OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY

BIOGRAPHY
• Born March 30, 1882 in Vienna, Austria

• Youngest child of Dr. Moriz Reizes and Libussa

Deutsch Reizes

• She experienced feelings of rejection by her

parents.

• She grew up in a family that was neither pro-

religious nor anti-religious.
• She felt neglected by her elderly
father, whom she saw cold and distant,
and although she loved and idolized
her mother, she felt suffocated by her

• Always felt neglected and devastated

when her elder sister died whom she
always idolized.

• On her 18th year, her elder brother,

Emmanuel died.
• Married Arthur Klein, an engineer and
best friend of her brother, whom she
believed to have been preventing her
to pursue medical studies.

• She had 3 children:

➢Melitta
➢Hans
➢Erich
• Klein met Sandor Ferenczi, a member of
Freud’s inner circle and the person who
introduced her into the world of
psychoanalysis.

• When her mother died, Klein became

depressed and entered analysis with
Ferenczi. She was deeply taken by
Psychoanalysis.

• As part of the program, she began to

psychoanalyze her children.

• Melitta, who became a psychoanalyst, was

analyzed by Karen Horney.
• Unfortunately, Klein did not
have a happy marriage; she
dreaded sex and abhorred
pregnancy.

• Klein separated from her

husband in 1919 but did obtain
a divorce for several years.
• She established a psychoanalytic
practice in Berlin and made her first
contributions to the psychoanalytic
literature with a paper dealing with
her analysis of Erich.

• Not completely satisfied with her

own analysis by Ferenczi, she ended
the relationship and began an
analysis with Karl Abraham.

• After 14 months Abraham died.

• At this point of her life, Klein decided to begin a self-analysis.

• In 1919, psychoanalyst including Freud, based their theories of child development.

• From Berlin she moved to London to avoid conflicts with preexisting practice in psychoanalysis.

• Although she claimed to practice Freudian psychology, Sigmund and Anna Freud did not agree with
her emphasis on child psychoanalysis.
• In 1934, Klein’s older son, Hans was killed in a fall.

• Melitta, who had recently moved to London,

maintained that her brother had committed suicide,
and she blamed her mother for his death.

• Melitta began analysis with Edward Glover, one of

Klein’s rivals in British Society.

• Klein and her daughter then became professionally

antagonistic and Melitta maintained her animosity
even after her mother’s death.
• In 1946, the British Society
accepted three training
procedures:

1. Traditional one of Melanie Klein

2. Advocated by Anna Freud
3. A middle group that accepted
neither training school but was
more eclectic in its approach
OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY
• It is an offspring of Freud’s instinct
theory.
• Difference from Freud’s instinct theory:
1. Have less emphasis on biologically
based drives and more importance on
consistent patterns of interpersonal
relationships
2. Tends to be more maternal, stressing
the intimacy and nurturing of the
mother
3. See human contact and relatednesss
OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY
o BASIC ASSUMPTION: Speculation on how the infant’s real or
fantasized early relations with the mother or the breast become a
model for all later interpersonal relationships.
• Klein stresses that the child’s relation to the breast is a prototype for
later relationships towards his/ her parents and other individuals.
PSYCHIC LIFE OF INFANTS
• PHANTASIES/ FANTASIES
- Psychic representations of unconscious id
instincts.
- Infants at birth already possesses a fantasy
about life.
- They possess unconscious images of “good” or
“bad”.
- For example, infants who fall asleep while sucking
on their fingers are phantasizing about having
their mother’s good breast inside themselves.
While hungry infants who cry and kick their legs
are phantasizing that they are kicking or
destroying the bad breast.
PSYCHIC LIFE OF INFANTS
• OBJECTS
- Any person, part of a person, or thing through
which the aim is satisfied.

- Its importance of certain objects like breasts,

vagina, and penis and so on to be of great
impact on an infants.

- Drives or instincts must have an object.

- Klein believed that an infant relates there

drives to external objects both in fantasy and
reality.
POSITIONS
• Infants organize their experiences into POSITIONS, or
ways of dealing with both internal and external objects.
• Two basic positions:

Paranoid-schizoid
Depressive position
position
POSITIONS
• PARANOID-SCHIZOID
POSITION
- Developed 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.
POSITIONS
• PARANOID-SCHIZOID
POSITION
- The infant then identifies the source as an object
of drive or instinct which he desires to be in control
with.
a. Persecutory breast
- 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.
b. Ideal breast
- It provides nourishment and care, together with
love, comfort and gratification where infant aims
to devour and harbor.
POSITIONS
• 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 infants 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.
 PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS
• INTROJECTION
- Infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and
experiences that they have 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 prosecutors.
 PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS
• PROJECTION
- 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.

- People can also project good impulses.

- Adult sometimes project their own feelings of love onto another person
and become convinced that the other person loves them.
 PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS
• SPLITTING
- Keeping apart incompatible impulses.
- 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 “bad-me”
PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS
• PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION
- 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.

- By taking the object back into themselves, infants feel that they have
become like that object; that is, they identify with that object.
 THREE IMPORTANT INTERNALIZATIONS
• EGO
- Klein believed that the ego, or one’s sense of self, reaches maturity at a much earlier
stage than Freud had assumed.
- Klein believed that although the ego is mostly unorganized at birth, it nevertheless
is strong enough to feel anxiety, to use defense mechanisms, and to form early
object relations in both phantasy and reality.
- The ego begins to evolve with the infant’s first experience with feeding, when the
good breast fills the infant not only with milk but with love and security.
- But the infant also experiences the bad breast – the one that is not present or does
not give milk, love, or security.
- The infant introjects both the good breast and the bad breast, and these images
provide a focal point for further expansion of the ego.
 THREE IMPORTANT INTERNALIZATIONS
• SUPEREGO
- Klein claims that:
a. superego emerges much earlier in life
b. not as result of resolved Oedipus complex
c. more harsh and cruel
- Early superego produces not guilt but terror to infants
- Klein also insisted that superego goes along with the development of
the Oedipus complex and provides realistic guilt in the resolution of the
complex.
- Cruel superego is responsible for many antisocial and criminal
tendencies in adults.
 THREE IMPORTANT INTERNALIZATIONS
• OEDIPUS COMPLEX
a. Begins at a much earlier age than Freud had suggested.
- Begins during the earliest months of life, overlap with the oral and anal stages, and reaches its
climax during the genital stage at around age 3 or 4.
b. Significant part of the Oedipus complex is children’s fear of retaliation from their parent for their
fantasy of emptying the parent’s body.
c. Importance of children retaining positive feelings toward both parents during the Oedipal years.
d. Serves the same need for both genders, to establish a positive attitude with the good or gratifying
object (breast or penis) and to avoid the bad or terrifying object.

FEMALE
MALE OEDIPAL
OEDIPAL
DEVELOPMENT
DEVELOPMENT
• Infants develop a passionate caring for the good breast and an
intense hatred for the bad breast, leaving a person to struggle a
lifetime to reconcile these unconscious psychic images of good
and bad, pleasure and pain.

• The most crucial stage of life is the first few months, a time when
relationships with mother and other significant objects from a
model for later interpersonal relations.

• A person’s adult ability to love or to hate originates with these

early object relations.
 LATER VIEWS ON
OBJECT RELATIONS
MARGARET MAHLER
• She believed the that children’s sense of
identity rests on a three step
relationship with their mother:
a. Infants have basic needs cared for by
their mother.
b. They develop a safe symbiotic
relationship with an all-powerful
mother.
c. The child emerges from their
mother’s protective circle and
establish their separate individuality
• In general, Mahler’s work was concerned
with the infant’s struggle to gain
autonomy and a sense of self.
HEINZ KOHUT
• He theorized that children
develop a sense of self during
early infancy when parents and
others treat them as if they had
an individualized sense of
identity.
• Extensive application to
borderline and narcissistic
personality disorder.
JOHN BOWLBY
• He investigated infant’s
attachment to their mothers
as well as the negative
consequences of being
separated from their
mothers.

• This theory emphasizes

different stages of
separation anxiety
MARY AINSWORTH AND COLLEAGUES
• She developed a technique from measuring the
type of attachment style an infant develops
toward its caregivers.

• These developmental psychologists were the

first in a long series of what were known as baby
psychologists.
• These individuals were very interested in the
parenting experience and its effects on the child.
KLEIN’S PSYCHOTHERAPY
• Klein developed the play therapy technique as a substitute for
Freud’s dream analysis and free association, believing that children
may express their unconscious wishes through toys and play things.

• Klein’s therapy is to reduce the depressive anxieties and persecutory

fears and encourages her patients to re-experience early emotions
and fantasies and help them identify between reality and fantasy,
conscious and unconscious.
KLEIN’S VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
• Determinism vs free choice
• Pessimistic or optimistic
• Causal vs teleological
• Unconscious determinants vs conscious determinants
• Biological vs environmental
• Similarities vs uniqueness