ABSTRACT
During the hegemony of the paranoid-schizoid position, which is characterized by the emergence and predominance of persecutory anxiety, mother's presence seems to keep the infant's experience of bad objects at bay. The infant must await the attainment of the depressive position to be able to contemplate true aloneness—that is, to be able to tolerate mother's absence without the gap having to be filled. According to the Kleinian point of view, the analytic infant believes that, if mother truly loved and cared for him, she would never have left him alone in the first place. Bion (1965) differentiates between the infant who can tolerate frustration and the one who cannot. Klein's and Bion's explanation for the negative aspects of the concretized "no-breast" lies in the infant's projective identification of its own hostility towards mother's absence into this image.
