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Pioneers in Object Relations Clinical Thinking:
Betty Joseph

“Melanie Klein used the term ‘position’ rather than ‘organization’, describing two positions-the paranoid-schizoid
and the depressive positions. The term 'position' implies an attitude of mind, a constellation of conjoint phantasies
and relationships to objects with characteristic anxieties and defenses. The notion of positions helps us, as a
framework, to orient ourselves in our listening to our patients. We need to get the feeling of the central position
in which his mind is currently operating-whether, for example, he is viewing his world, external and internal, more
from a depressive stance with a sense of responsibility, pain, and guilt that has to be dealt with or from a more
paranoid stance with much splitting off and projection of impulses and parts of the self and much fear, or
idealization, of objects, and flight from contact with psychic reality.”

“... discuss how we are using the concept of transference in our clinical work today. My stress will be on the idea
of transference as a framework, in which something is always going on, where there is always movement and activity.

Freud's ideas developed from seeing transference as an obstacle, to seeing it as an essential tool of the analytic
process, observing how the patient's relationships to their original objects were transferred, with all their richness,
to the person of the analyst. Strachey (1934), using Melanie Klein's discoveries on the way in which projection
and introjection colour and build up the individual's inner objects, showed that what is being transferred is not
primarily the external objects of the child's past, but the internal objects, and that the way that these objects
are constructed helps us to understand how the analytic process can produce change.”

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