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The view of the analytical process that I have utilized and written about these many years is one that stresses the resolution of confusional states as the necessary prelude to the threshold of the depressive position. Of the many types of confusion that can be given a name for descriptive purposes, all can be classified, for theoretical purposes, under the headings of geographic and zonal confusions. This has not only the advantage of orderliness, since the descriptive variations are fairly limitless, but also has a certain utility in the consulting room. For instance, to see good/bad confusions as the result of inadequate splitting-and-idealization has an imaginative appeal, but does not easily lend itself to clinical exemplification; on the other hand to define it as a zonal confusion, for instance faeces confused with penis, or as a consequence of projective identification, a bad part of the self having intruded into the paternal penis, finds immediate realization in dreams or children's play.
With the advent of the threshold of the depressive position, the truly genital oedipus complex makes its appearance on centre stage for the first time, having been so admixed with pregenital elements previously that the struggle towards acceptance of the combined object and the sacrosanct privacy of the nuptial chamber in psychic reality could not yet take shape. The reasons for this did not reside only in the various confusional states of the self but also in the state of the internal objects due to splitting of good from bad qualities, as for instance the top from the bottom of the maternal object, and by their contamination by projective identifications by split-off parts of the self. Both the improved integration of the internal parents and their clarification, or rehabilitation, by withdrawal of the intrusions are products of the analytic working through, that is, of the transference/countertransference process.
Under this model the phenomena of the consulting room with