ABSTRACT
The English grammatical formulation of psycho-analytic theories is one that employs a form in which succession plays the important role. ‘Dog bites man’ does not mean the same as ‘man bites dog’, and this gives a strong prejudicial colouration to all formulations in favour of the idea of events necessarily taking place successively—in the narrative formulation each event follows in a temporal order a preceding event, which follows another. In consequence it is supposed that mental events are similarly disposed in time—dreams, for example. But there is no real discussion of the importance attributed to ordered thinking that has any significance in the realms not of human thinking. The Kleinian paranoid-schizoid and depressive theories postulate another and quite different possibility.
