#Resource Melanie Klein's name for the achievement — usually in the first year — of holding the **whole object**, the mother who feeds *and* the mother who withholds, in one mind, instead of splitting her into a good breast and a bad one (the splitting itself runs on [[Introjection and Projection]]). A *position*, not a stage anyone leaves behind: everyone oscillates all their life between it and the paranoid-schizoid position of splitting and persecution. Health is mobility between the two, not arrival. ## What Turns on It - **Ambivalence borne.** Love and hate for the same person felt together, without the phantasy of destroying her. - **Loss and guilt.** If the bad breast one hated was in fact the whole mother one loved, she has been damaged in phantasy — depressive anxiety in its normal form: loss of the object, guilt for the damage, mourning in miniature. - **Reparation.** The urge to repair and restore what was attacked becomes, in Klein's account, the root of all creativity: one makes beautiful things to put the good object safely back into the world ([[Reparation]]). This is the hinge [[Anton Ehrenzweig]] borrows for Leonardo — creation as the answer to the death-fixation, reparation done repeatedly rather than the paranoiac repeat. - **The non-utilitarian attitude.** R. D. Money-Kyrle (1961) drew out the aesthetic consequence: seeing the object as real, separate, and *not for use* — the depressive position's way of regarding the world, which is Kant's disinterested attention from the inside ([[Immanuel Kant]], [[Sublime]]). ## And the Sublime The [[Sublime]] through this lens is terrifying nature made beautiful by a mind that has integrated its own terror — the survived mother become the motherly mountain. And art in a damaged world — the painted storm, art in collapse — is reparation of the endangered good object: see [[The Motherliness of Nature]]. ## In the Forest - [[Melanie Klein]] · [[Anton Ehrenzweig]] · [[Introjection and Projection]] · [[Sublime]] · [[The Uncanny]] - [[Depression]] — the clinical name Klein borrowed and recharged; related, not the same thing. - [[Grief]] — mourning as the lifelong rehearsal of the position. `Concepts:` [[Reparation]] · [[Introjection and Projection]] · [[Sublime]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Painting]]