Even Better than the Real Thing*

Abstract The model of mind upon which Klein and Bion built their psychoanalytic theories profoundly limits an individual's access to the external world or other people. As a result, Klein and Bion posit the subject as imprisoned from the beginning of life in a solipsistic world of infantile phantasy. Such theories have paradoxically elevated the contents of the mind to a privileged status over perception, making what is in the mind even more “real” than the world as experienced, or relations with others. The mechanism of projective identification has been relied on to explain communication in the absence of a theory that permits anything we may today call “interaction.” Kleinian theory is contrasted with a relational orientation that emphasizes the primacy of immediate social relations in the constitution of the subject and as its source of freedom.

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