[Undated]

It has just come to me that the mathematician is one who is capable of α and that it has this consequence: he can see the essential characters in, say, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, or the Oedipal situation, or primal scene, or any other. These situations, or complexes, are seen concretely and, at some point, in visual images. For example, Euclid’s geometrical patterns can easily be visual images that are made abstract. But the mathematician is able to produce abstractions, and signs for these abstractions, and can then replace the abstraction or its sign (reversing the direction of α) with a particular concretization.