WHO IS MELANIE KLEIN?
• Born in Austria 1882. Polish Hungarian Jewish.
Youngest of 4.
• Mother: Shop keeper, neurotic, manipulative,
controlled everything. Preffered her brother.
Despite this, she was close with her mother and
brother (father figure)
• Father: physician dentist, favored Emilie
• Klein married 1903 —> 3 children
• Discovered psychoanalysis; therapy with
Ferenczi (psychoanalysis with children)
• Left husband 1920, divorced 1926 — new
therapist Karl Abraham — terminally ill
• Moved to London with youngest son left 2 to
complete education
• Bad relationship with Melitta
• 1934 Hans (son) died in climbing
accident:Melitta said suicide
• Ex husband died 1939: Emilie 1940
• Only receives success just before dying in
hospital 1960
Introduction to Object Relation Theory
 Drives reflected to an object
 Based on the observation of children
 Children internalize both positive and
negative feeling toward their mother.
 Importance of 4-6 months after birth
 Develop superego much earlier that
Freud believed.
 Drives are the source of aim and object.
 Aim to reduce Tension.
PSYCHIC LIFE OF INFANT
 • Important: first 4 or 6 months
 • Phylogenetic Endowment
 • PHANTASY = good or bad
 •OBJECT =internalized image
POSITIONS
Paranoid Schizoid Position
 Develop during the first 3-4 months of
life
 The ego perception of the external
world is subjective and fantastic rather
than obj. and real.
 Good and bad breast are separated.
 Develop relationship with the ideal
breast which provides love, comfort
and gratification.
Depressive Position
 Develop during 5-6 months
 Infant begins to view external object as
a whole
 Good and bad breast can exist in one
person.
 The ego is beginning to mature or can
tolerate some of its own destructive
feelings rather than projecting them
outward.
PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISM
 Introjection - outer world/objects taken
into self to become part of inner world.
  Projection - aggressive/envious feelings
(badness) passed onto other people or
repressed to unconscious.
 Splitting - good and bad. As splitting
diminishes experiences more balanced,
bad less bad, good less good.
 Projective Identification - feeling that
they have become like that object
 Transitional Objects - dealing with
separation
INTERNALIZATION
EGO
 Mostly unorganized at birth, but strong
enough to feel anxiety, to use defense
mechanisms, and to form early object
relation in both fantasies and real.
 All experience are evaluated by the ego
in terms of how they relate to good and
bad breast.
 The ego, of one’s sense of self reaches
the maturity at a much earlier that
Freud assumed.
 The ego’s early ability to sense both
destructive and loving forces and to
manage them through splitting,
projection, and introjection.
SUPER EGO
 Emerges much earlier in life
 Not an outgrowth of the Oedipus
Complex
 Dual image of self allows them to
manage the good and the bad aspect of
external obj.
 No longer see the world in terms of
partial obj. and their egos become more
integrated.
 Harsh and cruel super ego is
responsible for many antisocial and
criminal tendencies in adult.
Oedipus Complex
 Begins during the earliest month of life,
overlaps with the oral and anal stages,
reaches it climax during genital age at
around 3 to 4 years old.
 Serves the same need for both sexes.
 Importance of Children retaining
positive feeling toward both parents
during oedipal year.
Female Oedipal Complex
 Sees ioher mother’s breast as good and
bad
 Around 6 months of age she begins to
view the breast as more positive.
 Female Oedipal stages proceeds
smoothly, the little girls adopts a
“feminine” position and has a positive
relationship with both parents.
 The little birth girls principal anxiety
comes from the fear that the inside of
her body has been injured by her
mother, an anxiety that can only
alleviated when she later gives birth to
a healthy little boy.
Male Oedipal Complex
 A boy shifts some of his oral desires
from his mother breast to his father’s
penis.
 Adopt a passive homosexual attitude to
his father.
  This passive homosexual position is a
prerequisite for the boy’s development
Self - center of individual's psychological
of a healthy heterosexual relationship
universe
with his mother.
 The boy’s Oedipus complex is resolved - center of initiative and recipient of
only partially by his castration anxiety. impressions
 Boy sees his parent as a whole objs, a
condition that enables him to work
through his depressive position.
Narcissistic needs:
VIEWS ON OBJECT RELATIONS
1) need to exhibit grandoise self (mirroring)
MARGARET MAHLER
2) need to acquire idealized image of one or
-first 3 years of life more parents

1. Normal Autism

-objectless stage JOHN BOWLBY'S ATTACHMENT THEORY

2. Normal Symbiosis - Attachment theory from Trilogy

Attachment & Loss
- "dual unity within one common boundary"
3 Stages of Separation Anxiety
3. Separation - individuation
1. Protest Stage
-personal identity
2. Despair
a. differentiation
3.Detachment
b. practicing
Assumptions:
c. rapprochement
1. Infants need to know that the caregiver is
-rapprochement crisis accessible and dependable

d. libidinal object constancy 2. Bonding relationship

-inner representation of mother

MARY AINSWORTH & STRANGE SITUATION

HEINZ KOHUT - 20 min. Lab session

•core if human personality

(x) innate instinctual drives 3 Attachment style ratings

(/) human relatedness

 Secure attachment (+) Pessimistic vs. (+) Optimistic

= Infants are happy, enthusiastic and (+) Causality vs. (-) Teleology
initiate contact.
(+) Unconcious vs. (-) Concious
Anxious - resistant attachment style
(-) Biological vs. (+) Social
= ambivalent when mother leaves the
room. Upset when mother back (-) Uniqueness vs. (+) Similarity

Anxious-avoidant

= Calm. Ignore and avoid mother when

back.

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, pencil,
and paper paint, crayon and so forth.
 In addition, to expressing negative
transference feelings through play,
Klein’s young patients often attacked
her verbally, which gave her
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 object.

Concept of Humanity

(+) Determinism vs. (-) Free choice