Psychic Life of an Infant

• An infant, even at birth, possesses an active phantasy life or the psychic representations of unconscious id instincts or unconscious images of “good” and “bad”.
• Infants begin life with an inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety they experience as a result of the conflict between life and death instinct.
• The ego, which exists at birth, can sense both destructive and loving forces
• Infants organize their experiences into positions to deal with the basic conflict between life and death instincts.
• The infant comes into contact with both the good breast and the bad breast, which produces alternating experiences of gratification and frustration.
• Good breast: Gratification, Bad breast: Frustration
• The infant adopts the paranoid-schizoid position to organize such experiences that include paranoid feelings of being persecuted and splitting of internal and external objects into the good and bad.
• Phantasies: For example, a full stomach is good; an empty one is bad. Thus, Klein would say that infants who fall asleep while sucking on their fingers are phantasizing about having their mother’s good breast inside themselves
• The earlier more primitive position is the paranoid-schizoid position and if an individual's environment and up-bringing are satisfactory, she or he will progress through the depressive position.
• In the paranoid-schizoid position, the main anxiety is paranoia and hypochondria, and the fear is for the self.
• GOOD BREAST - Nourishment, provides love, comfort, and gratification, positive qualities, satisfying experiences with the mother
• BAD BREAST - Rage and destructive feelings, negative qualities, unsatisfying experiences with the mother
• Infants develop the paranoid-schizoid position during the first 3 or 4 months of life and is characterized by:

  1. Ego’s perception of the world is subjective rather than objective.
  2. Persecutory feelings are not based on any real or immediate danger from the world.
  3. Must keep the good breast and the bad breast separate, where rage and destructive feelings are directed toward the bad breast, and feelings of love and comfort are associated with the good breast.
• Beginning 5th or 6th month, infants begin to view external objects as a whole and to see that good and bad can coexist in the same person.
• The ego can tolerate some of its destructive feelings rather than projecting them outward
• Infants experience feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object (depressive position).
• During the depressive position, infants blamed themselves for their previous destructive urges toward their mother and a desire to make reparation for these attacks, and be able to feel empathy for their mother.
• Successful resolution takes place when they fantasize that they have made such reparation and when they recognize that their mother will not go away permanently but will return after each departure.
• Incomplete resolution leads to a lack of trust and other psychic disorders.
• Female Oedipal Development

  At the beginning of the female Oedipal development—during the first months of life—a little girl sees her mother’s breast as both “good and bad.” Then around 6 months of age, she begins to view the breast as more positive than negative. Later, she sees her whole mother as full of good things, and this attitude leads her to imagine how babies are made.
• Then, during the early months of Male Oedipal development, a boy shifts some of his oral desires from his mother’s breast to his father’s penis. At this time the little boy is in his feminine position; that is, he adopts a passive homosexual attitude toward his father. Next, he moves to a heterosexual relationship with his mother, but because of his previous homosexual feeling

  for his father, he has no fear that his father will castrate him.