Reparation and thought

The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions can act as matrices for more advanced mental processes than those described here as protomental operations – that is to say, they can give rise to more complex functional structures, whose operationality has been described in terms of affects with which the subject relates to the world and, in particular, to the persons who can now be identified in it. These structures include what psychoanalysis has described as links or, often, ‘object relationships’ – that is, relationships of an affective type. The typical world of object relations in the paranoid-schizoid position appears to centre on the concern to preserve a nascent self. The objectrelations world formed in the depressive position, on the other hand, lays the foundations for regarding the different-from-self as other, which is endowed with a particularity now recognized by the newly acquired capacity to recognize reality. The internal objects now correspond more accurately to their external counterparts, while at the same time being distinct from them – and among the external objects, persons (the child’s caregivers) assume particular importance, while the internal objects that stand out owing to their greater intensity are those which, in affective terms, constitute links with persons. The concern to preserve the newly strengthened self can at this stage become a concern for objects, which are experienced as independent of the self. In the depressive position, this concern, although referred to the self (the ‘cherished’ objects), may become a concern for the object in itself, for the external object as signified by its internal counterpart, and, in particular, for the ‘objects’ that are persons. The foundations of the concern for the well-being, safety and happiness of the Other, and hence the goodness of the relationship with the Other, may be said to be laid at this stage. Winnicott (1958, 1965b) defines this as the phase of the ‘capacity for concern’ – that is, for care and solicitude. All this represents a qualitative leap in the child’s mental organization. The self now presents itself as the integration of the subject’s own parts and experiences and as the organizer of a dualistic world model (Money-Kyrle 1961) – that is, of a world inhabited both by a self and by other persons

(objects) endowed with a psychic reality of their own, which is made up of minds and feelings.1