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This situation has gradually begun to change in the last four decades, as a number of Latin American trained Kleinians have emigrated to the US and Canada and have begun to assume positions of influence in their local analytic societies. This state of affairs has proven to be an obstacle to a truly Kleinian development in North America, as well as an opportunity. Lacking a strong culture and tradition of Kleinian thought, North Americans who studied Klein and became ’Kleinian friendly’ and ‘Kleinian influenced’ have perhaps been freer to adapt and apply Klein and neo-Kleinian ideas than their more orthodox Kleinian trained colleagues in other regions. James Grotstein, an internationally recognized authority on Klein and Bion, who extended their conceptualizations of projective identification in his ‘projective trans-identification’ concept (Grotstein, 2005, 2008); and Thomas Ogden (1980, 1982, 1992a,b), who presented his own creative synthesis of Klein, Fairbairn, Bion and Winnicott while exploring deep fluid structures of (conscious and unconscious) experience and knowledge are most notable examples. It is due to such developments that many North American analysts appear to appreciate the concepts of Projective Identification and/or Containment (see the separate entries PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION and CONTAINMENT), even if at times only as an unconscious interpersonal process of induction. North American Kleinians have attempted to follow and employ the Kleinian notion of unconscious phantasy as a fundamental complex of animated representations of wished for, feared or imagined transactions between self and object that constitute, structure and inform one’s internal world . One could justly call this the “ dramatic point of view ” and see it as an addition to the more classical points of view – dynamic, topographic, economic, genetic, and structural – of Freudian metapsychology. Thus seen, unconscious phantasy plays a most important role in the understanding of the patient’s behaviors, feelings and character and transference may be seen as a manifestation or externalization of unconscious phantasy and the royal road to its understanding. For some, however, there is the reservation of Klein’s objection to this idea as potentially blaming the patient for the analyst’s countertransference problem. The influence of Bion’s thought in North America derives in part from his many years of his latter part of life in California, where a group of American analysts were directly exposed to his teaching. In addition to Grotstein and Ogden, also Harold Boris (1986, 1989), who brought Bion’s thinking to Boston, remained influential sources of Bioninan thinking throughout North America. It is believed that Bion decided to come to America in order to free himself from the inevitable pressures that follow from belonging to a group, the Klein group of London, to which he had become a leading contributor. As indicated in his later writings, he felt that membership within a group – and even more so, prominence of the kind that he had attained – inevitably produced pressures that led to conformity and stasis, rather than the continued creation and discovery of new ideas. This tendency and the struggles between the ‘Mystic’ (creative individual) and the ‘Establishment’ (the group) was something that he was aware of, warned about and struggled against all of his life.
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