The Anxieties of the Paranoid- Schizoid Position Paranoid , Anxiety Persecutory

This week of the Narrative is an important one and brings up some very interesting problems, giving us the opportunity to investigate the history of the paranoid-schizoid position. It is again a week that has certain outside interferences. The mother is ill again and she goes home to visit Paul, while the nurse comes to look after Richard. He is furious about it, and by the end of the week he is ill himself and misses the Saturday session, and the next three sessions up to Thursday of the following week. It is a week in which his seductiveness and his placation and his trickiness are fairly in abeyance. Instead, what emerges is something very paranoid in the boy. In the context of much greater co-operation with Mrs Klein, he is able to admit to her something that must have been quite unknown, not only to Mrs Klein, but to his mother as well, absolutely secret, namely his paranoid fears of being poisoned by Cook and Bessie.