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separate, diminishes. These are the beginnings of the depressive position. Maturation is thus closely linked to loss and mourning; as Roger Money-Kyrle (1955) points out, Klein’s theory has a built-in, natural morality based on love and guilt, which is discovered during the course of development rather than taught. Recognition of the other as separate from oneself encompasses the other’s relationships, which means that awareness of the oedipal situation inevitably accompanies the depressive position. Ronald Britton (1989, 1992) goes on to show in more detail how the depressive position and the Oedipus complex are not just developmentally concurrent, but that working through one necessarily entails working through the other. In the paranoid schizoid position Klein (1932, 1952a) posits the phantasy of a fearful and persecuting ‘combined parent figure’: the maternal body containing the father’s penis and rival babies. This primitive version of a couple, phantasised as in continuous intercourse, exhibits sadistic oral, urethral and anal features due to projections of infantile sexuality and sadism. In the depressive position, however, there is an awareness of a true third object, internal and external, which although giving rise to feelings of jealousy and envy, also adds stability to the internal situation. “The infant’s capacity to enjoy at the same time the relation to both parents, which is an important feature in his mental life and conflicts with his desires, prompted by jealousy and anxiety, to separate them, depends on his feeling that they are separate individuals. This more integrated relation to the parents (which is different from the compulsive need to keep the parents apart from one another and to prevent their sexual intercourse) implies a greater understanding of their relation to one another and is a precondition for the infant’s hope that he can bring them together and unite them in a happy way (Klein 1952c p. 79f, fn).” If development proceeds normally the good, loved object is increasingly established inside as the stable core of the ego. However, depressive pain may be unbearable, and is often countered by manic and obsessional defences, and by retreat to the splitting and paranoia of the paranoid schizoid position. The depressive position is not a once and for all achievement, but has to be worked through over and over again throughout life, although in good circumstances there is a lifelong trajectory towards a deeper, more three-dimensional relationship to self and other, and a greater capacity for re-integration after collapse into a paranoid schizoid mode of being. Klein describes the process of increasing perception of reality thus: “It seems that at this stage of development the unification of external and internal, loved and hated, real and imaginary objects is carried out in such a way that each step in the unification leads again to a renewed splitting in the imagos. But, as the adaptation to the external world increases, this splitting is carried out on planes which gradually become increasingly nearer and nearer to reality. This goes on until love for the real and the internalised objects and trust in them are well established.” (Klein 1935, p 288)
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