ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how two interrelated ideas from Melanie Klein's pioneering work in child analysis have been developed to become core parts of the contemporary Kleinian development of S. Freud's work. It deals with Klein's description of something she referred to initially simply as a projective process, followed by her description of two configurations occurring in the mental life of all human infants, continuing to operate throughout life. The chapter shows how the ideas were expanded by Wilfred Bion to form clinical tools for use in adult and child analysis, and for the study of group and institutional processes. For Klein, anxiety, and how it was managed by the early ego, was at the core of psychoanalysis. For Bion, container-contained extends Klein's concept of projective identification by taking it as being effected into a containing object, and expands upon it.
