Overview of Object Relations Theory: Phantasies

Klein: Object Relations Theory
Overview of Object Relations Theory
- Her theory was built on careful observations with young children

- Klein stressed the importance of 4 to 6 months after birth.
- She insisted that infant’s drives (hunger, sex and so forth) are directed to an object- a breast, penis, a vagina and so on.
- The child’s relations to the breast is fundamental and serves as a prototype for later relations to whole objects, such as
mother and father.
- Relating partial objects from early life of infants gives them fantasy-like qualities that affects all later interpersonal
relations.
Introduction to Object Relations Theory
- It is an offspring to instinct theory of Freud

- It places less emphasis on biologically based drives and more importance on consistent patterns of interpersonal
relationship
- It tends to be more maternal, stressing the intimacy and nurturing of the mother
- It generally see human contact and relatedness, not sexual pleasure, as the prime motive of human behavior
- This theory speculates how the infant’s real or fantasized early relations with the mother or the breast become a model
for all later interpersonal relationships
Psychic Life of the Infant
Phantasies
- One of the basic assumptions of this theory is that the infant possesses an active phantasy life.
- These phantasies are psychic representations of unconscious id instincts
- Klein would say that infants who fall asleep while sucking their fingers are phantasizing about having their mother’s
good breast inside themselves.
- Hungry infants who cry and kick their legs are phantasizing that they are kicking or destroying the bad breast,
- As the infant matures, unconscious phantasies connected with the breast continue to exert an impact on psychic life.
Objects
- Klein agreed with Freud that humans have innate drives or instincts including death instincts.
- Hunger drive has the good breast object; sex drive has a sexual organ as its objects.
- She believed that from early infancy children relate to these external objects, both in fantasy and in reality.
- 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 part.
- Introjected objects are fantasies of internalizing the object in concrete and physical terms.
Positions
- These are ways of dealing with both internal and external objects
- She used position rather than stages of development to indicate that positions are back and forth, they are not periods
of time or phases of development through which a person passes.
Paranoid- Schizoid Position
- It is 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
- According to her, infants develop the paranoid- schizoid position during the first 3 to 4 months of life, during which
time the egos’ perception of the external world is subjective and fantastic rather than objective and real.
- In the young child’s schizoid world, rage and destructive feelings are directed toward the bad breast while feelings of
love and comfort are associated with the good breast.
Depressive Position
- The feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object.
- During 5th and 6th month, an infant begins to view external object as whole and see that good and bad can exist in the
same person.
- Infant develops a more realistic picture of the mother and recognizes that she is an independent person who can be
both good and bad.
- The ego is beginning to mature like realizing that the infant lacks its capacity to protect the mother and guilt is
experience rather than destructive urges.
Psychic Defense Mechanisms
- Klein suggested that, from very early infancy, children adopt several psychic defense mechanisms to protect their ego
against anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies
Types of Psychic Defense Mechanisms
a. Introjection
- Infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the external
object, originally the mother’s breast
- It begins with an infant’s first feeding, when there is an attempt to incorporate the mother’s breast into the
infant’s body.
- Ordinarily, infants introject the good breast however if the bad breast is introjected then they become internal
prosecutors, capable of terrifying the infant and leaving frightening resides expressed in dreams.
b. Projection
- It use to get rid of bad or good objects
- It is the fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one’s
body.
- Children project both bad and good images onto external objects, especially their parents
- Infants who feel good about their mother’s nurturing breast will attribute their own feelings of goodness onto
the breast and imagine that the breast is good.
- Projection allows people to believe that their own subjective opinions are true.
c. Splitting
- This is by keeping apart incompatible impulses
- In order to separate bad and good objects, the ego must itself be split. Thus the 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
- Splitting has a negative and positive effect. If it is not extreme and rigid, it can be a positive and useful
mechanism not only for infants but also for adults. If it is excessive and inflexible splitting can
lead to pathological repression.
d. Projective Identification
- This is a psychic defense mechanism in which infants split off unacceptable parts of themselves, project them
into another object and finally introject them back into themselves in a changed or distorted
form.
- Infants typically split off parts of their destructive impulse and project them into the bad, frustrating breast
- It exerts a powerful influence on adult interpersonal relations.
- It exists only in the world of real interpersonal relationships
Internalizations
- This means that the person takes in (introjects) aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjections
into a psychologically meaningful framework.
Ego
- She believed that the ego, or one’s sense of self, reaches maturity at a much earlier stage than Freud had assumed.
- Klein ignored the id and based her theory on the ego’s early ability to sense both destructive and loving forces and to
manage them though splitting, projection and introjection
- She believed that although ego is mostly unorganized at birth, it is still strong enough to feel anxiety, to use defense
mechanisms and to form early object relations in both phantasy and reality.
- The infant introjects both the good and breast and the bad breast and these images provide a focal point for further
expansion of the ego.
Superego
- It emerges much earlier in life

- It is not an outgrowth of the Oedipus Complex
- It is much harsher and cruel
- To Klein, young children fear being devoured, cut up, and torn into pieces – fears that are greatly out of proportion to
any realistic dangers.
- She suggested that the answer resides with the infant’s own destructive instinct, which is experienced anxiety.
Oedipus Complex
- It begins at a much earliest months of life, overlaps with the oral and anal stages and reaches its climax during the
genital stage at age 3 or 4.
- Klein believed that a significant part of the Oedipus Complex is children’s fear of retaliations from their parent for their
fantasy of emptying the parent’s body.
- She stressed the importance of children retaining positive feelings toward both parents during the Oedipal years.
- She hypothesized that during its early stages, the Oedipus complex serves the same need for both genders that is to
establish a positive attitude with the good or gratifying object (breast or penis) and to avoid the bad or terrifying object
(breast or penis).

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Klein: Object Relations Theory

Overview of Object Relations Theory

- Her theory was built on careful observations with young children

Introduction to Object Relations Theory

- It is an offspring to instinct theory of Freud

Psychic Life of the Infant

Paranoid- Schizoid Position

Psychic Defense Mechanisms

Types of Psychic Defense Mechanisms

- It emerges much earlier in life

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