PS<=>D was a psychodynamic process worked out by Melanie Klein. Melanie Klein was an analysand of Freud who worked with children and severely disturbed adults. Her thinking diverged from Freud's and she was at the center of what are called "The Great Controversies". She and Anna Freud, Freud's daughter, were in serious disagreement and the politics caused a huge division in the psycho-analytic community in London.

Klein's work forms the basis of what referred to as object relations theory. In a very loose way, this deals with how individuals develop whole and complete understandings of themselves in relation to others and the world. Development is described in terms of creating whole objects. Klein created the concept of "positions", which are an internal stance that characterized the state of the process. One position is the "paranoid-schizoid" position. The other is called the "depressive" position. PS<=>D is a brief notation for the movement between these two positions. In the paranoid-schizoid position, the object is not "whole". Parts of it are "split-off" and disconnected. In other words, a realistic or useful level of understanding has not been achieved. The parts that are split off are those that are too painful to integrate.

Klein's clinical work led here to hypothesize that this occurs very early on in development and, in particular, during the early experiences of breast feeding and maternal care when the infant is faced with the terrifying and inexplicable feeling of hunger and the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the breast. The infant is scared to death when what it needs is not there. The depressive position is achieved as the infant learns to accept and tolerate the discomfort. It develops the capacity to tolerate (depress) the suffering and sense of loss. The theory asserts that this occurs prior to the onset of the oedipal complex in which the small child must learn to tolerate and understand the relationship between parents and his or her self. The success of the infant and child in resolving these perplexing problems involving intense feelings is hypothesized to have life long effects.

The PS<=>D oscillation is thought to occur throughout life as we encounter difficult and perplexing situations and work to resolve them. The psycho-analytic concept of "projection" is one of the ways in which intolerable feelings are split off and assigned, incorrectly, to someone or something else. There are other psycho-analytic concepts like this which were developed by or had their origin in Klein's work.

W.R. Bion was an analysand of Klein. He arrived on the scene in the midst of all the political controversies. His thinking and writing tended to be more abstract and he was reluctant to become embroiled in the disputes. He had been a tank commander in WW I and knew a war when he saw it. Whereas Freud's concepts were presented in a kind of mechanistic language sometimes referred to as "psychophysics", Klein used words that denote powerful emotions or violence, for example, envy, gratitude, and splitting, to emphasize the primal nature of what was occurring. Bion started working out more abstract methods of thinking about what was occurring. He developed something he called an instrument and named the "Grid". It is a two dimensional table that helped him think about how sensations, etc. develop into coherent thoughts by undergoing transformations. He deliberately and explicitly developed concepts with names like alpha and beta so that they did not carry any particular "baggage" and could be then assigned a meaning appropriate to the context. He was very aware that psycho-analytic theory was in its infancy so he made no formal theoretical claims about these concepts. The were basically part of a heuristic method he used in his work.

Jacques Lacan was also an analysand of Freud. Later in his life he went back and re-interpreted Freud's work using the ideas of the linguist Saussure whose theory is referred to as semiotics, or the study of signs. Roughly, this deals with the distinction between a sign and what it represents. It has been a while since I read some of Lacan's work but it is the relationship between the Freud's "System Unconscious" and language as articulated by Lacan that seems worth further investigation particularly with regard to the work of Lakoff and Johnson on embodied metaphor. Note that semiotics and embodied metaphor are quite different ways of thinking about language and communication.

Carl Jung was, at one point, Freud's designated successor as the leader of the psycho-analytic movement. A falling out occurred because of differences in opinion around the centrality of the Oedipal Complex. Freud's view was that resolution of the oedipal complex was the defining event in the development of the personality. Jung disagreed and started what he called analytic psychology. He was intensely interested in all myths and symbols and was impressed by the remarkable similarities between the myths of different cultures. His book, Man and His Symbols, illustrates the kind of evidence he examined while developing his theories. Some of his more well-known concepts are the collective unconscious - dynamic patterns of social organization that affect all individuals and form and shape culture, the archetype - embedded formulations of particular aspects of the self, e.g., the animus and anima, guides and tricksters, and synchronicity - an acausal connecting principal or the relevance of meaning in events that seem more than coincidental but for which no cause and effect relationship can be provided.

There are other individuals, such as Harry Stack Sullivan, who might be classified as psychodynamicists but who are not particularly associated with any school. Harold F. Searles, who did extensive work with schizophrenics, is another name that comes to mind. Despite the ongoing controversies and strong disagreements, all these theorists and practitioners can be classified as healers - although even that is debated. Freud and Jung, for whatever else one might think of them and their theories, have had a major impact on our culture both in the sense of shaping the course of psychotherapeutic theory and technique and in the interpretation and analysis of culture itself. To say that they lacked genuine insight into human nature would be to ignore a significant portion of the history of the 20^th century.

Corbett Williams

San Francisco, California