SOME OF BION'S IDEAS ON MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING

David Taylor
Bion described his four books, Learning From Experience (1962), Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963), Transformations (1965), and Attention and Interpretation (1970), as setting out a theory of psychoanalytic observation rather than psychoanalysis as such. This is similar to the way in which a philosopher of science tries to understand scientific method rather than being concerned directly with specific items of scientific knowledge. The philosopher of science uses particular experiments to illustrate the principles underlying scientific experiments, and in those four books that was Bion's method. His clinical examples were very schematic abstracts intended as reminders to an experienced readership. However, Bion's claim that he was not writing psychoanalysis was a little disingenuous. Many people have found Bion's illustrative observations of great value in their own right. In these illustrations he formulated clinical problems and phenomena, to use Bion's term ` configurations', which illuminate previously undescribed aspects of the personality. This work of Bion's also contains the basis of a psychoanalytic theory of meaning and understanding and this is the subject of this paper. I hope to show how these ideas can be helpful in clinical work with patients as well having general and theoretical interest. Of course, meaning and understanding are big subjects and the, therefore, incomplete theory of meaning that I will be describing will not touch on, for instance, philosophical or psycholinguistic aspects. I am taking a psychoanalytic theory of meaning and understanding to refer to the consideration of the role of emotional factors, especially infantile and primitive ones, in the development of meaning. By meaning I am intending two approximate, general senses. The first is that of general significance - how much, or how little, someone or something means to us. An example of this would be the phrase, `life has a great deal of meaning'. The second is the way in which systems of representation, be they language or pictures, can operate as carriers of information and in the specific context of this paper as vehicles of information about human experience. The various forms of that experience can have important effects upon these systems of representation. By the term understanding two things are intended. One is the emotional process where one person comes to understand another, and the second the process internal to an individual of `understanding', of discovering meaning. Bion's work was based upon Klein's ideas about the early relationship between the mother and infant, and the infant's fantasy life within that relationship. He repeatedly

DR DAVID TAYLOR is a Member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and a Consultant Psychotherapist in the Adult Department of the Tavistock Clinic. Address for correspondence: 120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA. This is a replacement for Dr Taylor's paper read at the Conference, `Learning and Some of its Problems' , which will be published next year in the Journal. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 14(1),1997 The author

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acknowledged his debt to Klein, in particular, his use of her ideas about the early Oedipus complex, the importance of envy as a factor in the personality, and the centrality of the shift from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. In `Notes on some schizoid mechanisms' Klein (1946) had introduced the concept of projective identification as an omnipotent fantasy of the infant's that a part of his personality could be split off and located in other objects, in the first instance, mother or parts of mother. For example, a baby who gets into a very hungry or desperate state may come to experience the breast as angry and demanding. A patient who was very angry at the beginning of a long break dreamt that his analyst was living on a hill by a track along which he was walking. The analyst was in a walled garden and was fiercely repelling the patient. Associations included that the analyst's stance resembled Betsy Trotwood in Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield when she was shooing off the donkeys as they strayed into her garden on the Downs above Dover. In these examples of projective identification the object's personality has become suffused by the emotional state of the subject and is experienced as possessing it. A number of writers, most notably, Segal (1964), have pointed out that Klein regarded projective identification as an intrapsychic mechanism and that the concept of projective identification had a relatively restricted role in her thinking. Later in her life, Klein became concerned about the over-use of the concept, especially as an excuse for not understanding what was going on in the patient, or as a support for claims that the patient was putting this or that feeling into the analyst. Bion was one of those who extended the notion of projective identification to include an interpersonal process in which the infant and, subsequently, the adult personality does actually convey aspects of experience and mental life to others by unconscious and often non-verbal means. A certain state or response is induced in the object. Bion described some of these notions in his famous model, `the idea of a container into which the object is projected and the object that can be projected into the container; the latter designated the contained'. (See, for example, Spillius (1988), Britton (1992), Anderson (1992) for descriptions of the development of these ideas.) The fact of projections being enacted, sometimes as communications, along with Bion's idea of the mother in some manner metabolizing and transforming raw experiences projected into her, is central to the theory of the process of understanding and the development of meaning. This model of mother-infant interaction informed a contemporaneous technical change in which increasing attention was paid to the fine details of the patient-analyst interaction; it has been realized that these may often be of considerable subtlety. It is frequently more possible to register the effects of projective identification as it operates in this context than it is to discern the means by which it is enacted. An example, drawn from Hamlet, will illustrate the link between the process of projection and the possibility of making sense of what is going on. At the beginning of the play Shakespeare depicts Hamlet's struggle to get to grips with, first, his father's death, and then his realization that his father died not of natural causes but was murdered by Claudius, his uncle and now his stepfather. His hatred of his mother's sexuality in her relationship with his uncle increases enormously. It is clear from the text that Hamlet cannot deal with all of this, and for this and other reasons he turns upon Ophelia, directing vehement and bewildering attacks upon her. Some of these just seem to spill out of him towards her. These attacks can be regarded as instances of verbal actions employed to effect the projection of overwhelming

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emotions. For example, Hamlet's exchange with Ophelia during the play within the play, when he says savagely to her:
I have heard of your paintings well enough. God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, and you lisp, you nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.' (Act III Sc. 1144-148)

or, a little later,

Hamlet: Ophelia: Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? No, my lord. Do you think I meant country matters?

and
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maiden's legs. (Act III Sc. II 110-117)

Hamlet is using his speech like a knife to wound Ophelia. He finds a weak spot, or I think more accurately that what he has within him finds a weak spot, and he assaults it at this point. The weak spot is the tender and conflicted nature of Ophelia's developing sexuality. This area is one of Hamlet's own injuries as a result of his mother's murderous infidelity. Ophelia's disturbance becomes more rooted and develops into a full-blown breakdown when Hamlet kills her father. Her own talk becomes whimsical, plaintive and meaningless, but as is remarked in the play:
Her Speech is nothing, Yet the unshaped use of it doth move The hearers to collection. They aim at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts, Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yields them, Indeed would make one think there might be thought, Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily. (Act IV Sc. V 7-13)

In this reading of the play, the substance, the murder of Hamlet's father, and then Gertrude's sexual relations with the murderer, the brother of her husband, could be viewed as the contained. Hamlet is the first container of these facts and cannot cope with them. Some of it he projects into Ophelia who, in a more catastrophic way, cannot manage; she becomes unable to talk sensibly and, eventually, is unable to live. In psychoanalytic treatments the nature of projective activities and the container of those activities play important roles in determining the overall character and quality of the treatment and how easy or difficult it is to understand and or arrive at meaning. Rey (1988) has described how patients do not only bring themselves to the treatment but also their objects, in this context, their `containers', into which their projections have previously been lodged. Putting these objects right is as important to the patient as their own state. When patients are described in this way as bringing their objects to a therapeutic relationship this most directly refers to the fact that patients are, consciously and

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unconsciously, preoccupied with their primary objects, with their state, their wellbeing. Also, patients have internalized representations of their parents and these influence how the analyst is perceived and reacted to. This is the basis of transference. But, in addition, the patient's objects, and these include traces of their earliest, most primitive interactions with primary objects, the breast, the quality of the mother and father in the earliest exchanges, will have left their traces by moulding in a most complex and pervasive way the patient and his feelings. The object's containing function as it assists or distorts the development of meaning will influence not only the content of the patient's feeling and mentation but also its form, its general characteristics such as clarity, general availability or endurance. Understanding the ways in which the patient's primary objects exert effects upon the form and structure of the personality is an important area of investigation in modern psychoanalysis. Currently available concepts, for example, identification, internalization and introjection, can only be regarded as headlines referring to a complex set of phenomena which require more elucidation. These phenomena span the frontiers of different disciplines, including psychoanalysis as such, the direct psychoanalytic observation of infants and children and developmental psychology insofar as it studies the actual or manifest exchanges of the mother-child interaction and the psychological exchange. Understanding the relationship between the contributions of these different methods of study is one of the most active areas of advance in developmental work. To indicate in approximate, metaphorical terms the sort of influence of the object upon the personality structure and function that I have in mind we may, for example, describe the feelings that emerge from a patient as possessing a certain shape. There may be a corresponding tendency that these affects may only be recognized by an object which has, in turn, the right `shape'. Images such as a key and a lock come to mind. In various ways the patient may gradually seek out and influence the nature of the analyst's response. Of course, the analyst is not passive in these procedures. And the analyst by noticing the reaction induced in him, what `shape' he gets into as he attempts to understand the patient, can also form some judgement about the nature of the patient's internal objects. Being aware of this `shape' can also, I think, be helpful in understanding why one patient is easy to understand and another difficult. This area of investigation is of especial interest when it is borne in mind that the primary object has, we believe, this important role in the development of the capacity to understand and be understood, in the development of a capacity to think and experience. A clinical illustration will connect the general subject of the influence of the object upon the personality with Bion's theory of containment. The patient, Mr A, was a 35yearold single man, working as a solicitor, who sought analysis because of difficulties in committing himself to a permanent relationship. He also felt that he was not sufficiently ' impactful' or forceful. In the analysis he brought dreams, associated to them and many of his comments were insightful, often impressively so, but he behaved in a very accommodating and restrained way. In this way the patient's impression of himself as insufficiently forceful and as not memorable was echoed in the analysis. In spite of diligent efforts by both analyst and patient little seemed to change in an enduring way. Important in this patient's background was that his mother had had a series of depressive episodes in his early childhood and was frequently absent. From the way the patient behaved in the analysis it made a great deal of sense to me to think of this

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patient as in some manner `not projecting'. At one level, he was so supportive of analytic work that no demands were made. Analytic work took place at a verbal level and certain profound issues were excluded or unavailable. Such work which did take place `did not mean much'. Neither did the patient `mean much'. From another angle, however, Mr A could be regarded as projecting most vividly the nature of his internal world. He is bringing his objects to the analysis with the revival of a mother-child relationship in which powerful and effective communication cannot take place. However, in the clinical situation itself I didn't find the idea that he was undemanding or not projecting very helpful because I could not convincingly discern any demands that Mr A was withholding. For instance, if I tried to interpret about his being undemanding he would acknowledge demands but we both knew that these demands, whilst not merely invented, were not forceful, nor were they memorable. Similarly, I wondered if the patient had protected his mother during his childhood and learnt that he could not make too many demands upon her, but again this wasn't very helpful because what he was protecting her from couldn't be found and when it could it wasn't convincing. Restraint and helpfulness were not the situation with the patient's girl-friend who was described by Mr A as immature, intolerant of reflection and guilt, as wanting physical comfort and sex, whilst evading awkward but real issues about whether the relationship was right or not, and what had gone on between the two of them. Mr A could not leave his girl-friend, but nor could he bring himself to make the relationship permanent. Distressing disputes occurred repeatedly and the situation seemed irresolvable. The patient's dilemma with his girl-friend was brought again and again, and his comments upon the girl-friend's character and behaviour appeared to be objective, devoid of triumph or projective qualities. They seemed rather sad and desperate. At the same time Mr A became more prone to depressions, in which he felt very bleak and empty and life seemed meaningless; sometimes these would be connected with difficulties with the girl-friend but sometimes they would not. In the sessions, especially when he was recounting the latest problem with the girl-friend, a desolate, hopeless and bleak atmosphere developed and I could find no interpretations which might bring a different perspective or state. This situation was difficult to tolerate, and I found myself sympathizing with the girlfriend's position, and under some pressure to behave as she did by complaining about Mr A' s discernment and truthfulness in noticing her problems. There was a tendency for my interpretations to become veiled complaints about this awkward capacity for discernment. Of course, many factors played a role in the intractability of this situation, and these included the patient's dread of being with a damaged object, guilt and sadomasochism. However, the aspect that I would like to focus upon concerns the absence felt in everybody involved of benevolence and tolerance which might have enabled the patient to soften the coolness of his judgement. I wondered if the patient had experienced his mother's absence as a demand upon him for selfcontrol, and with this type of object he had become profoundly identified. This might also explain some of the patient's anxieties about bodily contact and spontaneity; these problems were also manifest in the rather abstract disembodied quality to his thought and speech. This kind of object with which Mr A seemed to be identified did not permit emotional contact of a sort which would enable development. In this way the complex reaction

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to the repeated absences of the mother was evident in the analysis. So interpretations to the effect that the girl-friend represented split-off parts of Mr A produced little movement. However, when some of this understanding had begun to take shape, I interpreted that Mr A was bringing to the analysis a situation which he believed to be hopeless, and this was based upon his conviction that his girl-friend could not be helped by understanding, which in any case he felt he did not possess. That he also felt that he himself could never feel more decided or troublesome. I thought that he was expressing to me a profound hopelessness about the possibility of enduring difficult experiences and being helped through them. Mr A thought that this was correct. I think that this situation was linked with the mother's repeated absences and her state of mind. In the absence of a really benevolent, capable object within the patient it was difficult to produce interpretations which were connected with emotional meaning. Meaning could take place at a solely verbal level, but there was a sense of non-participation of key levels of the personality, including bodily activities which remained unintegrated. It was only when the analyst did what felt like work within himself - that an interpretation carrying some real significance was produced. When Bion considered that the infant's relationship with the mother's breast was essential to the development of meaning his formulation was of the mother's breast as a ` psychosomatic' breast. In this formulation, just as the breast is a source of milk so also it is experienced as the source of meaning. If the individual's primary objects are felt to be damaged, the individual will not feel supported internally and meaning cannot be maintained as the individual's world becomes more desolate and persecutory. Bion depicts an extreme case. He writes that since
in some contingencies the breast is not regarded as the source of meaning so much as meaning itself, the fantasy of having a damaged or annihilated breast severely compromises the existence of meaning. As a result there will be fears that meaning itself, as if it were matter, had ceased to exist.

Clinical manifestations of anxieties of this kind are not uncommon. In the first of our senses of meaning, that of experience possessing or lacking personal significance, for the infant the mother's breast is the linchpin of the meaning of life. Disorders in the infant's relationship with these aspects of the `breast' or `mother's' function are also reflected in subsequent difficulties with the manipulation of meaningful entities, distinguishing the symbolic from the literal, and more generally, in the building up of connections between different aspects of experience. For instance, in ordinary everyday life, connecting the present with the past, or in treatment, dreams with the transference, which then exist as an unnoticed, taken-for-granted, network resulting in communications having depth, resonance and a powerful capacity to hold attention. Difficulties and anxieties with the breast as a provider of meaning result in the absence of this network or it becomes distorted and meaning in its usual sense cannot be established or fully experienced. Meaning, then, is something which always has its earliest roots in an interaction and emotional exchange with primary objects. Bion, I think, suggests that meaning evolves as an aspect of dealing with experiences stirred up in that context. In this sense what matters is not only the objective truth of this or that meaning. Bion would say, for example, that it is not necessary for the meaning to have a `realization'. What matters also is the capacity of the particular meaning to process and deal with the emotional tensions, absences or anxieties which initiated it. Dealing with these

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tensions and absences involves facing the issues rather than evading them so reality does come in strongly at this level. This means that interpersonal meanings, whilst in some sense `invariant' (that is, representing something of the underlying situation), nevertheless need not always be legalistically or narrowly correct. In addition, the manner in which meanings are connected one with another is not necessarily causal; they are connected instead by the network which derives from the relationships from which they issue. That it is not necessary for meaning to have a realization in the external world does not imply that meaning, understanding, and knowledge are entirely arbitrary in their content. The individual also needs to be able to get a fairly realistic grasp upon the facts of life. And the ability of the personality to tolerate one of the facts of life, the absence of an object, was, for Bion, of great importance in development and in the stability of the personality. In the case of Mr A we saw how it was necessary to face that the work he and his analyst were doing often did not mean much and sometimes was meaningless. It was only on this foundation of the actual absence of meaning that some genuine understanding could arise. The experience of the absence of meaning is one of painful loss, and sometimes persecution, which becomes linked with the loss of the object as a whole and as a material or comforting thing. The connection between the toleration of loss and the development of the personality, the development of metaphor, symbolic thought and fantasy had been appreciated by many analysts before Bion. For example, within Bion's psychoanalytic heritage these ideas are present in Klein. Segal's (1957) work on symbols and symbolic equations spells out the clinical manifestations of problems with separating from the object and some of the processes necessary to the development of symbolic thought. However, Bion's contribution is particularly important because of its comprehensiveness and the highly original method he adopted. His ideas about the mother' s emotional function, and his description of the absent object being experienced as a present persecuting thing are parts of his contribution which are original. Claustro-agoraphobic patients are on the edge of the experience of absence in a way which illuminates the problem of dealing with these persecuting 'no-things' in interaction with `containers' of a particular kind. For example, Miss B, a young woman who had lost her father in traumatic circumstances, had developed quite pronounced claustroagoraphobic symptoms. Her symptoms worsened during holiday breaks, when she would often get into a crisis. She would find it impossible to travel in aeroplanes, which was sometimes necessary in her work, but also she would become unable to use lifts. In consultations during her crises all that would come across from her was a general agitation and anxiety. It would be very hard to find a specific content to her feelings. This problem, in which the deeper content of anxieties is unavailable, is characteristic of claustroagoraphobic patients. Bion suggested that the claustro-agoraphobic patient has an experience:
such as an infant might have when the breast is withdrawn, of facing emotions which are unknown, unrecognized as belonging to himself, and confused with an object which he but recently possessed.

This experience was what Bion described as the 'no-breast', the 'no-thing'. This is fundamentally an object belonging to the paranoid-schizoid state of mind. It is experienced as a present bad object rather than an absent good one. The claustro-

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agoraphobic patient's problem with being in open spaces arises because that space ` represents on the one hand, emotions which are felt to be indistinguishable from the "place where something was"'. Bion writes, `This is a space akin to the geometric realization from which Euclidean geometry is believed to derive'. In the claustrophobic form the patient cannot stay in an enclosed space, in the room, lift or aeroplane because it contains the absent object, the no-thing, the unbearable new feelings. In the agoraphobic form the patient cannot be in an open space because that is the space where the loved object was and its absence cannot be tolerated. This formulation of Bion's captures the dual aspect of the absent object for the claustro-agoraphobic patient. Its presence is feared just as its absence is feared. Both these feelings have an intricate relationship with the space which is felt to contain the experience. The use of terms and concepts belonging to other branches of knowledge, in this instance geometric, is very characteristic of Bion. By his use of the notions of empty space, lines without breadth, and points without extension Bion captures the dilemma and anxiety of the claustro-agoraphobic individual who cannot rest in one place. For these patients there is no way of thinking or tolerating the experience they find unbearable as their only container for this experience is a physical, empty, geometric space rather than a biological or emotional one. Continuing with his use of models from geometry Bion suggests, `the geometric transformation may be regarded as a representation, "detoxicated" (that is, with the painful emotional experience made bearable) of the same realization (but with the painful emotion expressed, by the intuitive psychoanalytic theory)' (Transformations, p. 125). This type of reasoning makes the much larger claim that geometry may have evolved as a discipline to deal with the emotional problems caused by the experience of the absence of objects. The terminologies and methods of algebra, arithmetic, painting, symbolic logic, religion are all used and adapted by Bion to suggest a comprehensive account of human thought. Bion summarized these ideas in the famous grid, which is a highly abbreviated statement of his theory of psychoanalytic observation. Examples of the use of the terms of other disciplines include, from mathematics, the terms alpha and beta functions, from symbolic logic and biology, the symbols for female and male, and from painting, the language of representation and perspective. So far, the role of projection, the nature of the container, the mother and other primary objects, and the capacity to tolerate the experience of the absent object have been discussed as parts of the process of understanding and as components of what meaning is. However, in addition to these factors, the mother has to do something to what the infant projects or communicates, just as the analyst or therapist has to do something with what the patient brings in order to understand him and arrive at meaning. B ion's solution to the problem of what the mother does is to suggest that she uses her reverie. Characteristically, Bion employs an ordinary term, reverie, in an unusual and surprising way. He defines reverie as
that state of mind which is open to the reception of any objects from the loved object, and is therefore capable of reception of the infant's projective identifications, whether they are felt by the infant to be good or bad. In short, reverie is a factor of the mother's alpha function. (Learning from Experience, p. 35)

Two brief examples will illustrate what Bion meant by the function of reverie in the process of understanding. The first example shows the process taking place in the mind of the therapist whilst the second illustrates the operation of reverie in the mind

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of the patient. The first example is of a very disturbed young man who came to a consultation saying that he felt that he was paranoid. He felt that people disliked him and was hyper-alert. As he said this he stopped and asked in an alarmed way, `Has this room got an echo?' In fact the room did have a slight echo but the patient, Mr C, was persecuted and hyper-alert. It emerged that he had a transient psychotic episode, as well as a very bad LSD trip, some two years ago. At that time he became very preoccupied with boxes and cupboards and had, in his confusion, been trying to find the meaning of life within them. So, he told me, he had broken into locked cupboards and drawers. Interestingly, throughout his life he has had a repetitive dream in which he is in a maze made up of various enclosures. In the enclosures he is looking for something which he cannot find, and often he is lost. In this patient's life violence had played quite a part. However, he tried to repudiate it. He also told me with some feeling that he felt his life had been okay until he had been 5 years old. He had been very happy being looked after very well by both of his parents. The problems had started when he had gone to school, where he felt he was bullied, and, in particular, a schoolmaster had attacked him. Being in the room with this patient was quite disturbing, as one was aware of his intense anxiety and odd perceptions. I noted the link with his dreams and the LSD trip, but I felt I could not understand how he perceived himself as being all right until the age of 5 years and what he meant by this and the way that things had gone wrong later. However, two hours after seeing him it came to me that perhaps school had been like suddenly facing a lot of feared rivals. There were certain biographical reasons for thinking this was the case and that Mr C had been faced with an influx of persecutory anxiety from which the overclose and idealized relationship with his parents had previously protected him. Also I thought that he might have had a lot of violent feelings that he had not been able to deal with. These had been projected into others and he had influenced them to attack him. As these ideas came to me I felt a sense of understanding and a freedom from the previous preoccupation and worry about not having been able to understand. I thought that what I thought might have been right. The second example comes from the patient described right at the beginning of the paper in order to illustrate projective identification. The patient had become angry with his analyst at the beginning of a prolonged separation. The patient, Mr D, was feeling very tense and hostile, feelings which were temporarily relieved one night when he dreamt of being in a park. Outside the park was a smart four-wheel-drive, off-the-road vehicle with tinted glass, whose windscreen and other parts were being violently attacked by a gang of youths, smashing it with a chair. The relief the patient felt following the dream seemed to be connected with a feeling that he had understood the dream as representing his attack upon the analyst. Relief was experienced because the dream was an index that the experience had been sufficiently detoxicated to be able to be dreamt and represented to himself. Paradoxically, although the content of the dream was so violent, the patient's feeling that the four-wheel-drive vehicle represented the analyst was also associated with relief because it meant a symbolic contact with the absent object. The dream was an outcome of the patient's reverie based upon an internalization of the analyst's prior work. The experience of preoccupation, sometimes unpleasant, the sense of something in one' s mind as being worked upon, the connections which seem to exist between a kind of preoccupation and dreaming are all, I think, captured by Bion's model. The veracity of the understanding comes, in part, from the fact that we know that we have gone

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through it. This lends authority to what we understand, in addition to the objectivity of the particular content and its internal coherence. This survey of Bion's ideas is partial and incomplete. The theory of meaning described is also fragmentary. Reactions to Bion's methods of thought vary greatly. Many find his thinking fascinating and captivating. Others are irritated by what can seem a mannered and precious way of indicating what might be spelt out more straightforwardly. There is a danger that these general ideas can be used as pseudoexplanations and that they can become a substitute for plain thinking. However, there Bion's style of thinking is intricately and suggestively linked with the picture of the human mind that he wished to present and suggest. I hope that this paper is something of an introduction to these important areas, many of which Bion was the first to notice, to formulate and endow with significance. References
Anderson, R. (Ed.) (1992) Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion, pp. 9-13. New Library of Psychoanalysis, London, Routledge. Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann. Bion, W.R. (1963) Elements of Psychoanalysis. London: Heinemann. Bion, W.R. (1965) Transformations. London: Heinemann. Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications. (All reprinted by H. Karnac Books, 1984.) Britton, R. (1992) Keeping things in mind, pp. 102-13 in Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion (Ed. Anderson, R.). New Library of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Klein, M. (1946) Notes on some schizoid mechanisms in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 3:1-24. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Rey, J.H. (1988) That which patients bring to analysis in Int. J. Psycho-Anal 69: 457-70. Segal, H. (1957) Notes on symbol formation in Int. J. Psycho-Anal 31: 391-7; also in The Work of Hanna Segal, New York: Jason Aronson, 1981. Segal, H. (1964) Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. London: Heinemann. Spillius, E. Bott (1988) Introduction (pp. 5-16) to Melanie Klein Today, Vol. 2. (Ed. Spillius, E. Bott). New Library of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.