ABSTRACT
As stated at the end of Chapter 6, the mind system can acquire the capacity to perform operations whereby it can distinguish representations or protorepresentations of external objects (which thus begin to be accepted into it by more specifically perceptual processes) from processes (feelings or protothoughts) of internal origin that relate to ‘those’ objects. In other words, the external objects are distinguished from the subject’s own internal processes (thoughts) so that the latter are experienced as constituting an initial self, which is no longer confused with the rest of the world. As a result, the subject’s own impulses of hate, rage, envy and aggression – that is, the ‘bad’ – are also felt to belong to the subject himself. So the presence of a bad self inside the subject must be tolerated. This incipient bad self, which becomes increasingly ramified through the use of fantasying based on functional models derived from bodily experience (see Chapter 8), assumes the form of the possible experience of attacking ‘the good objects’, chief among which are the subject’s own nascent mental capacities.1 This is the threshold of what used to be called the sense of guilt – or rather, of internal events describable as antecedents of an experience of guilt (cf. Section 7.4). It is the threshold of Klein’s ‘depressive position’, which she saw as the source of the possibility of good object relations (the capacity for love) and, on the basis of these, of good psychic development. In a further theoretical development of these ideas, the Bion school regards this position as the locus of the origin of ‘thought’, considered as a positive and decisive shift away from the evacuative psychotic processes (Ps → D) of the paranoid-schizoid situation. Let us now attempt to describe the depressive position in terms of our model – that is, by identifying the ‘cognitive operations’ inherent in it.
