0.4 Neo-freudian perspectives on personality  (Page 11/28)

Since the child is born with the life-instincts and death-instincts necessary to establish and maintain object relations, Klein did not focus on development as going through a series of stages. Instead, she suggested two basic developmental orientations that help the child to reconcile its emotions and feelings regarding the inner and outer worlds in which the child exists: the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position (Jarvis, 2004; Kernberg, 2004; Mitchell, 1986; Mitchell&Black, 1995). The means by which the child processes these emotions and orientations is based largely on fantasy. Klein believed that the child is capable at birth of an active fantasy-life. This fantasy emanates from within, and imagines what is without, and it represents the child’s primitive form of thinking about the world and about the child’s relationships (Jarvis, 2004; Kernberg, 2004; Mitchell, 1986). With regard to the mother, the child’s first object:

In the baby’s mind, the ‘internal’ mother is bound up with the ‘external’ one, of whom she is a ‘double’, though one which at once undergoes alterations in his mind through the very process of internalization; that is to say, her image is influenced by his phantasies, and by internal stimuli and internal experiences of all kinds. (pgs. 148-149; Klein, 1940/1986)

Klein believed that object relations are present at birth, and the first object is the mother’s breast (Klein, 1946/1986). Due, in part, to the trauma of birth, the child’s destructive impulses are directed toward the mother’s breast from the beginning of life. As the child fantasizes attacking and destroying its mother, it begins to fear retaliation. This leads to the paranoid position. Because of this fear, and in order to protect itself, the child begins the process of splitting the mother’s breast and itself into good and bad parts (the schizoid position). The child then relies on two principle defense mechanisms to reduce this anxiety: introjection leads the child to incorporate the good parts of the object into itself, and projection involves focusing the bad parts of the object and the child onto the external object. This introjection and projection then provide the basis for the development of the ego and the superego (Klein, 1946/1986; Mitchell, 1986).

As the child continues to develop, it becomes intellectually capable of considering the mother, or any other object, as a whole. In other words, the mother can be both good and bad. With this realization, the child begins to feel guilt and sadness over the earlier fantasized destruction of the mother. This results in the depressive position, and it represents an advancement of the child’s maturity (Jarvis, 2004; Kernberg, 2004; Klein, 1946/1986; Mitchell, 1986).

Discussion Question: Melanie Klein is unique in her emphasis on aggression and the death-instinct. Does it seem reasonable to consider aggression as important in human development as libido (and Eros)? Is it possible that aggression was an essential element in the development of the human species, but one that is no longer needed?