ABSTRACT
The relationship between the mechanisms of projective identification and the alternation of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions presents difficulties that seem due to an incompatibility. The ‘alternation between particularization and abstraction’ as a method of describing a theory is open to the objection that ‘abstrac-tion’ is a term that implies removal of a quality from something. The theory implicit in the representation of a pre-conception by a constant together with an unsaturated element has its conveni ence provided it is remembered that the sign is a representation of a complex realization. The genetic view of an abstraction differs from the conception of an abstraction as a representation of something that has been removed from something. A theory that such terms must be regarded as binding phenomena helps to dissipate contradictions inhering in the theory that an abstraction is something that has been removed from something else.
