ABSTRACT
I wish to draw on my experience as a psychoanalyst to describe a theme which comes over and over again in analytic work and which is always of great importance. It has to do with one of the roots of constructive activity. It has to do with the relationship between construction and destruction. You may immediately recognize this theme as one which has been developed chiefly by Melanie Klein who has gathered together her ideas on the subject under the heading 'the depressive position in emotional development' . Whether this is a good name or not is beside the point. The main thing is that psychoanalytic theory evolves all the time and it was Mrs Klein who took up the destructiveness that there is in human nature and started to make sense of it in psychoanalytic tenns. This was an important development that came in the decade after the First World War and many of us feel that our work could not have been done without this important addition to Freud's own statement of the emotional development of the human being. Melanie Klein's work extended Freud's own statement, and did not alter the analyst's way of working.
