ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Melanie Klein's conceptions of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions in a more synoptic way. W. R. Bion's works represent a post-modernising expansion and extension of Klein's Positions. The chapter introduces the intersubjective aspects of psychoanalysis into Kleinian theory, and fundamentally altered the Kleinian conception of projective identification. Perhaps one of Klein's most unique contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique was her concept of the epigenesis of infant development from the perspective of emotional positions, which was an innovative advance on Sigmund Freud and K. Abraham's notion of stages and phases. Klein formulated two important positions of anxiety that occur in the infant—persecutory and depressive. Bion was to spend the rest of his professional life attempting to unravel the mysteries of transformation. Bion penetrated the Kleinian veil of logical positivism, and opened up her theories to the post-modern age of relativity, deconstruction, intersubjectivity, chaos, complexity, and indeterminacy.
