ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a story, which is rooted in one particular psychoanalytic tradition, that of Kleinian and post-Kleinian thought, and it is embedded in work which the author has been doing for the last twenty-five years. A forward-looking emphasis on development, rather than a backward-looking one to possible sources of symptoms, characterized Melanie Klein's work from early on. She suggested that human development was less a matter of evolutionary progress from one psycho-sexual stage to the next, as Freud had suggested, than of different states of mind, each typified by particular defences, anxieties and qualities of relationship. The capacity to develop, to experience one's life in such a way that one can learn from it as well as about it, is rooted in an enormous range of interlocking factors for which psychoanalytic theory provides certain central concepts and descriptive mechanisms.
