ABSTRACT
The shift that took place in Wilfred R. Bion's later work is commonly thought to entail a departure from a traditional London Kleinian framework of thinking to something else. The growing emphasis on the importance of Bion's later thinking may downplay or blur Bion's important contributions to the foundations of traditional Kleinian thinking and practice. In Isaacs' "The nature and function of phantasy", the connection between phantasy and the state of one's mind is most clearly described. Klein's perspective on phantasy has a major impact not only on the understanding of the person, but also on the analytic situation. This chapter describes the dimensions of Klein's thinking and then turn to Bion's contribution, focusing on his "Attacks on linking". Klein's introduction of the concept of "projective identification", which centres on the phantasy of putting parts of oneself in the other, is intimately tied to these ideas. In "Attacks on linking", the phantasy of the mind centres on one major image of it.
