CHAPTER 5 KLEIN

• One approach to extending psychoanalytic theory has been the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and others
• Unlike Jung and Adler, who came to reject Freud's ideas, Klein tried to validate Freud's theories
• In essence,Klein extended Freud's developmental stages downward to the first 4 to 6 months after birth
• Ø  INTRODUCTION TO OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY

  -       Object relations theory differs from Freudian theory in at least three ways:

  (1) it places more emphasis on interpersonal relationships

  (2) it stresses the infant's relationship with the mother rather than the father

  (3) it suggests that people are motivated primarily for human contact rather than for sexual pleasure.
• The term object in object relations theory refers to any person or part of a person that infants introject, or take into their psychic structure and then later project onto other people
• Ø  PSYCHIC LIFE OF THE INFANT

  Klein believed that infants begin life with an inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety that they experience as a consequence of the clash between the life instinct and the death instinct
• A.    FantasiesKlein assumed that very young infants possess an active, unconscious fantasy life. Their most basic fantasies are images of the "good" breast and the "bad" breast.
• B. ObjectsKlein agreed with Freud that drives have an object, but she was more likely to emphasize the child's relationship with these objects (parents' face, hands, breast, penis, etc.), which she saw as having a life of their own within the child's fantasy world.
• Ø  POSITIONS

  -       In their attempts to reduce the conflict produced by good and bad images, infants organize their experience into positions, or ways of dealing with both internal and external objects.
• A.    Paranoid-Schizoid Position

  The struggles that infants experience with the good breast and the bad breast lead to two separate and opposing feelings
• B. Depressive Position

  -       Klein meant the anxiety that infants experience around 6 months of age over losing their mother and yet, at the same time, wanting to destroy her.
• Ø  PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS

  According to Klein, children adopt various psychic defense mechanisms to protect their ego against anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies
• Introjection

  Klein defined introjection as the fantasy of taking into one's own body the images that one has of an external object, especially the mother's breast
• The fantasy that one's own feelings and impulses reside within another person is called projection
• Infants tolerate good and bad aspects of themselves and of external objects by splitting, or mentally keeping apart, incompatible images
• Projective identification is the psychic defense mechanism whereby infants split off unacceptable parts of themselves, project them onto another object, and finally introject them in an altered form
• After introjecting external objects, infants organize them into a psychologically meaningful framework, a process that Klein called internalization
• • Internalizations are aided by the early ego's ability to feel anxiety, to use defense mechanisms, and to form object relations in both fantasy and reality.
• However, a unified ego emerges only after first splitting itself into two parts: those that deal with the life instinct and those that relate to the death instinct
• Klein believed that the superego emerged much earlier than Freud had held
• To her, the superego preceded rather than followed the Oedipus complex
• Klein also saw the superego as being quite harsh and cruel
• Klein believed that the Oedipus complex begins during the first few months of life, then reaches its zenith during the genital stage, at about 3 or 4 years of age, or the same time that Freud had suggested it began
• A.    Margaret Mahler's View

  -       developed her theory of object relations from careful observations of infants as they bonded with their mothers during their first 3 years of life.
• First is normal autism, which covers the first 3 to 4 weeks of life, a time when infants satisfy their needs within the all-powerful protective orbit of their mother's care
• Second is normal symbiosis, when infants behave as if they and their mother were an omnipotent, symbiotic unit
• Third is separation-individuation, from about 4 months until about 3 years, a time when children are becoming psychologically separated from their mothers and achieving individuation, or a sense of personal identity
• A.    Heinz Kohut's View

  -       More than any of the other object relations theorists, Kohut emphasized the development of the self.
• Children who experience a healthy relationship with their mother develop an integrated ego
• a punitive superego, a stable self-concept
• satisfying interpersonal relations
• Bowlby, a native of England, received training in child psychiatry from Melanie Klein
• LABEL OF FOLLOWING:

  A) protest

  B) apathy

  C) despair

  D) emotional

  E) detachment

  F) primary

  
• Children who reach the third stage lack warmth and emotion in their later relationships