MELANIE KLEIN'S ORT

• Melanie Klein was born on March 30, 1882 in Vienna, Austria and was the youngest of four children born to Dr. Moriz Reizes and his second wife, Libussa Deutsch Reizes
• Klein believed that her birth was unplanned, a belief that led to feelings of being rejected by her parents
• Klein got married at the age of 21 to an engineer named Arthur Klein whom she believed to have been preventing her to pursue medical studies
• Klein claimed that her theory is quite Freudian, but Freud himself did not acknowledge her
• Klein's daughter Melitta, who was also a psychoanalyst, was hostile to her
• Klein focused on analyzing children as opposed to Freudian's analyzing of adults
• Klein's rival was Anna Freud
• Object Relation Theory


  Was based on careful observations of infants, emphasizes interpersonal relations, primarily in the family and especially between mother and child
• Object


  Means person, and especially the significant person that is the object or target of another's feelings or intentions
• Relations


  Refers to interpersonal relations and suggests the residues of past relationships that affect a person in the present
• While Freud focused on the first 4 to 6 years


  Klein emphasizes the importance of 4 to 6 months after birth
• Klein stresses that the child's relation to the breast is considered to be a prototype for later relationships towards his/her parents and other individuals
• Object relations theory

  • Places less emphasis on biologically based drives and more importance on consistent patterns of interpersonal relationships
  • More maternal, stressing the intimacy and nurturing of the mother
  • Object relations theorists generally see human contact and relatedness—not sexual pleasure—as the prime motive of human behavior
• Psychic Life of Infants

  • Are shaped by both reality and by inherited predispositions
  • Fantasies/Phantasies – Infants at birth already possesses a fantasy about life. They already have their unconscious images of "good" and "bad"
  • Objects- Drives or instincts must have an object. This is where exerted and applied. Klein believed that an infant relates there drives to external objects both in fantasy and reality
• Different Positions


  • Good and bad
  • Life and death
  • Love and hate
  • Creativity and destruction
• Paranoid Schizoid Positions


  • Develop during the first 3 or 4 months of life
  • 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
  • The ego's perception of external world is subjective and fantastic rather than objective and real
  • Infants have a biological predisposition to attach a positive value to nourishment and the life instinct
• Persecutory Breast (BAD BREAST)


  Which provide frustrations to an infant and are incapable of providing love, care and comfort. This allows the child to develop the urge to destroy it by biting, tearing or even annihilating it
• Ideal breast (GOOD BREAST)


  This breast provides nourishment and care, together with love, comfort and gratification where infant aims to devour and harbor
• Depressive Position


  • Begins to surface by the age of 5-6 months when an infant can already view an object as incorporated both good and bad feelings
  • Where are infant feels the anxiety of losing a loved object accompanied by the sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that same object
  • Infant realizes that his/her mother might leave her so he begins to protect her
• Introjection


  • Infants fantasize taking into their body these perceptions and experiences that they had with the external object, originally the mother's breast
  • When good objects were introjected it helps them protect their ego from anxiety, however when bad objects were the ones introjected they become internal persecutors
• Projection


  Infants projects one's own feelings and impulses actually resides in another person and not within them. Children usually projects good and bad images towards their parents
• Splitting


  It enables them to see the positive and negative side of themselves or others. It may be both beneficial and destructive since it may recognize the good me and the bad me
• Projective Identification


  A psychic defense mechanism in which infants splits off unacceptable parts of themselves, project them into another object and finally introject them back into themselves in a changed or distorted form
• Ego

  • Unlike Freud who claims that Id dominates a child's unconscious, Klein believed that during this stage, ego though weak and unorganized can already feel anxiety and is strong enough to use different mechanism
  • The ego matures through the first experience of feeding providing him/her with love and security
• Superego


  • Klein claims that superego emerges much earlier in life, not as result of revolved Oedipus complex and is much more harsh and cruel
  • Klein further believes that early superego produces not guilt but terror to infants
• Oedipus Complex


  • Even though Klein claims that her idea of the Oedipus complex is an extension of Freud's many distinct characteristics where recognizable:
  • It begins at much earlier time of life
  • Significant part of it represents the child's fear of retaliation from his/her parents
  • Childs retention of positive feelings towards both parents
  • It enables children to recognize between good and bad
• Goals of Object Relation Therapy

  • The focus of treatment is to show the client that they can improve relationships and interactions with others by removing the "object" that they naturally attach to events and people
  • In Object Relations the therapist-to-client relationship is seen as a mirror of the mother-to-child relationship. In this view, the therapist-to-client bond is crucial, as it allows an individual to create the type of healing bond they may have missed during childhood