Klein: Object Relations Theory
Psychology of Personality
Lecture, Chapter 5
Overview of Object Relations Theory
Klein believed that an infant’s drives (hunger, sex, etc.) are directed to an
object and that his/ her relationship with the object influences interpersonal
relations later in life.
Klein shifted psychoanalytic focus away from organically based drives to drives
resulting from interpersonal relationships.
Klein developed her ideas from experience and observation of young children.
Several other theorists (Mahler, Kohut, Bowlby, and Ainsworth) expanded Object
Relations Theory.
Klein’s Life
Melanie Reizes Klein grew up as the youngest of 4 children in a nonreligious
family in Vienna.
Klein believed her birth to be unplanned and saw herself as rejected by both
parents.
Klein experienced the deaths of 2 close siblings, a brother and a sister, during
childhood, as well as her father’s death.
Klein divorced her husband and developed a very strained relationship, both
personally and professionally, with her daughter.
Possibly due to her own ambivalence toward her parents, particularly her mother,
Klein expanded the psychoanalytic approach to focus on the powerful, maternal
influence and the importance of very early infancy.
Distinctions from Freud
Object Relations Theory
places less emphasis on biologically based drives and more on drives of
interpersonal relationships.
is more maternal, stressing the intimacy and nurturing of the mother
sees the primary motive of human behavior to be human contact and relatedness,
rather than sexual pleasure and aggression.
Psychic Life of the Infant
Infants are born with an inherited disposition, phylogenetic endowment, to
reduce anxiety associated with life and death instinctual conflicts.
Infants possess active fantasies in terms of “good” and “bad.”
Later, more fantasies encompassing both reality and inherited predispositions,
emerge.
Objects include any person or thing through which a drive is satisfied.
Introjection is the effort to internalize objects of pleasure such as mother’s
hands, face, or breast, both cognitively and physically.
Positions
Positions are states that infants can inhabit as needed, not like developmental
stages which provide ways of dealing with both internal and external objects.
The Paranoid-Schizoid position organizes experiences that include both paranoid
feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external objects
into the good and the bad.
The Depressive position involves having anxiety over losing a loved object
coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object.
Psychic Defense Mechanisms
Klein believed that psychic defense mechanisms helped
infants protect themselves from anxiety regarding their own destructive
fantasies
Introjection involves taking into their body the perceptions and experiences
with the object.
Projection involves placing one’s own feelings and impulses into another person.
Splitting involves separation of the ego into both “good” and “bad” selves.
Projective identification involves splitting of unacceptable parts of
themselves, projecting them onto another object, and introjecting them back into
themselves in a distorted form.
Internalizations
Internalizations refer to the process of organizing introjections into
psychologically meaningful frameworks.
Klein believed that the ego was present at birth in an unorganized form and was
capable of using defense mechanisms, and forming object relations in fantasy and
reality.
Klein believed that the superego is based on terror in early stages, that it is
not an outgrowth of the Oedipus complex, and that it emerges much earlier in
life.
Klein believed that the Oedipus complex took place during early months,
overlapping with oral and anal stages,
it involves fear of retaliation from parent for their fantasies
that positive feelings toward both parents should be retained
that it serves the same need of establishing positive relationship with the
“object” for both genders.
Other View on Object Relations Theory
Margaret Mahler
Psychological birth involves a child becoming an individual
separate from caregiver, leading to a sense of identity
Normal autism (birth to 3-4 weeks), or a state of primary
narcissism, where infant is unaware of others.
Normal symbiosis (4th week to 4-5 months), when infant
behaves as though he and mother are omnipotent system.
Separation-individuation (4th to 30-36th months), involving
differentiation, practicing, rapprochement crisis, and libidinal object
constancy.
Heinz Kohut – believed that infants are naturally narcissistic in that:
They have the need to exhibit the grandiose self.
They have the need to acquire an idealized image of parent(s).
Mary Ainsworth – developed Strange Situation to measure infant’s attachment
style
Secure attachment – happiness with mother’s return; initiate
contact
Anxious-resistant – ambivalence; both seek and reject
mother’s contact
Anxious-avoidant – ignore and avoid mother’s contact upon her
return.
Bowlby’s Attachment Theory
Bowlby observed childhood attachment behaviors and linked
those to behaviors in adulthood.
Bowlby assumed that attachment is instinctual and
evolutionary, in that separation of infant and parent would threaten baby’s
safety.
Goal is to maintain proximity
Threats to proximity initiate reaction in parent and child.
Infant separation anxiety involves protest, despair, and
finally detachment from other people.
Parental separation anxiety involves balancing the desire to
be close to the child with desire for child’s growth and self-reliance.
Bowlby noted similarities between infants separated from mothers and adults
facing bereavement and saw grief as a form of separation anxiety
Bowlby linked pathological grief to patterns of parental attachments
Anxious attachment - anxiety, nervousness, fear of parenting
role
Compulsive self-reliant – distant, unaffectionate parent
Compulsive caregiver – overly involved parent
Collin Murray Parkes applied Bowlby’s Attachment Theory to bereaved adults and
identified periods of denial and numbing, searching, anger/guilt, and defense,
describing pathological grief as chronic, inhibited, or delayed.
Psychoanalysis
Although rejected by both Sigmund and Anna Freud, Klein pioneered the use of
psychoanalysis with children.
Klein used play therapy as a means for young children to express aggressive
fantasies
giving the psychotherapist an opportunity to interpret the unconscious motives.
Klein’s goal was to reduce young children’s anxieties and fears and to mitigate
the harshness of internalized objects.
Conclusion
Did Klein use science in her theory development?
Was her theory able to generate research, be falsified, organize data, guide
action, be internally consistent, and be parsimonious?
Where does Object Relations Theory fall on the basic issues concerning the
nature of humanity?
Determinism vs. free choice
Pessimism vs. optimism
Causality vs. teleology
Conscious vs. unconscious
Social vs. biological influences
Uniqueness vs. similarities