Concept
Paranoid-schizoid position
Klein's name for the earliest organisation of the infant's mind, which she set out fully in 1946, adding Fairbairn's word schizoid to her earlier paranoid position. Under the pressure of fear of annihilation, the infant splits its objects and itself into wholly good and wholly bad parts, projects bad parts outward and feels persecuted by them, and protects the good by keeping the two apart. The position gives way, though never for good, to the depressive position, in which whole objects can be loved and hated at once.
Development
1946
introduced by Melanie Klein
In Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946)
1986
reworked by Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden read Klein's positions as modes of generating experience rather than developmental phases. In the paranoid-schizoid mode the self is experienced as an object to which things happen. He later set it in dialectical tension with the depressive and autistic-contiguous modes.
In The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue (1986);The Primitive Edge of Experience (1989)
Relations
introduced by
- 1946 Melanie Klein
derives from
- 1946 Splitting
Klein built the earliest position on splitting. The schizoid in its name refers to splitting of the object and the ego, the defence against persecutory anxiety by which the infant keeps the good breast apart from the bad.
- Schizoid position
Klein's concept took its name, in part, from Fairbairn's schizoid position, but kept her own account of the death drive and early anxiety.
gave rise to
- 1952 Basic assumption
In 'Group dynamics: a re-view' (1952) Bion traced the basic assumptions to a primitive part-object scene tied to the psychotic anxieties, splitting and projective identification of Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.
- 1989 Autistic-contiguous position
Ogden modelled the new position on Klein's idea of a position and placed it beneath the paranoid-schizoid as a third, more primitive mode. The three stand in dialectical relation rather than in sequence.
reworked by
- 1986 Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden read Klein's positions as modes of generating experience rather than developmental phases. In the paranoid-schizoid mode the self is experienced as an object to which things happen. He later set it in dialectical tension with the depressive and autistic-contiguous modes.
diverged into
- Aesthetic conflict
Meltzer reverses Klein's order of development: the infant's first experience is an aesthetic, depressive-like response to the mother's beauty, and the splitting of the paranoid-schizoid position is a defensive retreat from the pain of that conflict.
Works
- 1946
Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms
First published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1946 and reprinted, revised, in Developments in Psycho-Analysis (1952), this paper is Melanie Klein's account of the months that precede the depressive position she had described in the 1930s. In this earliest phase the infant's anxiety is predominantly persecutory and its defences predominantly schizoid; Klein names it the paranoid position, adding the term schizoid, which she takes from Ronald Fairbairn, and from 1952 calls it the paranoid-schizoid position. She holds that an ego capable of anxiety, defence and object relations exists from birth but lacks cohesion, and that its primary anxiety is a fear of annihilation arising from the death instinct within, which it deflects outward and then meets as persecution. Its chief defence is splitting: the object, at first the breast, is divided into a good and a bad one, and since the ego cannot split the object without being split itself, the same division runs through the self, sustained by idealisation, denial and omnipotent phantasies of annihilating what is bad. Klein here describes projective identification, the phantasy of forcing split-off parts of the self into the mother in order to harm, possess and control her, so that she comes to be felt as those parts; good parts of the self are projected too, which is necessary for good object relations but, in excess, depletes the ego. The paper traces how these mechanisms colour schizoid object relations and the transference, with their detachment and splitting-off of feeling, and argues that when persecutory anxiety and splitting are too strong the depressive position cannot be worked through, so that the fixation points of schizophrenia lie in this first position and are bound up with those of manic-depressive illness. Klein discusses Fairbairn's work at length, accepting much of his account of schizoid phenomena while objecting to his neglect of anxiety, aggression and the death instinct.
- 1961
Experiences in Groups and Other Papers
Bion's book gathers his writings on groups from the 1940s and early 1950s. It opens with a 'Pre-view', the 1943 Lancet paper written with John Rickman on the first Northfield experiment, in which Bion ran the training wing of a military psychiatric hospital so that the soldiers' own disorganisation became a problem for the group to study and tackle. At its centre are seven papers, first published in Human Relations between 1948 and 1951, on the small therapeutic and study groups he took at the Tavistock Clinic after the war. There Bion declined the leadership the members expected of him and addressed his interpretations to the group as a whole, watching how it treated him and the task it had met for. From these observations he concluded that every group works on two levels at once. As a work group it cooperates on its declared task, keeps in touch with reality and can learn from experience; at the same time it behaves as if its members shared one of three unspoken basic assumptions: that they have met to depend on a leader who will sustain them, to fight an enemy or flee from it, or to pair off in the hope that a saviour will be born. Each basic assumption carries its own emotions and calls for its own kind of leader; only one is active at a time, and the others are held in what he calls a protomental system, where bodily and mental events are not yet told apart. Individuals combine with these assumptions spontaneously, in proportion to what he names their valency, and the group mentality they produce runs against their individual aims and against development. Certain institutions, he suggests, are work groups that harness one assumption for a task: the Church dependence, the army fight-flight, the aristocracy pairing. The closing 'Re-view', 'Group dynamics: a re-view' (1952), restates these findings in the light of Melanie Klein's work: basic-assumption life is a defence against the psychotic anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, the group evokes very primitive phantasies about the mother's body, and the therapist's sense of being made to play a part in the group's phantasy is explained by projective identification. In dialogue with Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Bion argues that group phenomena are not created by bringing people together but are latent in every person, who is by nature a group animal, and that the family pattern Freud found in groups overlies more primitive mechanisms.
- 1988
The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art and Violence
Written with Meg Harris Williams, the book proposes that mental development begins not in persecution but in the infant's overwhelming response to the beauty of the mother. This aesthetic conflict lies between her outward beauty, open to the senses, and her interior, which is enigmatic and can only be imagined. Withdrawal from the conflict underlies many later disturbances, while the capacity to bear it underlies thinking, art and the analytic relationship. Williams's chapters read the conflict in poetry and literature. Its publisher describes the book as a family project of Martha Harris, her daughters Meg and Morag, and Meltzer.
- 1989
On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position
Ogden reads the British object-relations thinking of the preceding two decades as having begun to explore forms of experience lying outside those described by Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn and Bion, and proposes for them the concept of an autistic-contiguous position, more primitive than both the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions. The three stand in dialectical relation, each creating, preserving and negating the others. The autistic-contiguous position is a sensation-dominated, pre-symbolic mode of generating experience, which supplies much of experience's sense of boundedness and an early sense of the place where experience occurs. Its characteristic anxiety is an unspeakable terror that this boundedness will dissolve, felt as leaking, falling or dissolving into endless, shapeless space. With clinical illustrations, the paper discusses the position's principal defences, its ways of organising experience, its forms of object relatedness and its avenues of psychological change.
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- 2005
See also
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References
- Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms1946Evidence for a relation
- The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue1986Evidence for a relation
- The Primitive Edge of Experience1989Evidence for a relation
- On the Concept of an Autistic-Contiguous Position1989Evidence for a relation
- The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art and Violence1988Evidence for a relation
- Basic Assumption2005Evidence for a relation
- Experiences in Groups and Other Papers1961Evidence for a relation