ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that psychotic mechanisms operate through the fragmentation of a prior unity, and this fragmentation is linked to the breakdown of our capacity for symbolic representation. The fragmented capacity to make connections in accordance with the reality principle is phenomenologically experienced in a fragmented way. Psychoanalysis is essentially a psychology of motive. Melanie Kleinian theory has given rise to a distinctive psychoanalytic theory of thinking, in the work of Kleinian psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. The interaction between analyst and patient can be understood on Bion's model of the earliest interpersonal connection, which effected through projective identification. Bion gives a classification of the stages of thinking, whose order indicates a developmental progression: preconceptions, conceptions and concepts. 'The conception is initiated by the conjunction of a preconception with a realisation'. The realisation is some object which the preconception unites with; the preconception is a predisposition of the mental apparatus to find a certain kind of object, and is innate.
