ABSTRACT
D. W. Winnicott wrote about the formation of a “true self” in a human being who begins life in a dyadic relationship with a mother, who hopefully can offer “primary maternal preoccupation” to facilitate her infant’s developmental growth into the state of having a “self”. In dialectic with this, Melanie Klein offers us a phenomenological theory that can be fleshed out in developmental terms, but which also offers us the poignancy of a theorist who has lived very close to the existential nature of human suffering. Winnicott’s journey to thinking about the capacity for concern definitely overlaps Klein’s thinking about feeling for oneself and about the subjectivity of the other, that is, the growth of empathy in the depressive position. Klein shows a similar dynamic in her own original work in “Envy and gratitude”. She proposes that the paranoid–schizoid position is a natural early developmental phenomenon that transforms at six months of life to the depressive position.
