ABSTRACT
In 1946, Klein returned to a consideration of the very first stages of mental development which she had studied in her analysis of the many young children she wrote about in her early papers. The working out of her view of the constellation of anxieties and defences which she had named the depressive position stimulated a re-theorisation of the very early infantile mental processes which preceded the more integrated emotional states she placed broadly in the second half of the first year of life. The more paranoid and schizoid anxieties of the beginning of life she now gathered in a unified concept of a paranoid-schizoid position. This more fully delineated range of psychic phenomena also made possible powerful links to severe forms of mental illness in adults, in the same way that the theory of the depressive position had illuminated manic-depressive and obsessional states. The roots of psychotic disorder, she suggested, are to be found in those anxieties and defences which are normal in early infancy but can become a source of major illness if development stalls.
