Module 8: Melanie Klein: Object Relations
Theory
Biography:
Born: March 30, 1882 in Vienna,
Austria
-
Youngest child
-
Feelings of rejection by her parents
Unfortunately, Klein did not have a
happy marriage; she dreaded sex and
abhorred (LOATHED) pregnancy
Klein separated from her husband in
1919 but did obtain a divorce for several
years
She grew up in a family that was
neither pro-religious nor anti-religious.
She established a psychoanalytic
practice in Berlin and made her first
contributions to the psychoanalytic
literature with a paper dealing with her
analysis of Erich.
She felt neglected by her elderly
father, whom she saw cold and distant, and
although she loved
and idolized her
mother, she felt suffocated by her
Not completely satisfied with her own
analysis by Ferenczi, she ended the
relationship and
began an analysis with
Karl Abraham
Always felt neglected and devastated
when her elder sister died whom she always
idolized
-
On her 18th year, her elder brother,
Emmanuel died
Married Arthur Klein , an engineer
and best friend of her brother, whom she
believed to have
been preventing her to
pursue medical studies
-
Had 3 children:
 Melitta
 Hans
 Erich
Klein met Sandor Ferenczi, a member
of Freud’s inner circle and the person who
introduced her
into the world of
psychoanalysis
When her mother died, she became
depressed and entered analysis with
Ferenczi. She was
deeply taken by
Psychoanalysis.
As part of the program, she began to
psychoanalyze her children
Melitta who became a psychoanalyst
was analyzed by Karen Horney
After 14 months, Abraham died
At this point of her life, Klein decided
to begin a self-analysis.
In 1919, psychoanalyst including
Freud, based their theories of child
development
From Berlin she moved to London to
avoid conflicts with preexisting practice in
psychoanalysis.
Although she claimed to practice
Freudian Psychology, Sigmund and Anna
Freud did not agree with her emphasis on
child psychoanalysis.
In 1934, Klein’s older son, Hans was
killed in a fall
Melitta, who had recently moved to
London, maintained that her brother had
committed
suicide, and she blamed her
mother for his death
MElitta began analysis with Edward
Glover, one of Klein’s rivals in British society
Klein and her daughter then became
professionally antagonistic and Melitta
maintained her animosity even after her
mother’s death
In 1946, the British Society
accepted three training procedures:
•
They possess unconscious images of
“good” or “bad”
1.
Traditional one of Melanie Klein
2.
Advocated by Anna Freud
For example, infants who fall asleep
while sucking on their fingers are
phantasizing about having their mother’s
good breast inside themselves. While hungry
infants who cry and kick their legs are
phantasizing that they are kicking or
destroying the bad breast.
3.
A middle group that accepted neither
training school but was more eclectic in its
approach
2. OBJECTS

-
Object Relations Theory
An offspring of Freud’s instinct theory
Difference from Freud’s instinct
theory:
1. Have less emphasis on biologically
based drives and more importance on
consistent patterns of interpersonal
relationships
2. Tends to be more maternal, stressing
the intimacy and nurturing of the
mother
3. See human contact and relatedness

Basic Assumption: Speculation on
how the infant’s real or fantasized
early relations with the mother on the
breast become a model for all later
interpersonal relationships.
•
Klein stresses that the child’s relation
to the breast is a prototype for later
relationships towards his/her parents and
other individuals.

Psychic Life of Infants
1. Phantasies/ fantasies
Psychic representations of
unconscious id instincts
Infants at birth already have a fantasy
about life
Any person, part of a person, or thing
through which the aim is satisfied
Its importance of certain objects like
breasts, vagina, and penis and so on to be of
great impact on infants
Drives or instincts must have an
object
Klein believes that an infant relates
there drives to external objects both in
fantasy and reality
Infants organize their experiences
into POSITIONS, or ways of dealing with both
internal and external objects
-
Two basic positions:
1. Paranoid-schizoid position (2.
Depressive position)
Developed during the first 3 or 4
months of life
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
The ego’s perception of external
world is subjective and fantastic rather than
objective and real
The infant then identifies the source
as an object of drive or instinct with he
desires to be in control with.
a.
Persecutory breast
Provide frustrations to an infant and
are incapable of providing love, care and
comfort. This allows the child to develop the
urge to destroy it by biting, tearing or even
annihilating it.
b.
Ideal Breast
it provides nourishment and care,
together with love, comfort and gratification
where infant aims to devour and harbor.
2. Depressive position
Begins to surface by the age of 5-6
months when an infant can already view an
object as incorporated both good and bad
feelings
Where are infants feels the anxiety of
losing a loved object accompanied by the
sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that
same object
Infant realizes that his/her mother
might leave her so she begins to protect her.

Psychic defense mechanisms
•
Splitting
-
Keeping apart incompatible impulses
It enables them to see the positive and
negative side of themselves or others
It may be both beneficial and
destructive since it may recognize the “goodme” and “bad-me” good me and bad me
•
Introjection
Infants fantasized taking into their
body those perceptions and experience that
they have had with the external object,
originally the mother’s breast
When good objects were introjected it
helps them protect their ego from anxiety,
however, when bad objects were the ones
introjected they become internal prosecutors
it?”
“Why would I let my child experience
•
Projection
It is the fantasy that one’s own
feelings and impulses actually reside in
another person and not within one’s body
Children project both bad and good
images onto external objects, especially their
parents
People can also project good
impulses.
(Adult sometimes project their own feelings
of love onto another person and become
convinced that the person loves them)
•
Projective Identification
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.
- 3 Important Internalization
•
Ego Klein
Klein believed that the ego, or one’s
sense of self, reaches maturity at a much
earlier stage that Freud had assumed
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
relation in both phantasy 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
from their parent for their fantasy of
emptying the parent’s body
But the infant also experiences bad
breast – the one that is not present or does
not give milk, love, or security.
c)
Importance of children retaining
positive feelings toward both parents during
the Oedipal years
The infant introjects both the good
breast and the bad breast, and these images
provide a focal point for further expansion
of the ego.
d)
Serves the same need for both
genders, to establish a positive attitude with
the good or gratifying object (breast or penis)
and to avoid the bad or terrifying object
•
Superego Klein
•
Female Oedipal Complex
-
Klein claims that:
•
Male Oedipal Complex
a)
life
Superego emerges much earlier in
Infants develop passionate caring for
the good breast and intense hatred for the
bad breast, leaving a person to struggle a
lifetime to reconcile these unconscious
psychic imaged of good and bad, pleasure and
pain
b)
Not as result of resolved Oedipus
complex
c)
More harsh and cruel
Early superego produces not guilt
but terror to infants
Klein also insisted that superego
goes along with the development of the
Oedipus Complex and provides realistic
guilt in the resolution of the complex
Cruel superego is responsible for
many antisocial and criminal tendencies in
adults.
The most crucial stage of life is the
first few months, a time when relationships
with mother and other significant objects
from a model for later interpersonal
relations.
A person’s adult ability to love or to
hate originates with these early object
relations.
Later views on object relations
•
•
Oedipus Complex Klein
a)
Begins at a much earlier age than
Freud had suggested.
Begins during the earliest months of
life, overlap with the oral and anal stages, and
reaches its climax during the genital stage
at around age 3 or 4.
b)
Significant part of the Oedipus
complex is children’s fear of retaliation
Margaret Mahler
Children’s sense of identity rests on
a three step relationship with their
mother:
a)
Infants have basic needs cared for by
their mother
b)
They develop a safe symbiotic
relationship with an all-powerful mother
c)
The child emerges from their
mother’s protective circle and establish their
separate individuality
• In general, Mahler’s work was concerned
with the infant’s struggle to gain autonomy
and a sense of self
•
Heinz Kohut
He theorized that children develop a
sense of self during early infancy when
parents and others treat them as if they had
an individualized sense of identity.
Extensive application to borderline
and narcissistic personality disorder
•
John Bowlby
unconscious wishes through toys and play
things
Klein’s therapy is to reduce the
depressive anxieties and persecutory
fears and encourages her patients to reexperience early emotions and fantasies
and help them identify between reality and
fantasy, conscious and unconscious.
 Klein’s view of human nature
•
Determinism vs. free choice
•
Pessimistic or optimistic
•
Causal vs. teleological
He investigated infant’s attachment to
their mothers as well as the negative
consequences of being separated from their
mothers
•
Unconscious determinants vs.
conscious determinants
•
Biological vs. environmental
Emphasizes different stages of
separation anxiety
•
Similarities vs. uniqueness
•
Mary Ainsworth and colleagues
She developed a technique from
measuring the type of attachment style an
infant develops toward its caregivers
These developmental psychologists
were the first in a long series of what were
known as baby psychologists
-these individuals were very interested in
the parenting experience and its effects on
the child

Klein’s Psychotherapy
Klein developed the play therapy
technique as a substitute for Freud’s
dream analysis and free association,
believing that children may express their