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Melanie Klein

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> Melanie Klein

Description |
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Description

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) started from Freud but developed her own approach. In doing so, she was
opposed by Anna Freud, which split the British Psychoanalytical Society into
separate camps.

She used observation of children at play with selected toys (her ‘play
technique’) as a substitute for the adult free association.

Discussion

Lacan’s view was that ‘unconscious is the discourse of Other’ (in that the
child views itself as an other), where the subject is inserted into a field of
differences. For Klein, the unconscious is a dynamic internal
realm, created by projection and
introjection.

For Klein, normal development mainly involves managing the opposing inner
forces of love and hate, preservation and destruction. She replaces
Freud’s stages of development with descriptions of positions that are a specific
configuration of object relations, anxieties and defenses which persist
throughout life.

Klein saw the baby as relating to the world via its physical relationship
with the world, with the initial importance of its mother, initially as a set of part-objects.

She dates the super-ego
as starting in the oral phase.

Under the sway of phantasy
life and of conflicting emotions, the child at every stage of libidinal
organization introjects his
objects — primarily his parents — and builds up the
super-ego from these elements… All the factors which have a bearing on his
object relations play a part from the beginning in the build-up of the
super-ego.

‘The first introjected object, the
mother’s breast, forms the basis of the super-ego.

She closely linked the external physical and internal worlds, thus explaining
much of the later linkages between emotional states and bodily symptoms.

She has been criticized for placing excessive emphasis on inner systems and
later object-relations theorists (eg.
Winnicott) put more emphasis on the role of the external world in creating a
psychologically healthy child.

A summary of some of Klein’s key points is as follows:

The child’s inner world has exaggerated, idealized and persecutory objects
are phantasies, not simple representations of experiences with parents.
The very young infant’s inner world is primarily defensive, protecting the
self from the discomfort of pain, frustration, etc.
The key defensive psychic state is the
paranoid-schizoid position, based on part-object
relationship (eg. good and bad object
differentiation), splitting,
projection and introjection.
As the child grows, it realizes that good and bad experiences come from
the same person, as well as differences between internal and external objects.
This leads to guilty feeling and fear of rejection in the
depressive position. This eventually leads to a
more integrated person. Projective
identification is an essential mechanism in both paranoid-schizoid and
depressive positions (note that ‘position’ is used rather than ‘stage’ as
these are not necessarily completely sequential.

Foreground for Klein was the interaction of unconscious feelings — which was
background for Freud, who used more scientific and metaphoric explanations.

Note that psychoanalysis (in all its schools of thought) has little to say
about identity in the sense of being a stable self, considering the matter to be
too complex and variable.

The goal of psychoanalysis is to help people live more fully in the present
by escaping from the anchors and distortions of the past.