CHAPTER 5
LECTURE
OUTLINE
I. Overview of Object Relations Theory
Unlike Adler
and Jung, who ultimately rejected Freud’s theories, Melanie Klein tried to
validate and extend Freud’s ideas within the framework of psychoanalysis. Klein
and other object relations theorists have generally sought to extend Freud’s
developmental stages downward to the first few months after birth. Most of
these theorists have examined the importance of the mother–child relationship.
II. Biography of Melanie Klein
Melanie
Klein was born in Vienna in 1892, the youngest and least favored of four children
of a struggling physician and his second wife. Her closest childhood friend was
an idolized older brother. When this brother died, Melanie was devastated.
While still in mourning for her beloved brother, she married Arthur Klein, an
engineer and a close friend of her brother. Her marriage, which eventually
ended in divorce, produced three children, a daughter and two sons. Klein’s
daughter, Melitta, became a psychoanalyst and was one of her mother’s most
bitter critics. Klein had neither a Ph.D. nor an M.D. degree, but she became an
analyst by being psychoanalyzed and studying psychoanalysis. As a
psychoanalyst, she specialized in analyzing children, including her own. In
1927, she moved to London where she practiced until her death in 1960. She
never reconciled with her daughter Melitta, who refused to attend her mother’s
funeral.
III. Introduction to Object Relations Theory
Object
relations theory differs from Freudian theory in at least three ways: (1) it
places more emphasis on interpersonal relationships, (2) it stresses the
infant’s relationship with the mother rather than the father, and (3) it
suggests that people are motivated primarily for human contact rather than for
sexual pleasure. The term object in
object relations theory refers to any person or part of a person that infants
introject onto their psychic structure and then later project onto other
people. Thus, an object is something like Freud’s notion of a superego, which
children introject. That is, children take into their psychic structure the
morals and ideals that they see in their parents.
Klein
believed that infants begin life with an inherited predisposition to reduce the
anxiety that they experience as a consequence of the clash between the life instinct
and the death instinct.
A. Fantasies
Klein
assumed that very young infants possess an active fantasy life, albeit on an
unconscious level. Their most basic fantasies are images of the “good” breast
and the “bad” breast. Later, these and other unconscious fantasies are shaped
by both reality and by inherited predispositions.
B. Objects
Klein agreed with Freud
that drives have an object, but she was more likely to emphasize the child’s
relationship with these objects (parents’ face, hands,
breast, penis, etc.), which she saw as having a life of their own within the
child’s fantasy world.
V. Positions
In their
attempts to reduce the conflict produced by good and bad images, infants organize
their experience into positions, or ways of dealing with both internal and
external objects. Although these positions have names that suggest pathology,
Klein used them to refer to normal as well as abnormal development.
A. Paranoid-Schizoid
Position
The struggles that infants
experience with the good breast and the bad breast lead to two separate and
opposing feelings: a desire to harbor the breast and a desire to bite or
destroy it. To tolerate these two feelings, the ego splits itself by retaining
parts of its life and death instincts while projecting other parts onto the
breast. It then has a relationship with the ideal
breast and the persecutory breast.
To control this situation, the infant adopts the paranoid-schizoid position,
which is a tendency to see the world as having the same destructive and
omnipotent qualities that the infant possesses.
B. Depressive
Position
By depressive position,
Klein meant the anxiety that infants experience around 6 months of age over
losing their mother and yet, at the same time, wanting to destroy her. The
depressive position is resolved when infants fantasize that they have made up
for their previous transgressions against their mother and also realize that
their mother will not abandon them.
VI. Psychic Defense Mechanisms
According to Klein,
children adopt various psychic defense mechanisms to protect their ego against
anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies.
A. Introjection
Klein defined introjection
as the fantasy of taking into one’s own body the images that one has of an
external object, especially the mother’s breast. Infants usually introject good
objects as a protection against anxiety, but they also introject bad objects in
order to gain control of them.
B. Projection
The fantasy that one’s own
feelings and impulses reside within another person is called projection. Again,
children project both good and bad images, especially onto their parents.
C. Splitting
Infants tolerate good and
bad aspects of themselves and of external objects by splitting, or mentally
keeping apart, incompatible images. If not carried to extreme, splitting can be
beneficial to people because it allows them to like themselves while still
recognizing some unlikable qualities.
D. Projective
Identification
The psychic defense
mechanism in which infants split off unacceptable parts of themselves, project
them onto another object, and finally introject them in an altered form is
called projective identification. Unlike projection, which exists mostly in
fantasy, projective identification takes place in the real world.
VII. Internalizations
After
introjecting external objects, infants organize them into a psychologically
meaningful framework, a process Klein called internalization.
A. Ego
Internalizations are aided
by the early ego’s ability to feel anxiety, to deploy defense mechanisms, and
to form object relations in both fantasy and reality. However, a unified ego
emerges only after first splitting itself into the two parts: those that deal
with the life instinct and those that relate to the death instinct.
B. Superego
Klein believed that the
superego emerged much earlier than Freud had held. To her, the superego
preceded rather than followed the Oedipus complex. Klein also saw the superego as
being quite harsh and cruel.
C. Oedipus Complex
Again, Klein’s conception
of the Oedipus complex differed from Freud’s. First, she believed that the
Oedipus complex begins during the first few months of life, then reaches its
zenith during the genital stage, at
about age 3 or 4, or the same time that Freud had suggested it began. Second,
Klein held that much of the Oedipus complex is based on children’s fear that
their parents will seek revenge against them for their fantasy of emptying the
parent’s body. Third, Klein believed that, for healthy development, children
should retain positive feelings for both parents during the Oedipal years.
1. Male
Oedipal Development
According to Klein, the
little boy adopts a “feminine” position very early in life and has no fear of
being castrated as punishment for his sexual feelings for his mother. Later, he
projects his destructive drive onto his father, whom he fears will bite or
castrate him. The male Oedipus complex is resolved when the boy establishes
good relations with both parents.
2. Female
Oedipal Development
The little girl also adopts
a “feminine” position toward both parents quite early in life. She has a
positive feeling both for her mother’s breast and for her father’s penis, which
she believes will feed her with babies. Sometimes the girl develops hostility
toward her mother, whom she fears will retaliate against her and rob her of her
babies, but, in most cases, the female Oedipus complex is resolved without any
jealousy toward the mother.
VIII. Later Views on Object Relations
A number
of other theorists have expanded and altered Klein’s theory of object
relations. Notable among them are Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg,
and John Bowlby.
A. Margaret
Mahler’s View
Mahler, a native of Hungary
who practiced psychoanalysis in both Vienna and New York, developed her theory
of object relations from careful observations of infants as they bonded with
their mothers during their first 3 years of life. In their progress toward
achieving a sense of identity, children pass through a series of three major
developmental stages. First is normal
autism, which covers the first 3 or 4 weeks of life. During this time,
infants satisfy their needs within the all-powerful protective orbit of their
mother’s care and without an awareness of any other person. Second is normal symbiosis, when infants behave
as if they and their mother were an omnipotent, symbiotic unit. Third is separation-individuation, which spans
the time from about 4 months until about 3 years. During this time, children
become psychologically separated from their mothers and achieve individuation, or a sense of personal
identity.
B. Heinz Kohut’s
View
Like Kernberg, Kohut was a
native of Vienna, but he spent most of his professional life in the United
States. More than any of the other object relations theorists, he emphasized
the development of the self. In
caring for infants’ physical and psychological needs, adults treat them as if
they had a sense of self. The parents’ behaviors and attitudes then help
children form a sense of self that gives unity and consistency to their
experiences.
C. Otto Kernberg’s
View
Kernberg, a native of
Vienna, has spent most of his professional career in the United States. Like
Freud, his theories of infantile development have been built mostly on his
clinical experiences with older patients. Kernberg believed that the key to
understanding personality is the mother–child relationship. Children who
experience a healthy relationship with their mother develop an integrated ego,
a punitive superego, a stable self-concept, and satisfying interpersonal
relations. In contrast, children who have poor relations with their mother will
have difficulty integrating their ego and may suffer from some form of
psychopathology
during adulthood.
D. John Bowlby’s
Attachment Theory
John Bowlby, a physician
and native of England, received training in child psychiatry from Melanie
Klein. Like other object relations theorists, Bowlby believed that early childhood
attachments to parents have a considerable influence on later personality
development. By studying human and other primate infants, Bowlby observed three
stages of separation anxiety. First,
an infant will protest; second, it
shows apathy and despair, and finally, the human infant will become emotionally detached from other people, including the primary caregiver.
Children who experience this third stage lack warmth and emotion in their later
relationships. Bowlby influenced Mary Ainsworth, a psychologist who has
developed techniques for measuring attachment style.
IX. Psychotherapy
The goal
of Kleinian psychotherapy was to reduce depressive anxieties and persecutory
fears and to lessen the harshness of internalized objects. To do this, Klein
encouraged patients to re-experience early fantasies, while she pointed out the
differences between reality and fantasy as well as between conscious and
unconscious wishes. The understanding that patients gained from this procedure
allowed them to feel less persecuted by internalized objects and to project
previously frightening internal objects onto objects in the external world.
X. Related Research
Object
relations theories stress the importance of early bonding, and recent research
in this area has focused on attachment theory and interpersonal relationships
of both children and adults.
A. Attachment
Theory and Children’s Object Relationships
Kirsh and Cassidy (1997) found that children with
secure attachment, compared with children with insecure attachment, have both
better attention and better memory. Other research (Fury, Carlson, &
Sroufe, 1997) suggests that securely attached young children grow up to become
adolescents who feel comfortable in friendship groups that allowed new members
to easily become part of those groups. Still other studies (Fury et al., 1997)
have shown that 8- and 9-year-old children who were securely attached during
infancy produced family drawings that demonstrated interpersonal security.
B. Attachment
Theory and Adult Relationships
Research
with adults suggests that those with secure attachments experience more trust,
closeness, and positive emotions than do adults with other attachment styles.
Other research with college students has found that those with secure
relationships had less hostility and were more independent than students with
avoidant or ambivalent relationships.
XI. Critique of Object Relations Theory
Object
relations theory shares with Freudian theory an inability to be either
falsified or verified through empirical research; that is, findings consistent
with the theory can also be explained by some other model. Nevertheless, some
clinicians regard the theory as being a useful guide to action and as
possessing substantial internal consistency. However, the theory must be rated
low on parsimony and on its ability to organize knowledge and to generate
research.
XII. Concept of Humanity
Object
relations theorists see personality as being a product of the early
mother–child relationship, and thus they stress determinism over free choice.
The powerful influence of early childhood also gives these theories a low
rating
on uniqueness and high ratings on causality, unconscious forces, and social
influences. Klein and other object relations theorists rate average on optimism
versus pessimism.