was concerned, the intention had been to alter nothing in the method, but to facilitate the means of communication available to the patient. This was not so true of Miss Freud's early work, largely on the basis of an assumption that the child would not be able to form a transference in the same sense as the adult patient. That assumption was based in turn upon a view of the transf