Remarks on tin ore deposits at Mount Bischoff, Tasmania

Baron Von Groddeck, Chief Mining Councillor of the Hartz Mining Districts and Director of the Royal Prussian Academy of mines at Clausthal, Germany. Translated by G. Thureau, F.G.S., Govornment Geologist and Inspector of Mines, from the Special Imprint of the Journal of the German Geological Society of 1884. The Royal Academy of Mines at Clausthal was some time ago placed in possession of a very fine collection of Australian ores. That collection was presented to our Academy by M. Wagenknecht, of Aachen (a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tasmania). Amongst the samples were found a number of specimens. of Tin Ore, together with the rocks and the minerals said to be associated with same, from Mt. Bischoff, Tasmania. The series interested me, particularly on account of a piece of supposed Quartz-Porphyry, which rock, it was represented, is associated (according to the description of S. H. Wintle* and Geo. H. P. Ulrich) with those Tin Ores, and also because of some peculiar, dense, greyish-blue coloured masses of mineral which most frequently are found to enclose those Tin Ores. * S. H. Wintle ; Stanniferous Deposits of Tasmania. Trans. Royal Society of New South Wales, 1875, vol. ix., page 87. Geo. H. F. Ulrich. Written communication ; New York Book for Mineralogy, etc., 1877, page 494

The psychic life of fragments: splitting from Ferenczi to Klein

The present paper starts from the reflection that there is a curious “phenomenological gap” in psychoanalysis when it comes to processes of splitting and to describing the “life” of psychic fragments resulting from processes of splitting. In simpler terms, we are often in a position to lack a precise understanding of what is being split and how the splitting occurs. I argue that although Melanie Klein’s work is often engaged when talking of splitting (particularly through discussions on identification, projection and projective identification), there are some important phenomenological opacities in her construction. I show that by orchestrating a dialogue between Melanie Klein and Sándor Ferenczi, we arrive at a fuller and more substantive conception of psychic splitting and of the psychic life of fragments which are the result of splitting. This is even more meaningful because there are some unacknowledged genealogical connections between Ferenczian concepts and Kleinian concepts, which I here explore. While with Klein we remain in the domain of “good” and “bad” objects—polarised objects which are constantly split and projected—with Ferenczi we are able to also give an account of complicated forms of imitation producing psychic fragments and with a “dark” side of identification, which he calls “identification with the aggressor”. While attempting to take steps toward imagining a dialogue between Klein and Ferenczi, I note a certain silent “Ferenczian turn” in a late text by Melanie Klein, “On the Development of Mental Functioning”, written in 1958. In particular, I reflect on her reference to some “terrifying figures” of the psyche, which cannot be accounted for simply as the persecutory parts of the super-ego but are instead more adequately read as more enigmatic and more primitive psychic fragments, resulting from processes of splitting