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The assumption of the unity of the mind must have had, one would think, a fatal blow from Charcot and the hypnotists had it not been rescued by Freud with his view of the stratification of consciousness. But in his last years he came round to the view that the mind does in fact 'split itself into segments so isolated from one another that health and illness, for instance, can exist side by side in the individual personality. When Melanie Klein, in 1946, gave a new firmness to the concept of splitting in the personality, and thereby promoted the phenomenon of narcissism on to a structural rather than an instinctual plane, the consequences for the psycho-analytical model of the personality were extensive. First of all it brought the function of ‘attention’ into focus, and limited consciousness to what Freud had called “an organ for the perception of psychic qualities”. Consequently ‘narcissism’ could be viewed as an organisational phenomenon, bringing infantile parts of the personality into collusion against the authority, experience and values of the parental figures (internal, external in the family, or cultural representations of such figures). The directional implications of narcissism under the earlier Libido Theory were now transformed into ‘egocentricity’, a view of the world in which the self stands at the centre.
The social and political implications of Freud's findings underwent a drastic change. His ideas of Group Psychology, which had viewed the wide world as an extrapolation of the family and its dynamics, was no longer tenable. First, Melanie Klein's picture of narcissistic organisations brought the ‘gang’ into view, and then the momentous formulations of Bion on Basic Assumption Groups revealed tribal mentality at work in civilised forms. The result has been a widened and far more complex view of man, and with it the realisation among psycho-analysts that the method they were pursuing in their consulting rooms was too narrow in its range.
This narrowness,