Psychic Defense Mechanisms

• From very early infancy, infants adopt several psychic defense mechanisms to protect the ego against anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies, originating from oral-sadistic anxieties concerning the breast.
• INTROJECTION - Infants fantasize, taking into their bodies those perceptions and experiences that they have had with an external object, particularly the mother’s breast.
• Infant tries to introject good objects as a protection against anxiety. But sometimes, they introject bad objects to gain control over them.
• When bad objects are introjected, they become internal persecutors, capable of terrifying the infant.
• PROJECTION - Infants fantasize that one’s own feelings and impulses reside in another person and not within one’s body to alleviate the anxious feelings of being destroyed by dangerous internal forces.
• Children project both good and bad images onto external objects, especially their parents.
• SPLITTING - Infants can only manage the good and bad aspects of themselves and of external objects by splitting them; that is, keeping apart incompatible impulses.
• Infants develop a picture of both the “good me” and the “bad me” that enables them to deal with both pleasurable and destructive impulses toward external objects.
• PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION - Occurs when a person projects qualities that are unacceptable to the self onto another person, and that person internalizes the projected qualities and believes him/herself to be characterized by them appropriately and justifiably.
• Infants рrojective identification the parts they hate into their mothers to manage their internal anxieties, and the mother is recruited as a recipient to help the infant tolerate painful intrapsychic states of mind
• INTERNALIZATIONS - Occurs when the person introjects aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjections into a psychologically meaningful framework.
• Internalization 1: EGO - Klein argued that the ego (sense of self) reaches maturity at an earlier stage than Freud assumed
• Ego - Mostly unorganized at birth but strong enough to sense both destructive and loving forces and manage them through splitting, projection, and introjection. All experiences are evaluated by the ego in terms of how they relate to the good breast and the bad breast.
• Internalization 2: SUPEREGO - Klein’s picture of the superego differs from that of Freud in terms of (1) emerging earlier in life, (2) not an outgrowth of the Oedipus complex, and (3) being more harsh and cruel.
• Early superego produces not guilt but terror and resides with the infant’s own destructive instinct experienced as anxiety.
• Internalization 3: OEDIPUS COMPLEX - Klein’s notion of the Oedipus complex is:

  1. Begins during the earliest months of life, overlaps with oral and anal stages, and reaches its climax during the genital stage at around age 3 or 4.

  2. Marked by children’s fear of retaliation from their parents for their fantasy of emptying the parent’s body.

  3. Children retain positive feelings toward both parents during Oedipal years

  4. Serves to establish a positive attitude toward the good object and to avoid the bad object.