MELANIE REIZES KLEIN
- Claimed that her theories are quite Freudian but Freud himself does not acknowledge her.
- Her daughter, Melitta, was also a psychoanalyst and was hostile to her.
- She focused on analyzing children as opposed to the Freudian tradition of analyzing adults.
- Her rival was Anna Freud.
- Klein insisted that the infant's drives (hunger, sex, and so forth) are directed to an object-a breast, a
penis, a vagina, and so on.
- According to Klein, the child's relation to the breast is fundamental and serves as a prototype for
later relations to whole objects, such as mother and father.
- Thus, Klein's ideas tend to shift the focus of psychoanalytic theory from organically based stages of
development to the role of early fantasy in the formation of interpersonal relationships.
OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY
Object relations theory places less emphasis on biologically based drives and more importance on
consistent patterns of interpersonal relationships.
- As opposed to Freud's rather paternalistic theory that emphasizes the power and control of the father,
object relations theory tends to be 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.
- Although different drives may seem to have separate aims, their underlying aim is always the same-to
reduce tension: that is, to achieve pleasure.
- The object of the drive is any person, part of a person, or thing through which the aim is
satisfied.
- Klein and other object relations theorists begin with this basic assumption of Freud and then speculate
on how the infant's real or fantasized early relations with the mother or the breast become a model
for all later interpersonal relationships.
- An important portion of any relationship is the internal psychic representations of early significant
objects, such as the mother's breast or the father's penis, that have been introjected, or taken into the
infant's psychic structure, and then projected onto one's partner.
- Whereas Freud emphasized the first few years of life, Klein stressed the importance of the first 4 or 6
months.
- Infants do not begin life with a blank slate but with an inherited predisposition to reduce the
anxiety they experience as a result of the conflict produced by the forces of the life instinct and
the power of the death instinct.
PHANTASIES
Phantasies - are psychic representations of unconscious id instincts; they should not be confused with
the conscious fantasies of older children and adults.
- She simply meant that they possess unconscious images of "good" and "bad."
- For example, a full stomach is good; an empty one is bad.
- Klein would say that infants who fall asleep while sucking on 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.
OBJECTS
Objects - Drives force us to do something to relieve tension. Usually to relieve tension, we need an
object to achieve that.
- The hunger drive has the good breast as its object, the sex drive has a sexual organ as its object,
and so on.
- The earliest object relations are with the mother's breast, but "very soon interest develops in the face
and in the hands which attend to his needs and gratify them".
POSITIONS (DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES)
- In their attempt to deal with this dichotomy of good and bad feelings (life instinct and death instinct),
infants organize their experiences into positions, or ways of dealing with both internal and external
objects.
Paranoid-schizoid Position - 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 (3-4 months
old).
Depressive Position - The feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for
wanting to destroy that object (5 months).
PARANOID-SCHIZOID
- The infant desires to control the breast by devouring and harboring it. At the same time, the infant's
innate destructive urges create fantasies of damaging the breast by biting, tearing, or annihilating it.
- In order to tolerate both these feelings toward the same object at the same time, the ego splits itself,
retaining parts of its life and death instincts while deflecting parts of both instincts onto the breast.
- Now, rather than fearing its own death instinct, the infant fears the persecutory breast. But the infant also
has a relationship with the ideal breast, which provides love,
comfort, and gratification.
- This preverbal splitting of the world into good and bad serves as a prototype for the subsequent
development of ambivalent
feelings toward a single person.
DEPRESSIVE POSITION
- 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.
- The ego is beginning to mature to the point at which it can tolerate some of its own destructive feelings
rather than projecting them outward.
- The infant also realizes that the mother might go away and be lost forever. Fearing the possible loss of
the mother, the infant desires to protect her and keep her from the dangers of its own destructive forces,
those cannibalistic impulses that had previously been projected onto her.
- But the infant's ego is mature enough to realize that it lacks the capacity to protect the mother, and thus
the infant experiences guilt for its previous destructive urges toward the mother.
- The depressive position is resolved when children fantasize that they have made reparation for their
previous transgressions and when they recognize that their mother will not go away permanently but will
return after each departure.
- They are able not only to experience love from their mother, but also to display their own love for her.
- An incomplete resolution of the depressive position can result in lack of trust, morbid mourning at the
loss of a loved one, and a variety of other psychotic disorders.
PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS
- From very early infancy, children adopt several psychic defense mechanisms to protect their ego against
the anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies.
Introjection - infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have
had with the external object, originally the mother's breast.
Projection - the fantasy that one's own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not
within one's body.
Splitting - Infants can only manage the good and bad aspects of themselves and of external objects by
splitting them, that is, by keeping apart incompatible impulses
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.
- Combination of Projection and Introjection. Project the bad impulse to another person who the infant
thinks is good, then introduce that impulse again to the infant's own psyche in a purer form as purified by
the other person.
INTERNALIZATIONS
- The person takes in (introjects) aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjections into
a psychologically meaningful framework.
Ego - Klein (1959) 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.
Superego - Emerges earlier than Freud assumed, not an outgrowth of Oedipal Complex, it is more harsh
and cruel.
EGO
- 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.
- 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.
- Klein assumed that infants innately strive for integration, but at the same time, they are forced to deal
with the opposing forces of life and death, as reflected in their experience with the good breast and the
bad breast.
- As infants mature, their perceptions become more realistic, they no longer see the world in terms of
partial objects, and their egos become more integrated.
SUPEREGO
- Early superego produces Terror.
- To Klein, young children fear being devoured, cut up, and torn into pieces- fears that are greatly out of
proportion to any realistic dangers.
- Klein rejected Freud's notion that the superego is a consequence of the Oedipus complex. Instead, she
insisted that it grows along with the Oedipus complex and finally emerges as realistic guilt after the
Oedipus complex is resolved.
OEDIPUS COMPLEX
- Klein believed that Oedipal Complex starts at the earliest months of the infant and climaxes during the
genital stage (3-4 years old).
- Superego grows with the Oedipus complex.
- 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).
- For both girls and boys, a healthy resolution of the Oedipus complex depends on their ability to allow
their mother and father to come together and to have sexual intercourse with each other. No remnant of
rivalry remains. Children's positive feelings toward both parents later serve to enhance their adult sexual
relations.
FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
- The female child fantasizes about her father's penis as the giver of gifts to her mother and will
develop a good relationship with it. If it goes smoothly, the child will have a good relationship with both
parents.
- In a less favorable development, the female child will see her mother as a rival with the penis and will try
to rob the penis from the mother. She will then project this impulse to her mother and then fear that her
mother will retaliate by injuring her or stealing the child's babies.
MALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
- After some time, the boy's oral desires from his mother's breast will be shifted to his father's
penis.
- This is called feminine position wherein the male child adopts a passive homosexual relationship with
the father.
- Next, he moves to a heterosexual relationship with his mother, but because of his previous homosexual
feelings for his father, he has no fear that his father will castrate him.
- The boy must have a good feeling about his father's penis before he can value his own.
- As the boy matures, however, he develops oral-sadistic impulses toward his father and wants to bite off
his penis and to murder him.
- These feelings arouse castration anxiety and the fear that his father will retaliate against him by biting off
his penis which will convince him not to have sexual intercourse with her mother because it will be
dangerous.
- The boy's Oedipus complex is resolved only partially by his castration anxiety. A more important factor is
his ability to establish positive relationships with both parents at the same time. At that point, the boy sees
his parents as whole objects, a condition that enables him to work through his depressive position.
LATER THEORIES IN OBJECT RELATIONS
MARGARET MAHLER
- Margaret Mahler - To Mahler, an individual's psychological birth begins during the first weeks of
postnatal life and continues for the next 3 years or so.
- By psychological birth, Mahler means that the child becomes an individual separate from his or her
primary caregiver, an accomplishment that leads ultimately to a sense of identity.
Stages of Development
First Stage - Normal Autism - 3-4 weeks old
- A newborn infant satisfies various needs within the all-powerful protective orbit of a mother's care.
- Neonates have a sense of omnipotence, because, like unhatched birds, their needs are cared for
automatically and without their having to expend any effort.
- She referred to normal autism as an "objectless" stage, a time when an infant naturally searches for the
mother's breast.
Second Stage - Normal Symbiosis - 4-5 weeks old
- During this time, "the infant behaves and functions as though he and his mother were an omnipotent
system-a dual unity within one common boundary" (Mahler, 1967, p. 741).
- By this age the infant can recognize the mother's face and can perceive her pleasure or distress.
- However, object relations have not yet begun-mother and others are still "preobjects."
Third Stage - Separation-Individuation - 5-36 months old
- Children become psychologically separated from their mothers, achieve a sense of individuation, and
begin to develop feelings of personal identity.
- Young children in the separation-individuation stage experience the external world as being more
dangerous than it was during the first two stages.
- Overlapping Four Substages.
Substages of Separation-individuation
Differentiation (5-10 months) - marked by a bodily breaking away from the mother-infant symbiotic orbit
Practicing (7-16 months) - children easily distinguish their body from their mother's, establish a specific
bond with their mother, and begin to develop an autonomous ego
Rapprochement (16-25 months) - they desire to bring their mother and themselves back together, both
physically and psychologically
Libidinal Object Constancy - During this time, children must develop a constant inner representation of
their mother so that they can tolerate being physically separate from her.
STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
- Any errors made during the first 3 years-the time of psychological birth-may result in later regressions to
a stage when a person had not yet achieved separation from the mother and thus a sense of personal
identity.
HEINZ KOHUT
Heinz Kohut - Kohut emphasized the process by which the self evolves from a vague and
undifferentiated image to a clear and precise sense of individual identity.
- Infants require adult caregivers not only to gratify physical needs but also to satisfy basic psychological
needs.
- In caring for both physical and psychological needs, adults, or selfobjects, treat infants as if they had a
sense of self.
- The self gives unity and consistency to one's experiences, remains relatively stable over time, and is
"the center of initiative and a recipient of impressions".
- The self is also the child's focus of interpersonal relations, shaping how he or she will relate to parents
and other selfobjects.
- Infants are self-centered, looking out exclusively for their own welfare and wishing to be admired for who
they are and what they do. They have two narcissistic needs: the need to exhibit the grandiose self and
the need to acquire an idealized image of one or both parents.
Narcissistic Needs
- The grandiose-exhibitionistic self is established when the infant relates to a "mirroring" selfobject
who reflects approval of its behavior.
- The idealized parent image is opposed to the grandiose self because it implies that someone else is
perfect.
- Both narcissistic self-images are necessary for healthy personality development. Both, however, must
change as the child grows older. If they remain unaltered, they result in a pathologically narcissistic adult
personality.
JOHN BOWLBY’S ATTACHMENT THEORY
- Bowlby firmly believed that the attachments formed during childhood have an important impact on
adulthood. Because childhood attachments are crucial to later development, Bowlby argued that
investigators should study childhood directly and not rely on distorted retrospective accounts from adults.
Three stages of Separation Anxiety
Protest - When their caregiver is first out of sight, infants will cry, resist soothing by other people, and
search for their caregiver.
Despair - As separation continues, infants become quiet, sad, passive, listless, and apathetic.
Detachment - During this stage, infants become emotionally detached from other people, including their
caregiver.
Assumptions of Attachment Theory
- First, a responsive and accessible caregiver (usually the mother) must create a secure base for the
child. The infant needs to know that the caregiver is accessible and dependable. If this dependability is
present, the child is better able to develop confidence and security in exploring the world.
- A second assumption of attachment theory is that a bonding relationship (or lack thereof) becomes
internalized and serves as a mental working model on which future friendships and love relationships are
built.
MARY AINSWORTH
The Strange Situation
Secure Attachment - when their mother returns, infants are happy and enthusiastic and initiate contact;
for example, they will go over to their mother and want to be held.
Anxious-resistant Attachment - infants are ambivalent. When their mother leaves the room, they
become unusually upset, and when their mother returns they seek contact with her but reject attempts at
being soothed.
Anxious-avoidant Attachment - With this style, infants stay calm when their mother leaves; they accept
the stranger, and when their mother returns, they ignore and avoid her.
Psychotherapy
- Psychotherapy - Klein insisted that negative transference was an essential step toward successful
treatment.
- Children are her main clients. To foster negative transference, she used Play Therapy as a substitute to
dream analysis and free association.
