2. Aesthetic Conflict: Its Place in the Developmental Process

The evolution of the Model of the Mind which underlies the observation and thoughts of psycho-analysts has been a quiet and covert one in many respects but its nodal points are clearly marked by the progression Freud-Abraham-Klein-Bion. What began as a hydrostatic model for the distribution of psychic energy in the spirit of nineteenth century physics, gradually shifted its analogy. The emergence of the genetic aspect brought forth the archeological metaphor; the replacement of topography by structural imagery introduced a social comparison (the Ego serving three masters); the replacement of ‘mechanism’ by ‘unconscious phantasy’, the insistence on the ‘concreteness of psychic reality’ and the introduction of an ‘epistemophilic’ instint to replace Freud's ‘sexual researches of children’, shifted the biological model of the evolution of the individual mind from a Darwinian to a Lamarckian basis. By 1945 the Kleinian model had achieved this modification of the evolutionary simile of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, on the basis of a strengthened position for identification processes and thus of a view of development which emphasised relationship with objects rather than anything equivalent to survival of the fittest. Melanie Klein's 1946 paper ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, which introduced the ideas of projective identification and splitting processes, shattered the assumption of unity of the mind, which Freud had already begun to do in his paper ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Service of Defence’; it furthermore opened up a multiplication of the ‘worlds’ of mental life in a way that even the ‘concreteness of psychic reality’ had not envisaged. The Bionic transformation, which divides mental life into the symbolic and nonsymbolic areas (alpha-function and beta elements), and places its emphasis on the mind as an instrument for thinking about emotional experiences, has only began to be felt in the consulting rooms. But Bion's firm relegation of creative thought to