ABSTRACT
In The Kleinian Development, Donald Meltzer noted psychoanalysis’ debt to philosophers such as E. Cassirer, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who “focussed on problems of symbol formation, notational systems, modes of thought, uses of ambiguity, the meaning of silences, the role of the musical versus the lexical level in communication. The “field” view of recurring emotional struggle supersedes, in post-Kleinian theory, the Kleinian “phase” theory of a developmental hurdle between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In Meltzer’s account, the replacement of “phase” by “field” is what allowed it to become evident that it was the “aesthetic response” that activated the symbolic realm. In The Kleinian Development, Meltzer says that psychoanalysis has its “historic roots more in philosophy and theology than in nineteenth-century science”. Wilfred Bion seems to have come to his concept of faith, as something necessary to alpha-function, via the Kierkegaardian route, recognizing that his initial attempts at being a Kleinian analyst were two-dimensional.
