MELANIE KLEINE

AHMED RADY
MB, ChB, Msc, MD, CRS, BCPC, DAPA, ABMPP
Lecturer of Psychiatry at Alexandria University Faculty of Medicine

MELANIE KLEINE
Melanie Klein Heavily influenced by Freud, Klein evolved a theory of
internal object relations that was intimately linked to drives

Her unique perspective largely grew out of her psychoanalytic

work with children, in which she became impressed with the
role of unconscious intrapsychic fantasy. She believed that a
fear of annihilation associated with Freud's death instinct was
a key factor in the first few months of the infant's life

MELANIE KLEINE
Freud

Kleine
LIBIDINAL DRIVE
DEATH DRIVE

MELANIE KLEINE
She postulated that the ego undergoes a splitting process to deal with that
terror; derivatives of the death instinctsuch as aggression, hatred,
sadism, and all other forms of "badness"are disavowed and projected
onto the mother.

MELANIE KLEINE
Klein viewed projection and introjection as the primary defensive
operations at that stage of life. After projecting the death-instinct
derivatives into the mother, the infant begins to suffer from persecutory
anxiety, in which the infant lives in dread of an invasive attack from the
mother. In that terrifying fantasy, the "bad mother" created by the infant's
projections gets inside the infant (i.e., the "bad mother" is reintrojected)
and destroys the remaining "goodness" (i.e., libidinal derivatives) that were
originally protected by the splitting and projection of the "badness.

MELANIE KLEINE
That persecutory anxiety characterized what Klein called the paranoidschizoid position, the infant's mode of organizing experience in which all
aspects of the infant and the mother are split into good and bad elements.
Klein thought that external and internal objects cannot be clearly
distinguished because the actual figures in the external world are heavily
colored by the infant's projections and ensuing perceptions are distorted

MELANIE KLEINE
She conceptualized oscillating cycles of introjection and projection to keep
bad aspects of the self separated from good aspects of the self and to
keep the bad aspects of objects separated from the good aspects. In that
manner the child can prevent good, loving aspects of its experience from
being destroyed by bad, hateful aspects of experience.

PROJECTION

INTROJECTION

MELANIE KLEINE
In the second half of the first year of life, according to Klein's
developmental timetable, the child's part-object world (i.e., a world
containing an "all-bad" mother and an "all-good" mother) begins to change.
The child becomes aware that the hateful, rejecting mother and the loving,
nurturing mother are simply aspects of the same person. As those
disparate views are integrated, the infant becomes concerned that it may
have harmed or destroyed its mother through its hostile and sadistic
fantasies directed toward her. At that developmental point the child has
arrived at the depressive position

MELANIE KLEINE
0 -------- 6 months

6 months -------- 1 year

Mom
Projection

Schizoid-Paranoid position

Introjection

Depressive Postion

MELANIE KLEINE

In contrast to the paranoid-schizoid position, in which the primary concern

of the infant is external attack, in the depressive position the infant's
primary concern is that it may harm love objects, particularly the mother.
The possibility of losing the good object through sadistic and aggressive
impulses produces guilt feelings in the child. Anxiety about loss of the love
object through one's own destructiveness is known as depressive anxiety

MELANIE KLEINE

To deal with guilt feelings, the child engages in a process of reparation, in

which efforts are made to ensure that love prevails over hate and that
damage done through one's own destructiveness is repaired through loving
behavior. Because the maternal object is recognized as a whole object in
the depressive position, Klein postulated that the Oedipus complex begins
in the second half of the first year, and she recast the whole oedipal
constellation as an effort to resolve depressive anxieties and guilt through
reparation.

MELANIE KLEINE

Kleinian theory has been criticized for its significant shortcomings. One of
its primary difficulties is the assumption that an infant in its first year of life
possesses a highly sophisticated capacity for abstract and conceptual
thinking. The infant's perceptual-cognitive development is actually too
rudimentary when that young to be capable of elaborating the
sophisticated fantasies that Klein postulates. Hence, her developmental
timetable, which compresses preoedipal and oedipal phases into the first
year, is no longer tenable

MELANIE KLEINE

Klein's emphasis on envy and greed have considerable clinical utility, but
her view that such states, as well as aspects of sadism and aggression,
derive from the death instinct has fallen out of favor. Klein has also been
criticized for relying too heavily on fantasy and thereby discounting the role
of actual environmental trauma on children and the influence of real
parental objects on the child's development

MELANIE KLEINE

Post-Kleinian theorists have suggested that the paranoid-schizoid and

depressive positions are not developmental phases that are outgrown but,
rather, two modes of generating experience that continue in a dialectic with
one another throughout adult life. Viewed from that perspective

MELANIE KLEINE

Thanks for attention