ABSTRACT
In psychoanalysis, knowing about something often operates as a defence against knowing it in a deeper, emotional sense. The internal objects are employed against external, and external against internal, both for satisfaction and for security; desire is employed against hate and destructiveness; omnipotence against impotence, and even impotence against destructive omnipotence; phantasy against reality and reality against phantasy. Effective social change is likely to require analysis of the common anxieties and unconscious collusions underlying the social defences determining phantasy social relationships’. One among several interrelated ways of characterising the two-week residential conferences is that they are so arranged as to facilitate experiential learning about the ways in which group processes can generate psychotic anxieties and institutional defences against them. Melanie Klein is operating well and truly in the most primitive parts of the inner world, where dream symbolism meets up with primitive bodily functions and body parts.
