Week 5 Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein
Week 5: Object Relations Theory

Brief Biography
 Place: Vienna, Austria
 Date: March 30, 1882
 Work: Physician
 Father: Neglectful
 Mother: Suffocating
 The youngest of four children born to Dr. Moriz Reizes and his second wife, Libussa
Deutsch Reizes
 She believed that her birth was unplanned – a belief that led to feelings of being
rejected by her parents
 She grew un in a family was neither pro-religious nor antireligious
 Her early relationship were either unhealthy or ended in tragedy
 Fond of her sister and infatuated with her brother
 When she was 18, her father died but a greater tragedy occurred two years later
when her beloved brother died.
 She married Arthur, an engineer who had been her brother’s close friend
 She was distant to her daughter who eventually joined the group of Anna
Freud
 Although she continued to regard herself as Freudian, neither Freud or her
daughter Anna accepted her emphasis in the importance of very early
childhood or her analytic technique with children
 She extended psychoanalytic theory beyond the boundary set by Freud
 First devised the idea of Play Therapy for Children
Development of the self
 Disruptions: leave the child feeling empty, deficient, frustrated
 Adequate, Positive Relations: in the early stages lead to good feelings about
self
 Self-Representations and Internalized Objects shape how one relates to others
in the world
Psychological Function for infants
 Internal objects carry out functions performed by the external object: trust,
self-worth, condemnation.
Psychic Life of the Infant Fantasies (Phantasies)
 Psychic representation of unconscious id instincts.
 Infant possess an active fantasy life
 Most basic fantasies are of what is “good” or “bad” (e.g, good and bad
breast)
 Are shaped by both reality and by inherited predisposition
 Klein would say that infants who fall asleep while sucking on their fingers are
phantasizing about their mother’s good breast inside themselves
Objects
 Drives have an object
 Objects are introjected or taken into child’s fantasy world and have a life of their
own
 In their active fantasy, infants introject, or take their psychic structure, these
external objects, including father’s penis, their mother’s hand and face, and other
body parts
 Breast: a child’s first interpersonal relation
Position
 Ways of dealing with both internal and external objects
 Klein chose the term “position” rather than the “stage of development” to indicate
that positions alternate back and forth; they are not periods of time or phases of
development through which a person passes
Paranoid-schizoid position
 Organizing experiences in a way that includes both feeling of persecution and
splitting of internal and external objects into the good and the bad
 Develops during the 3rd and 4th month of life, during which time the ego’s
perception of the external world is subjective and fantastic rather than
objective and real
 Adopted to control the good breast and to fight off its persecutors
 The persecutory feelings are considered to be paranoid; that is, they are not
based on any real or immediate danger from the outside worlds.
 In the young child’s schizoid world, rage and destructive feelings are directed
toward the bad breast, while feelings of live and comfort are associated with
the good breast
 Most people have both positive and negative feelings toward their love ones.
Depressive Position
 Anxiety over losing a loved object with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy
loved object
 At that time, the infant develops a more realistic picture of the mother and
recognizes that she is an independent person who can be both good and bad
 Beginning at about 5th or 6th month, an infant begins to view external objects
as a whole and to see that good and bad can exist in the same room
 Children inn the depressive position recognize that the loved object and the
hated object are now one and the same.
Psychic defense mechanisms
 Used for protecting their ego against the anxiety aroused by their own
destructive fantasies
1. Introjection
 Infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences
that they had with the external object, originally the mothers breast
 When dangerous objects are introjected, they become internal persecutors,
capable of terrifying the infant and leaving frightening residues.
 Introjected objects are not accurate representations of the real objects but
are colored by children’s fantasies.
 An infant’s means of controlling
2. Projection
 The fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually reside in another
person and not within one’s body
3. Splitting
 A psychic defense mechanism in which the child subjectively separates
incompatible aspects of an object
4. Projective Identification
 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
Internalization of others
 Experiences: an aspect of the external world is introjected and becomes part
of the child’s internal world
 Aspects of the external world that are organized internally into a
psychologically meaningful framework
 EGO: the ego begins to evolve with the infant’s first experience with the
feeding, when the good breast fills the only after splitting the good me and
the bad me
 SUPEREGO: Klein’s picture of the superego differs from Freud’s in at least
three important respects:
1. It emerges much earlier in life
2. It is not an outgrown Oedipus complex;
3. It is much more harsh and cruel
Oedipus Complex
 Begins during the earliest months of life, overlaps with the oral and anal
stages, and reaches its climax during the genital stage at around 3 to 5
 A significant Oedipus complex is children’s fear of retaliation from their
parent for their fantasy of emptying the parent’s body
 Children retaining positive feelings toward both parents during the oedipal
years
 The Oedipus complex serves the same need for both genders, that is, to
establish a positive attitude with the good gratifying object (breast or penis)
and to avoid the bad or terrifying object (breast or penis)
 Development of self and psychological characteristics is explained in terms of
the internalization of psychosocial experiences
 Views personality and motivation in terms of interpersonal transactions and
not instincts
Found Three Basic Styles
 Secure attachment (60-70%): explores environment in mother’s presence,
upset when she leaves, distressed when mother leaves and not well-
comforted by stranger, calms down quickly when mother returns
 Avoidant attachment (15-20%): not distressed when mother leaves, equally
comforted by stranger and mother, shows little interest when mother returns
 Resistant attachment (10-15%): does not explore environment, intense
distress when mother leaves, avoids stranger, resists mother when she returns
and is not easily comforted
 Disorganized/Disoriented attachment (5-10%): child has random outburst and
periods of unresponsiveness as well as spurts of sudden emotion;
unpredictable behavior.

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Melanie Klein

Week 5: Object Relations Theory

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