The dialectically constituted/decentred subject of psychoanalysis. II. The contributions of Klein and Winnicott

The present paper focuses on the contributions of Klein and Winnicott to a psychoanalytic conception of the dialectically constituted and decentred subject. Klein's idea of 'positions' represents a conception of the subject constituted in the creative and negating dialectical interplay of fundamentally different modes of attributing meaning to experience. The Kleinian subject is decentred in psychological space and in psychoanalytic time. The concept of projective identification provides the elements of a theory of the creation of the subject in the context of a psychological-interpersonal dialectic. The subject for Winnicott is not coincident with the individual psyche: 'There is no such thing as an infant [apart from the mother]'. Winnicott's notion of the creation of the subject in the psychological space between mother and infant involves a conception of the on-going constitution of the subject in the simultaneity of forms of dialectical tension between at-one-ment and separateness, internality and externality, I and me, I and Thou.