Klein

1. Klein Chapter 5

2. Outline • Biography of Klein • Psychic Life of the Infant • Positions • Psychic Defense Mechanisms • Internalizations Cont’d

3. Outline • Later Views on Object Relations • Psychotherapy • Related Research • Critique of Object Relations Theory • Concept of Humanity

4. Biography of Klein • Born in Vienna in 1882 • Youngest and least favored of four children • Had neither a Ph.D, nor an M.D. • Became an analyst by being psychoanalyzed and through a study of psychoanalysis • Klein's daughter, Melitta, became a psychoanalyst and was one of her mother's most bitter critics • Specialized in analyzing children • Died in England in 1960

5. Psychic Life of the Infant • Fantasies • Infants possess an active fantasy life • Most basic fantasies are of the “good” breast and the “bad” breast • Objects • Drives have an object • Objects within child’s fantasy world have a life of their own

6. Positions • Paranoid-Schizoid Position • Tendency to see the world as having the same destructive and omnipotent qualities that the infant possess • Depressive Position • Anxiety over losing a loved object • Sense of guilt for wanting to destroy loved object

7. Psychic Defense Mechanisms • Introjection • Projection • Splitting • Projective Indentification

8. Internalizations • Ego • Superego • Oedipus Complex • Male Oedipal Complex • Female Oedipal Complex

9. Later Views of Object Relations • Margaret Mahler’s View • Developed her theory of object relations from careful observations of infants as they bonded with their mothers during their first three years of life • In their progress toward achieving a sense of identity, children pass through a series of three major developmental stages: • Normal autism • Normal symbiosis • Separation-individuation

10. Later Views of Object Relations • Heinz Kohut’s View • 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

11. Later Views of Object Relations • Otto Kernberg’s View • 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 • Children who have poor relations with their mother will have difficulty integrating their ego and may suffer from some form of psychopathology during adulthood

12. Later Views of Object Relations • John Bowlby’s View • Believed that early childhood attachments to parents have a considerable influence on later personality development • By studying human and other primate infants, he observed three stages of separation anxiety: • Protest, Despair, & Detach • Influenced Mary Ainsworth who has developed techniques for measuring attachment style • Secure, Anxious-resistant, & Anxious-avoidant

13. Psychotherapy • Encouraged patients to reexperience early fantasies, while pointing out the differences between reality and fantasy • Goal of Kleinian Psychotherapy: • Reduce depressive anxieties and persecutory fears and to lessen the harshness of internalized objects

14. Related Research • Attachment Theory and Children’s Object Relationships • Kirsh and Cassidy (1997) • securely attached children have better attention and better memory • Attachment Theory and Adult Relationships • Those with secure attachments experience more trust, closeness, and positive emotions in relationships

15. Critique of Object Relations Theory • Klein’s Theory is: • High on Guiding Action and Internal Consistency • Moderate on Parsimony • Low on Generating Research, Falsifiability, and Organizing Knowledge

16. Concept of Humanity • Determinism over Free Choice • Equal emphasis on Optimism and Pessimism • Causality over Teleology • Unconscious over Conscious • Culture over Biology • Similarity over Uniqueness