Background

• Born in 1882

• Unplanned birth and rejection by parents

• Physician, pioneer of object relation theory

• Depression due to missing life goals and self-analysis

• Changing direction from adults to analyzing children directly

• Nurturing relationship between parent and child

• Her daughter Melitta, competition with her mother

• Opponent to Anna Freud

Object Relation Theory

• Offspring of Freud’s instinct theory but ORT differs in at least 3 ways:

1. ORT places less emphasis on biologically based drives and more importance on consistent patterns of interpersonal relationship.

2. Rather than emphasizing the power and control of the father, ORT tends to be more maternal, stressing the intimacy and nurturing of the mother.

3. ORT generally see human contact and relatedness – not sexual pleasure – as a prime motive of human behavior

• Psychic life of the infant

  • Importance of the first 4-6 months

  • Infants do not begin life with a blank slate but an an inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety

  • Experience as a result of the conflict produced by the forces of the life instinct and the power of the death instinct.

  • The infant’s innate readiness to act or react presupposes the existence of phylogenetic endowment

• Fantasies

  • The infant, even at birth, possesses an active fantasy life

  • Fantasies are psychic representations of unconscious id instincts

  • They should not be confused with the conscious fantasies of older children and adults

  • Unconscious images of “good” and “bad”

    • Ex. a full stomach is good, an empty one is bad

  • As the infant matures, later unconscious fantasies are shaped by both reality and by inherited predispositions

  • One of these fantasies involves the Oedipus Complex, of the child’s wish to destroy of parent and sexually possess the other

• Objects (agreed with Freud)

  • Humans have innate drives or instincts, including a death instinct

  • Drives must have some object

    • The hunger drive has a good breast as its object

    • The sex drive has a sexual organ as its object

  • Klein believed that from early infancy children relate to these external objects, both in fantasy and in reality

  • In their active fantasy, infants introject external objects

Objects

• Object Relations: interpersonal relations

• External Objects: significant persons that are the target of a person’s feelings, desires, needs

• Internal Objects: internalized images of the external person, which may differ from the real person

Psychological Function of Infants

• Splitting (normal and defensive process)

  • Keeping apart contradictory feelings about others – good mother vs frustrating mother

• Internalization of “Others” – “Experiences”

  • An aspect of the external world is an introjected and becomes part of the child’s internal world

    • Emotional experiences and characteristics of relationships

  • Internal objects carry out functions performed by the external objects: trust, self-worth, condemnation

  • Lead to the formation of self-representations

Self-Representations

• How the infant perceives himself or herself in relation to significant others in their lives

  • Initially, external objects and self are not differentiated

  • Pleasurable feelings are internalized as “good one”

  • Frustration is internalized as “bad me” which is painful and often repressed

• Self-representations and internalized objects shape how one relates to oneself and to others

Development of the Self

• Crucial early development task: move from a state of fusion and dependence on caregiver to a state of increased independence and differentiation (attachment – individuation processes)

• Adequate, positive relations in the early stages lead to food feelings about self

• Negative relations and neglect leave the child feeling empty, deficient, frustrated

Object Relations Theory

• Positions

  • Infants as constantly engaging in a basic conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct

    • Between good and bad, love and hate, creativity cs destruction

    • The ego moves toward integration and away from disintegration infants naturally prefer gratifying sensations over frustrating ones

  • Infants organize their experiences onto positions,

    • Ways of dealing with both internal and external objects

    • The term “position” rather than “stage of development”

      • Positions alternate back and forth

      • Not periods of time or phrases of development through which a person passes

1. Paranoid - Schizoid Position

   • The infant desires to control the beast by devouring and harboring it

   • As the same time, the infant’s innate destructive urges create fantasies of damaging the breast by biting, tearing, or annihilating it

   • To tolerate both these feelings toward the same object at the same time, ego splits itself

     • Retailing parts of its life and death instincts while reflecting parts of both instincts into the breast

   • Now, rather than fearing its own death instinct, the infant fears the persecutory breast

   • Develops a relationship with the ideal breast, which provides love, comfort, and gratification

   • The infant desires to keep the ideal breast inside itself as a protection against annihilation by persecutors

   • Position is developed during the first 3-4 months of life

   • A way of organizing experiences including both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external objects into the good and bad

   • The ego’s perception of the external world is subjective and fantastic rather than objective and real

   • The persecutory feelings are considered to be paranoid

     • Not based on any real of immediate danger from the outside world

2. Depressive Position

   • Beginning at about 5-6 months

   • Infant begins to view external objects as a whole

   • Good and bad can exist in the same person

   • 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 and 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

   • Keep her from the dangers of its own destructive forces, those cannibalistic impulses that had previously been projected on her

   • The infant’s ego is mature enough to realize that it lacks the capacity to protect the mother

   • Experiences guilt for each previous destructive urge toward the mother

   • The feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy

Defense Mechanisms

• Psychic defense mechanisms to protect their ego against the anxiety

• Oral-sadistic anxieties concerning the breast

  • The dreaded, destructive breast vs satisfying, helpful breast

1. Introjection

   • Infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the external object, originally the mother’s breast

   • Introjected objects are not accurate representations of the real objects but are colored by children’s fantasies

2. Projection

   • As infants use introjection to take in both good and bad objects, they use projection to get rid of them

   • The fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one’s body

   • By projecting unmanageable destructive impulse onto external objects, infants moderate the unbearable anxiety of being destroyed by dangerous internal forces

   • Projection allows people to believe that their own subjective opinions are true

3. Splitting

   • Keeping apart incompatible impulses

   • Splitting as good and bad and splitting ego

     • “Good me” and “bad me”

   • Infants develop a picture of both the “good me” and the “bad me” that enables them to deal with both pleasurable and destructive impulses towards external objects

   • Denial and repression of “bad me”

4. Projective Identification

   • Infants split off unacceptable parts of themselves

   • Project them onto another object

   • Introject them into themselves in a changed of distorted form

   • By taking the object back into themselves, infants feel that they have become like that objects, that is, they identify with that object

   • Exerts a powerful influence on adult interpersonal relations

   • Unlike simple projection, which can exist wholly in fantasy, projective identification exists only in the world of real interpersonal relationships

Internalizations

• Persons takes in (introjects) aspects of the external framework and organizes in a meaningful manner

• 3 important internalizations

1. Ego

   • The ego, of one’s sense of self, reaches maturity at a much earlier stage that Freud had assumed

   • Freud hypothesized that the ego exists at birth, he did not attribute complex psychic functions to it until about the third to fourth year

   • To Freud, the young child is dominated by the id

   • Klein largely ignored the id

   • The ego’s early ability to sense both destructive and loving forces and to manage them through splitting, projecting, and introjection

   • Mostly unorganized at birth but strong enough to feel anxiety, to use defense mechanisms, and to form early object relations in both fantasy 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

     • The bad breast: the one that is not present or does not give milk, love, or security

   • All experiences are evaluated by the ego in terms of how they relate to the good breast and the bad breast

   • When the ego experiences the good breast, it expects similar good experiences with other objects (own fingers, a pacifier, or the father)

   • Thus, the infant’s first object relation (the breast) becomes the prototype not only for the ego’s future development but for the individual’s later interpersonal relations

2. Superego

   • Emerges much earlier in life

   • Not an outgrowth of the Oedipus Complex

   • More harsh and cruel

   • Produces not guilt but terror

   • Why so harsh? (e.g., fear of cut up by his/her parents)

   • This dual image of self allows them to manage the good and bad aspects of external objects

   • 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

   • Terror turns into feeling of guilt

   • This early ego defense lays the foundation for the development of the superego

   • Harsh and cruel superego is responsible for many antisocial and criminal tendencies in adults

3. Oedipus Complex

   • Begins during the earliest months of life, overlaps with the oral and the anal stages, reaches its climax during the genital stage (instead of phallic stage) at around age 3-4

   • Children's fear of retaliation from their parent for their fantasy of emptying the parent’s body

   • Stressed the importance of children retaining positive feelings toward both parents during the Oedipal years

   • During its early stages, the Oedipus Complex serves the same need for both sexes

     • Children are capable of both homosexual and heterosexual relations with both parents

Male Oedipal Development

• During the early months of Oedipal development, a boy shifts some of his oral desires from his mother’s breast to his father’s penis

• At this time the little boy is in his feminine position

  • He adopts a passive homosexual attitude toward his father

• He moves to a heterosexual relationship with his mother

  • But because of his previous homosexual feeling for his father

  • He has no fear that his father will castrate him

• This passive homosexual position is a prerequisite for the boy’s development of a healthy heterosexual relationship with his mother

• The boy must have a good feeling about his father’s penis before he can value his own

• As the boy matures, 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

• This fear convinces the little boy that sexual intercourse with his mother would be extremely dangerous to him

• The boy’s Oedipus Complex is resolved only partially by his castration anxiety

  • His ability to establish positive relationship with both parents at the same time

  • Boy sees his parents as whole objects, a condition that enables him to work through his depressive position

Female Oedipal Development

• Like the young boy, a little girl first sees her mother’s breast as both good and bad

• Then around 6 months of age, she begins to view the breast as more positive than negative

• Later, she sees her whole mother as full of good things, and this attitude leads her to imagine how babies are made

• She fantasizes that her father’s penis feeds her mother with riches, including babies

• Because the little girl sees the father’s penis as the giver of children, she develops a positive relationship to it and fantasize that her father will fill her body with babies

• If the female Oedipal stage proceeds smoothly, the little girl adopts a “feminine” position and has a positive relationship with both parents

• However, under less ideal circumstances, the little girl will see her mother as a rival and will fantasize robbing her mother of her father’s enis and stealing her mother’s babies

• Just as the boy’s hostility toward his father leads to fear of retaliation, the little girl’s wish to rob her mother produces a paranoid fear that her mother will retaliate against her by injuring her or taking away her babies

• The little girl’s principal anxiety comes from a fear that the inside of her body has been injured by her mother, an anxiety that can only be alleviated when she later gives birth to a healthy baby

• Penis envy stems from the little girl’s wish to internalize her father’s penis and to receive a baby from him

• This fantasy precedes any desire from an external penis contrary to Freud’s view, Klein could find no evidence that the little girl blames her mother for bringing her into the world without a penis

• Instead, Klein contended that the girl retains a strong attachment to her mother throughout the Oedipal period

• 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

Psychotherapy

• Klein substituted play therapy for Freudian dream analysis and free association, believing that young children express their conscious and unconscious wishes through play

• It is to foster negative transference and aggressive fantasies, she provided each child with a variety of small toys, pencils and paper, paint, crayons, and so forth

• In addition to expressing negative transference feelings through play, Klein’s young patients often attacked her verbally, which gave her an opportunity to interpret the unconscious motives behind the attacks

• The aim of Kleinian therapy is to reduce depressive anxieties and persecutory fears and to mitigate the harshness of internalized objects