TOP - KLEIN: OBEJCT RELATIONS THEORY by Feist & Feist

 

Object Relations Theory

Proponent: Melanie Reizes Klein was born March 30, 1882, in Vienna, Austria.

Object relations theories assume that the mother-child relationship during the first 4 or 5 months is the most critical time for personality development. 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. The very early tendency of infants to relate to partial objects gives their experiences an unrealistic or fantasy-like quality that affects all later interper- sonal relations. 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 for- mation of interpersonal relationships.

Psychic Life of the Infant

Klein stressed the importance of the first 4 or 6 months. To her, 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.

1. Phantasies - One of Klein’s basic assumptions is that the infant, even at birth, possesses an active phantasy life. These phantasies are psychic representations of unconscious id instincts; they should not be confused with the conscious fantasies of older children and adults. 

2. Objects - Klein agreed with Freud that humans have innate drives or instincts, including a death instinct. Drives, of course, must have some object. Thus, the hunger drive has the good breast as its object, the sex drive has a sexual organ as its object, and so on. 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 parts. Introjected objects are more than internal thoughts about external objects; they are fantasies of internalizing the object in concrete and physical terms.

Postions

Klein (1946) saw human infants as constantly engaging in a basic conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct, that is, between good and bad, love and hate, creativity and destruction. As the ego moves toward integration and away from dis- integration, infants naturally prefer gratifying sensations over frustrating ones.

In their attempt to deal with this dichotomy of good and bad feelings, infants organize their experiences into positions, or ways of dealing with both internal and external objects. Klein chose the term “position” rather than “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. Although she used psychi- atric or pathological labels, Klein intended these positions to represent normal social growth and development. The two basic positions are the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position.

1. 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. According to Klein, infants develop the paranoid-schizoid position during the first 3 or 4 months of life, during which time the ego’s perception of the external world is subjective and fantastic rather than objective and real. 

2. Depressive Position - The feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object constitute what Klein called the depressive position. Children in the depressive position recognize that the loved object and the hated object are now one and the same. They reproach themselves for their previous destructive urges toward their mother and desire to make reparation for these at- tacks. Because children see their mother as whole and also as being endangered, they are able to feel empathy for her, a quality that will be beneficial in their future inter- personal relations. 

Psychic Defense Mechanisms

Klein (1955) suggested that, from very early infancy, children adopt several psychic defense mechanisms to protect their ego against the anxiety aroused by their own de- structive fantasies. To control these anxieties, infants use several psychic defense mechanisms, such as introjection, projection, splitting, and projective identification.

1. Introjection - By introjection, Klein simply meant that infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the external object, originally the mother’s breast. Introjection begins with an infant’s first feeding, when there is an attempt to incorporate the mother’s breast into the infant’s body. Ordinarily, the infant tries to introject good objects, to take them inside itself as a protection against anxiety. However, sometimes the infant introjects bad objects, such as the bad breast or the bad penis, in order to gain control over them.

2. Projection - Just as infants use introjection to take in both good and bad objects, they use projection to get rid of them. Projection is the fantasy that one’s own feelings and im- pulses actually reside in another person and not within one’s body. By projecting un- manageable destructive impulses onto external objects, infants alleviate the unbearable anxiety of being destroyed by dangerous internal forces (Klein, 1935).

3. 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. In order to separate bad and good objects, the ego must itself be split. Thus, 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.

4. Projective Identification - A fourth means of reducing anxiety is projective identification, 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. By taking the object back into themselves, infants feel that they have become like that object; that is, they identify with that object.

Internalizations

When object relations theorists speak of internalizations, they mean that the person takes in (introjects) aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjec- tions into a psychologically meaningful framework. In Kleinian theory, three important internalizations are the ego, the superego, and the Oedipus complex.

1. Ego - The ego, which exists at birth, can sense both destructive and loving forces, that is, both a nurturing and a frustrating breast. To deal with the nurturing breast and the frustrating breast, infants split these objects into good and bad while also splitting their own ego, giving them a dual image of self.

2. Superego - Klein’s picture of the superego differs from Freud’s in at least three important respects. First, it emerges much earlier in life; second, it is not an outgrowth of the Oedipus complex; and third, it is much more harsh and cruel. Klein (1933) arrived at these differences through her analysis of young children, an experience Freud did not have.

3. Oedipus Complex - Klein held that the Oedipus complex begins during the earliest months of life, over- laps with the oral and anal stages, and reaches its climax during the genital stage at around age 3 or 4. Klein believed that a significant part of the Oedipus complex is children’s fear of retaliation from their par- ent 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. he 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). In this position, children of either gender can direct their love either alternately or simultaneously toward each parent. Thus, children are capable of both homosexual and heterosexual relations with both parents.

            a.) Female Oedipal Development - At the beginning of the female Oedipal development—during the first months of life—a little girl sees her mother’s breast as both “good and bad. If the female Oedipal stage proceeds smoothly, the little girl adopts a “feminine” position and has a positive relationship with both parents.

            b.) Male Oedipal Development - Like the young girl, the little boy sees his mother’s breast as both good and bad (Klein, 1945). Then, 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. he 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. 

In summary, Klein believed that people are born with two strong drives—the life instinct and the death instinct. 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 form a model for later interpersonal relations. A person’s adult ability to love or to hate originates with these early object relations.

 

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To cite reference: 

Feist, Jess & Feist, Gregory J. 2008. Theories of Personality, 7th Edition. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Publish in the United States of America.

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