ABSTRACT
Kleinian theory has sometimes been understood as envisaging emotional growth as development beyond the splitting and part-object functioning of the paranoid-schizoid position to the ambivalence and whole-object functioning of the depressive position (Ps→D). In this view, Ps functioning is regarded as primitive in contrast to the maturity of D. But this perspective is itself a manifestation of splitting, viewing Ps as all-bad and D as all-good. A dialectical understanding recognizes the good as well as the bad in Ps and the bad as well as the good in D and seeks to synthesize what is creative and life-enhancing in both. Bion’s shift from writing Ps→D to writing Ps↔D only appears to do this. Bion's and Britton's conception of creativity as involving cycles of disintegration followed by reintegration involves a valid recapitulation of contributions by Kris, Winnicott and Loewald, but the association of the paranoid-schizoid position with fragmentation rather than order, and the depressive position with order and with depression, is called into question. Bion’s vision of psychopathology as attacks on linking needs to be supplemented by recognition that psychopathology equally entails attacks on de-linking or separating. In a truly dialectical perspective the “feminine” bias of the “linkers” is not replaced by the “masculine” bias of the “splitters,” but by a “bisexual” concept of mental evolution through cycles of integration, disintegration and reintegration on higher levels.
