[discuss] Melanie Klein's differentiation of two basic groupings of anxieties and defences, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions / describe what she meant by these terms and in the process illustrate how useful they can be when we try to orientate ourselves towards our patients in a clinical setting / suggest that more recent work enables us to refine these concepts and to subdivide each of the positions to produce a more detailed developmental continuum which retains the dynamic notion of an equilibrium
in the paranoid-schizoid position anxieties of a primitive nature threaten the immature ego and lead to the mobilization of primitive defences / the depressive position represents an important developmental advance in which whole objects begin to be recognized and ambivalent impulses become directed towards the primary object (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)