ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the basic building blocks of human character, development, pathology and psychotherapy to be our relentless pursuit to establish and maintain loving connections with others. Temporal issues play a starring role in the experience of splitting during our earliest days of development, which are organized psychically in the paranoid/schizoid position. Experiences organized in the paranoid/schizoid position do not contain ambivalence. Likewise, the primary anxiety experienced by the child at this point in time shifts from annihilation to ambivalence. Fear of annihilation is unbearably dreadful; ambivalence is painful. The chapter proposes that Fairbairn did not distinguish between the splitting processes of our earliest psychic organizations in the paranoid/schizoid position, and the integration processes of the depressive position. The primary anxiety accompanying the paranoid/schizoid position is annihilation, while the primary anxiety of the depressive position is ambivalence.
