Melanie kline

MELANIE KLEIN
OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY

Melanie Klein was born March 30, 1882 in Vienna Austria.
The youngest of four children of Dr. Moriz Reizes with his second wife
Libussa Deutsch Reizes.
Melanie believed that her birth was unplanned.
She felt distant to her father, who favored his oldest daughter Emilie.
The time Melanie was born, her father started to rebel against his
Orthodox Jewish training and had ceased to practice any religion.

Melanie grew up in a family that was neither proreligious nor
antireligious.
Melanie aspired to become a physician.
She felt neglected by her elderly father and she felt suffocated by her
mother.
Melanie had a special fondness with her sister Sidonie who became her
tutor (4 years older)
Sidonie died when Melanie was 4 years old.

After Sidonie’s death, Melanie became attached to her only brother
Emmanuel.
Emmanuel tutored Melanie too.
When Melanie was 18 her father died. After 2 years Emmanuel also died.
While still in mourning over her brother’s death, Melanie married Arthur
Klein an engineer who had been Emmanuel’s close friend.
Her marriage at 21 prevented her from becoming a physician.

Melanie did not have a happy marriage. Nevertheless her marriage to
Arthur produced three children:
Melitta born in 1904; Hans born in 1907; and Erich born in 1914.
In 1909, the Kleins moved to Budapest, where Arthur had been
transferred.
There, she met Sandor Ferenczi, a member of Freud’s inner circle.

Overview of Object Relations Theory
Object relations theory of Melanie Klein was built on careful
observation of young children. In contrast to Freud, who
emphasized the first 4 to 6 years of life.
Klein stressed the importance of 4 to 6 months after birth.
She 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.

Psychic life of the infant
 Phantasies
these phantasies are psychic representations of unconscious id
instincts.
 Klein did suggest that neonates could put thoughts into words. She
simply meant that they possess unconscious images of
“good” and “bad.”
Example:
A full stomach is good: an empty one is bad.

It is like saying:
Infants who fall asleep while sucking on their
fingers are phantasizing about having their mother’s good
breast inside themselves. Similarly, hungry infants who cry
and kick their legs are phantasizing that they are kicking or
destroying the bad breast.

 Objects
Klein agreed with Freud that humans have innate drives or
instinct.
Drives, must have some object. She believed that from early
infancy children relate to these external objects, both in fantasy
and reality.
The hunger drive has the good breast as its object.
The sex drive has a sexual organ as its object.
*The earliest object relations are with the mother’s breast.

 Positions
Klein saw human infants as constantly engaging in
basic conflict between the life instinct and death instinct.
That is, between good and bad, love and hate, creativity
and destruction.
* In children’s 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.

Two Basic Positions
 Paranoid-Schizoid Position
(first 3 or 4 months of life)
to control the good breast and to fight off its persecutors, the infants
adopts this position.
A way of organizing experiences that includes both paranoid
feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external
objects into good and the bad.

Two Basic Positions
 Depressive Position
(first 5 or 6 months of life)
The feeling of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense
of guilt for wanting to destroy that object. Infants experiences guilt for its
previous destructive urges toward the mother.
*children in this position recognize that the loved object and hated
object are now one and the same.

the depressive position is resolved when:
The 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.

Psychic Defense Mechanism
Klein suggested that from early infancy, children adopt
several psychic defense mechanism to protect their ego
against the anxiety aroused by their own destructive
fantasies.
I. Introjection
II.Projection
III.Splitting
IV.Projective identification

 Introjection
Klein simply meant that infants fantasize taking into
their body these perceptions and experiences that they
have had with the external object.

 Introjection
* This begins with an infant’s first feeding, when there is an
attempt to incorporate the mother’s breast into the infant’s body.
*When dangerous object are introjected, they become internal
persecutors, capable of terrifying the infant and leaving
frightening residues that may be expressed in dreams.

 Projection
the fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually
reside in another person not within one’s body.
*adults sometimes project their own feeling of love onto another
person and become convinced that the other person loves them.

 Splitting
keeping apart incompatible impulses. Thus, infants
develop the picture of both the good me and bad me that enables
them to deal with both pleasurable and destructive impulses
toward external objects.

 Projective identification
A psychic defense mechanism in which infants splits
off unacceptable parts of themselves, project them into
another object, and finally introject them back into
themselves in a changed or distorted form.

* Object relation theorist speak of internalization , they
mean that the person make in (introjects) aspects of
external world and then organizes those introjections.
Three internalizations
1. Ego
2. Superego
3. Oedipus complex
Internalizations

• For Melanie ego or one’s sense of self, reaches, maturity at
much earlier than Freud had assumed.
*Melanie ignored the id and based her theory on the ego’s early
ability to sense both destructive and loving forces and to manage
them through splitting, projection and introjection.
Ego

All experiences even those connected with the feeding, are
evaluated by the ego in terms of how they relate to the good
breast and the bad breast.
For example:
when the ego experiences the good breast, it expects
similar good experiences with other objects, such has its own
fingers, pacifier, or the father.
Ego

Melanie’s superego differ from Freud’s in at least three important
respect:
1. It emerges much earlier in life
2. It is not outgrowth of the Oedipus complex
3. It is more harsh and cruel
*Melanie arrived at these differences through her analysis of
young children, an experience Freud did not have.
Superego

Melanie believed that the more mature superego superego
produces feelings of inferiority and guilt. But her analysis of young
children led her to believe that the early superego produces not
guilt but terror.
*young children fear being devoured, cut up, and torn into
pieces---fears that are greatly out of proportion to any realistic
dangers.
Superego

To manage this anxiety, the child’s ego mobilizes the libido
(life instincts) against the death instinct.
This early ego defense lays the foundation for the development of
the superego, who extreme violence is a reaction to the ego’s
aggressive self-defense against its own destructive tendencies.
* Melanie this harsh and cruel superego is responsible for many
antisocial and criminal tendencies in adults.
Superego

Melanie believed that her idea of Oedipus complex was merely an
extension and not a refutation of Freud’s ideas., her conception
departed from the Freudian one in several ways.
1. Melanie held that the Oedipus complex begins at a much
earlier age then Freud had suggested.
2. Melanie believed that a significant part of Oedipus complex is
children’s fear of retaliation from their parent for their fantasy
of emptying the parent’s body.
Oedipus complex

3. She stressed the importance of children retaining positive feelings
towards both parents.
4. The Oedipus complex serve the same need for both genders that is to
establish a positive attitude with good and gratifying object and to avoid
the bad and terrifying object.
* In this position, children either gender can direct their love either
alternately or simultaneously toward both parent.
Oedipus complex

Melanie kline

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