Object Relations Theory: Melanie Klein

• Melanie Klein's Object Relations Theory focuses on interpersonal relationships.

Object Relations Theory

• The first 4 to 6 months after birth are most important.
• Infant drives like hunger and sex are directed towards an object – a breast, penis, or vagina.
• A child's relationship with the breast serves as a fundamental prototype for the relationships with mother and father.
• Klein shifted psychoanalytic theory away from organically based stages to the role of early fantasy in interpersonal relationships.
• Object Relations Theory (Klein) focuses on consistent patterns of interpersonal relationships.
• It emphasizes maternal nurture and intimacy of the mother and sees human contact as the main motivator for human behavior.
• Psychoanalytic Theory (Freud) focuses on biologically based drives and the power and control of the father.
• It sees sexual pleasure as the prime motive for human behavior.

Psychic Life of the Infant

• Infants don't start life with a blank slate, but with an inherited predisposition to reduce anxiety.
• Anxiety results from the conflict between the "life instinct" and the "death instinct".
• Phantasies and Objects are key components.
• Phantasies are psychic representations of unconscious id instincts.
• They have unconscious images of "good" and "bad", for instance, a full stomach is "good" and an empty one is "bad."
• Drives force action to relieve tension; mostly this requires an object.
• Drives must have some object; the hunger drive involves the good breast and the sex drive involves a sexual organ.
• The earliest object relations are with the mother's breast.

Positions (Developmental Stages)

• Infants organize experiences into "positions," to deal with good and bad feelings and internal and external objects.
• These positions are either paranoid-schizoid or depressive.

Paranoid-Schizoid Position

• A way of organizing experiences includes both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external objects into the good and the bad.
• The infant wants to control the breast by devouring and harboring it, but also has fantasies of damaging the breast by biting, tearing, or annihilating it.
• The child has to keep the good and bad breast separate or they risk annihilating the good breast and losing it as a safe harbor.
• In the young child's schizoid world, rage and destructive feelings are directed toward the bad breast, while feelings of love and comfort are associated with the good breast.

Depressive Position

• The feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object constitute depressive action.
• An 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 begins to mature enough to tolerate some of its own destructive feelings rather than projecting them outward.
• However, the infant's ego is still not mature enough to realize that it lacks the capacity to protect the mother.
• Therefore, the infant experiences guilt for past destructive urges toward the mother.
• The depressive position is resolved when children fantasize that they have made amends for their previous transgressions and when they recognize that their mother will not go away permanently but will return after each departure.
• Children close the split between the good and the bad mother and can experience love from their mother, and display their own love for her.
• An incomplete resolution can result in lack of trust, morbid mourning at the loss of a loved one, and a variety of other psychic disorders.

Psychic Defense Mechanisms

• Introjection
• Projection
• Splitting
• Projective Identification
• Introjection is when someone "takes in both good and bad objects".
• Infants fantasize taking into their body perceptions and experiences they had with the external object - originally the mother's breast.
• Introjected objects don't accurately represent the real objects and are colored by children's fantasies.
• Projection means "Get rid of them".
• It is a 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.
• Projection allows people to believe that their own subjective opinions are true.
• Splitting is when the ego splits itself so to separate bad and good objects.
• Infants develop a picture of both the "good me" and the "bad me" to deal with pleasurable and destructive impulses to external objects.
• Projective Identification involves infants splitting off unacceptable parts of themselves, project them into another object, and finally introject them back into themselves in a changed or distorted form.
• Projective identification exerts a powerful influence on adult interpersonal relations

Internalizations

• The Ego
• The Superego
• the Oedipus complex

Ego

• The ego (one's sense of self) matures at a much earlier stage than Freud assumed.
• The ego evolves with the infant's first experience with feeding, when the good breast fills the infant not only with milk but with love and security.
• Klein assumed infants innately strive for integration, but at the same time, are forced to deal with the opposing forces of life and death, as reflected in their experience with the good breast and the bad breast.
• As infants mature, their perceptions become more realistic by no longer seeing the world in terms of partial objects, and their egos become more integrated.

Superego

• According to Klein, the superego produces terror, not guilt.
• Young children fear being devoured, cut up, torn into pieces - out of proportion to any realistic dangers.
• Klein rejected Freud's notion that the superego is a consequence of the Oedipus complex.
• Instead Klein insisted that it grows along with the Oedipus complex and finally emerges as realistic guilt after the Oedipus complex is resolved.

Oedipus Complex

• Klein held that the Oedipus complex begins during the earliest months of life.
• She theorized that the Superego grows with Oedipus complex.
• Hypothesized that during its early stages, the Oedipus complex 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 (breast or penis)
• Children are capable of both homosexual and heterosexual relations with both parents.

Female Oedipus Complex

• At the beginning of the female Oedipal development (first months), a little girl sees her mother's breast as both "good and bad."
• Around 6 months of age, she sees the breast as more positive than negative, leading to her seeing her whole mother as full of good things, leading to her wondering how babies are made.
• The girls fantasizes that her father's penis feeds her mother with riches, including babies.
• The little girl sees the father's penis as the giver of children, developing a positive relationship to it and fantasizing 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 sees her mother as a rival and fantasizes robbing her mother of her father's penis and stealing her mother's babies.
• The little girl's wish to rob her mother produces a paranoid fear that her mother retaliates against her by injuring her or taking away her babies.
• Principal anxiety comes from a fear that the inside of her body has been injured by her mother.
• This anxiety is alleviated only when she later gives birth to a healthy baby.

Male Oedipus Complex

• Like the young girl, the little boy sees his mother's breast as both good and bad (Klein, 1945).
• 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; that is, he adopts a passive homosexual attitude toward his father.
• Next, 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.
• As the boy matures, he 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.
• According to Klein, a more important factor is his ability to establish positive relationships with both parents at the same time.
• At that point, the boy sees his parents as whole objects, helping him to work through his depressive position.

Resolution of The Oedipus Complex

• 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.
• Then, no remnant of rivalry remains.
• Children's positive feelings toward both parents later serve to enhance their adult sexual relations.

Summary of Object Relations

• 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 unconscious psychic images of good and bad, pleasure and pain.
• The most crucial stage of life is the first few months, when relationships with mother and other significant objects form a model for later interpersonal relations.
• Adult ability to love or hate originates with these early object relations.