ABSTRACT
We are familiar with the fact that Bion took Melanie Klein’s concept of projective identification and extended it to produce his theory of containment. He introduced the notion of normal projective identification as essential to development and distinguished this from pathological projective identification. However, we have not so clearly adjusted to the fact that Bion did something similar to Klein’s theory of the paranoidschizoid and depressive positions. If we follow the implications of Bion’s alternating Ps←→D and equate Ps and D with these two positions, then movement from the depressive position to the paranoid-schizoid position, as well as the other way round, is to be seen as part of a normal process of development. He wrote that where material emerges related to things unknown ‘Any attempt to cling to what [is known] must be resisted for the sake of achieving a state of mind analogous to the paranoid-schizoid position’ (Bion 1970:124). He was emphatic that this Ps state should be tolerated ‘until a pattern evolves’. This ‘evolved state’ he called D, ‘the analogue to the depressive position’, and he added that ‘the passage from one to the other may be very short…or it may be long’ (ibid.). He was concerned to distinguish his Ps from the pathological paranoid-schizoid position that Melanie Klein had described. To this end he suggested calling Ps patience and D security; neither of these terms has caught on.
