Melanie Klein

• object relations theory of Melanie Klein was built on careful observations of young children.
• • First, object relations theory places less

  emphasis on biologically based drives and more importance on consistent patterns of interpersonal relationships.

  • Second, as opposed to Freud’s rather paternalistic

  theory that emphasizes the power and control of the father, object relations theory tends to be more maternal, stressing the intimacy and nurturing of the mother.

  • Third, object relations theorists generally see human contact and relatedness —not sexual pleasure—as the prime motive of human behavior.
• In Freudian terms, the object of the drive is any person, part

  of a person, or thing through which the aim is satisfied.
• An important portion of any relationship is the internal psychic representations of early significant objects, such as the mother’s breast or the father’s penis, that have been introjected, or taken into the infant’s psychic structure, and then projected onto one’s partner.
• Whereas Freud emphasized the first few years of life, Klein stressed the importance of the first 4 or 6 months. To her, infants do not begin life with a blank slate but with an inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety they experience as a result of the conflict produced by the forces of the life instinct and the power of the death instinct. The infant’s innate readiness to act or react presupposes the existence of

  phylogenetic endowment, a concept that Freud also accepted.
• even at birth, possesses an active phantasy life. These phantasies are psychic representations of unconscious id instincts; they should not be confused with the conscious fantasies of older children and adults. In fact, Klein intentionally spelled phantasy this way to make it distinguishable.
• When Klein (1932) wrote of the dynamic phantasy life of infants,

  she did not suggest that neonates could put thoughts into words. She simply meant that they possess unconscious images of “good” and “bad.”
• Because these phantasies are unconscious, they can be contradictory. For example, a little boy can phantasize both beating his mother and having babies with her. Such phantasies spring partly from the boy’s experiences with his mother and partly from universal predispositions to destroy the bad breast and to incorporate the good one.
• Klein agreed with Freud that humans have innate drives or instincts, including a death instinct. Drives, of course, must have some object.
• The earliest object relations are with the mother’s breast, but “very soon interest develops in the face and in the hands which attend to his needs and gratify them” (Klein, 1991, p. 757). In their active fantasy, infants introject, or take into their psychic structure, these external objects, including their father’s penis, their mother’s hands and face, and other body parts.
• Introjected objects are more than internal thoughts about external objects; they are fantasies of internalizing the object in concrete and physical terms. For example, children who have introjected their mother believe that she is constantly inside their own body. Klein’s notion of internal objects suggests that these objects have a power of their own, comparable to Freud’s concept of a superego, which assumes that the father’s or mother’s conscience is carried within the child.
• Positions

  Klein (1946) saw human infants as constantly engaging in a basic conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct, that is, between good and bad, love and hate, creativity and destruction. As the ego moves toward integration and away from disintegration, infants naturally prefer gratifying sensations over frustrating ones.
• In their attempt to deal with this dichotomy of good and bad feelings, infants organize their experiences into positions, or ways of dealing with both internal and external objects.
• Klein chose the term “position” rather than “stage of develop-

  ment” to indicate that positions alternate back and forth; they are not periods of time or phases of development through which a person passes. Although she used psychiatric or pathological labels, Klein intended these positions to represent normal social growth and development. The two basic positions are the paranoid schizoid position and the depressive position.
• the ego splits itself, retaining parts of its life and death instincts

  while deflecting parts of both instincts onto the breast. Now, rather than fearing its own death instinct, the infant fears the persecutory breast. But the infant also has a relationship with the ideal breast, which provides love, comfort, and gratification.
• The infant desires to keep the ideal breast inside itself as a protection

  against annihilation by persecutors. To control the good breast and to fight off its persecutors, the infant adopts what Klein (1946) called the paranoid-schizoid position, a way of organizing experiences that includes both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external objects into the good and the bad.
• paranoid-schizoid position during the

  first 3 or 4 months of life, during which time the ego’s perception of the external world is subjective and fantastic rather than objective and real.
• When adults adopt the paranoid-schizoid position, they do so

  in a primitive, unconscious fashion. As Ogden (1990) pointed out, they may experience themselves as a passive object rather than an active subject. They are likely to say “He’s dangerous” instead of saying “I am aware that he is dangerous to me.”
• Depressive Position

  Beginning at about the 5th or 6th month, an infant begins to view external objects as whole and to see that good and bad can exist in the same person. At that time, the infant develops a more realistic picture of the mother and recognizes that she is an independent person who can be both good and bad. Also, the ego is beginning to mature to the point at which it can tolerate some of its own destructive

  feelings rather than projecting them outward.
• The feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object constitute what Klein called the depressive position.
• Children in the depressive position recognize that the loved object and the hated object are now one and the same. They reproach themselves for their previous destructive urges toward their mother and desire to make reparation for these attacks. Because children see their mother as whole and also as being endangered, they are able to feel empathy for her, a quality that will be beneficial in their future

  interpersonal relations.
• They are able not only to experience love from their mother,

  but also to display their own love for her. However, an incomplete resolution of the depressive position can result in lack of trust, morbid mourning at the loss of a loved one, and a variety of other psychic disorders.
• Psychic Defense Mechanisms: introjection, projection,

  splitting, and projective identification.
• Psychic Defense Mechanisms These intense destructive feelings originate with oral-sadistic anxieties concerning the breast—the dreaded, destructive breast on the one hand and the satisfying, helpful breast on the other.
• By introjection, Klein simply meant that infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the external object, originally the mother’s breast.
• IOrdinarily, the infant tries to introject good objects, to take them inside itself as a protection against anxiety. However, sometimes the infant introjects bad objects, such as the bad breast or the bad penis, in order to gain control over them. When dangerous objects are introjected, they become internal persecutors, capable of terifying the infant and leaving frightening residues that may be expressed in dreams or in an interest in fairy tales such as “The Big Bad Wolf” or “Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs.”
• Introjected objects are not accurate representations of the real objects but are colored by children’s fantasies.
• Projection is the fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one’s body.
• When object relations theorists speak of internalizations, they mean that the person takes in (introjects) aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjections into a psychologically meaningful framework. In Kleinian theory, three important internalizations are the ego, the superego, and the Oedipus complex.
• Klein, however, largely ignored the id and based her theory on the ego’s early ability to sense both destructive and loving forces and to manage them through splitting, projection, and introjection.
• although the ego is mostly unorganized at birth,

  it nevertheless is strong enough to feel anxiety, to use defense mechanisms, and to form early object relations in both phantasy and reality.
• example, when the ego experiences the good breast, it expects similar good experiences with other objects, such as its own

  fingers, a pacifier, or the father. Thus, the infant’s first object relation (the breast) becomes the prototype not only for the ego’s future development but for the individual’s later interpersonal relations.
• Klein assumed that infants innately strive for integration, but at the same time, they are forced to deal with the opposing forces of life and death, as reflected in their experience with the good breast and the bad breast. To avoid disintegration, the newly emerging ego must split itself into the good me and the bad me.
• To avoid disintegration, the

  newly emerging ego must split itself into the good me and the bad me.

  The good me exists when infants are being enriched with milk and love; the bad me is experienced when they do not receive milk and love. This dual image of self allows them to manage the good and bad aspects of external objects.
• Superego, First, it emerges much earlier in life; second, it is not an outgrowth of the Oedipus complex; and third, it is much more harsh and cruel. Klein (1933) arrived at these differences through her analysis of young children, an experience Freud did not have.
• Freud conceptualized the superego as consisting of two subsys-

  tems: an ego-ideal that produces inferiority feelings and a conscience that resultsin guilt feelings.

  Klein would concur that the more mature superego produces

  feelings of inferiority and guilt, but her analysis of young children led her to believe that the early superego produces not guilt but terror.
• Why

  are the children’s superegos so drastically removed from any actual threats by

  their parents? Klein (1933) suggested that the answer resides with the infant’sown destructive instinct, which is experienced as anxiety. To manage this anxiety, the child’s ego mobilizes libido (life instinct) against the death instinct.
• By the 5th or 6th year, the superego arouses little anxiety but a great measure of guilt. It has lost most of its severity while gradually being transformed into a realistic conscience.

  However, Klein rejected Freud’s notion that the superego is a consequence of the Oedipus complex. Instead, she insisted that it grows along with the Oedipus complex and finally emerges as realistic guilt after the Oedipus complex is resolved.
• Klein held that the Oedipus complex begins during the earliest months of life, overlaps with the oral and anal stages, and reaches its climax during the genital stage at around age 3 or 4.
• Klein preferred the term “genital” stage rather

  than “phallic,” because the latter suggests a masculine psychology.