ABSTRACT
'A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States' is a watershed in the development of Melanie Klein's thought. In this paper she introduces the entirely new concept of the depressive position. In The Psychoanalysis of Children, Klein had described a number of restitutive or reparative mechanisms, but it is only with her concept of the depressive position that she came to see reparation as playing a fundamental role in development. In her paper 'The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties', Klein describes the inter-relationship between the depressive position and the Oedipus complex. Klein's work on the depressive position is both a continuation of Sigmund Freud's and Karl Abraham's researches in that area and the culmination of her own work with children and adults. Klein's concept of the depressive position is obviously an extension of Abraham's 'primal depression', but she develops it considerably.
