ABSTRACT
This chapter closely analyses Klein’s two famous papers on manic-depressive states, written five years apart. She inherited legacies from Freud as well as her two analysts and bequeathed to psychoanalysis in turn a new temporal order for the psyche as organized according to successive but also reversible positions rather than stages. She also created a complex inner world populated by phantasy representations of external objects and set up, as the goal of mourning and the depressive position, the continual, Sisyphean need to re-establish and repair the good internal object. Though these contributions to the psychoanalytic internal world and the nature of mourning are inordinately valuable, it is argued that Klein did not develop a sufficiently cogent theory of the internal processing of loss, conceived as an at least potentially more successful enterprise. This is discussed in terms of both a certain hypostasis or concreteness and the dearth of a digestive or metabolic perspective in Klein’s thinking. The coda of the chapter suggests that although Klein gestured towards such thinking in a later paper, within the Kleinian school it was Bion who contributed an explicit analogical figuration of the developing mind in digestive terms.
