CHAPTER 5 | MELANIE KLEIN: OBJECT RELATIONS
THEORY
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY | PSY 20231 | BS Psychology 2-2 | Prof. Precious Gail V. Santos
OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY
OVERVIEW OF THE OBJECT RELATIONS
THEORY
• Built from careful observations of young
children.
• Emphasized the first 4 to 6 months after
birth.
• Infant’s drives (hunger, sex, and so forth) are
directed to an object—a breast, a penis, a
vagina, and so on.
• The child’s relation to the breast is
fundamental and serves as a prototype for
later relations to people.
BIOGRAPHY OF MELANIE KLEIN
• Melanie Reizes Klein was born on March 30,
1882, in Vienna, Austria.
• Youngest of 4 children born to Dr. Moriz
Reizes and his second wife, Libussa
Deutsch Reizes.
• Klein believed that her birth was
unplanned—a belief that led to feelings of
being rejected by her parents.
• She felt especially distant to her father, who
favored his oldest daughter, Emilie.
• During her childhood Klein observed both
parents working at jobs they did not enjoy -
father was a physician who did not make a
living out of it and just became a dental
assistant, and a mother selling plants and
reptiles.
• Despite her father’s meager income as a
doctor, Klein aspired to become a physician.
• Klein’s early relationships were either
unhealthy or ended in tragedy - she felt
neglected by her father and had a special
fondness for her older sister Sidonie.
• Sidonie was 4 years older and taught
Melanie arithmetic and reading.
Unfortunately, when Melanie was 4 years
old, Sidonie died.
• She then became close to her brother
Emmanuel who also tutored Melanie and
helped her pass the entrance examinations
of a reputable preparatory school.
• When Klein was 18, her father died, and 2
years later, Emmanuel, died which left Klein
devastated.
• While still in mourning over her brother’s
death, she married Arthur Klein, an engineer
who was Emmanuel’s close friend.
• Melanie believed that her marriage at age 21
prevented her from becoming a physician.
• Unfortunately, Klein did not have a happy
marriage; she dreaded sex and hated
pregnancy.
• Despite that, they had 3 children: Melitta,
born in 1904; Hans, born in 1907; and Erich,
born in 1914.
• In 1909, she met Sandor Ferenczi, a
member of Freud’s circle & the person who
introduced her to psychoanalysis.
• When her mother died in 1914, Klein
became depressed and entered analysis
with Ferenczi. That same year she read
Freud’s on Dreams.
• At about the same time she discovered
Freud, Erich was born. Klein was deeply
taken by psychoanalysis and trained her son
according to Freudian principles.
• She also attempted to analyze Melitta and
Hans, both of whom eventually went to other
analysts (Melitta was analyzed by Karen
Horney).
• Klein separated from her husband in 1919.
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• After the separation, she established a
psychoanalytic practice in Berlin and made
her first contributions to the psychoanalytic
literature with a paper dealing with her
analysis of Erich, who was not identified as
her son until long after her death.
• Not completely satisfied with the analysis by
Ferenczi, she ended the relationship and
began an analysis with Karl Abraham,
another member of Freud’s inner circle.
• After only 14 months, Klein experienced
another tragedy when Abraham died.
• Before 1919, psychoanalysts based their
theories of child development on their
therapeutic work with adults.
• Klein worked with children.
• Her work with very young children, including
her own, convinced her that children
internalize both positive and negative
feelings toward their mother and that they
develop a superego much earlier than Freud
had believed.
• Although she continued to regard herself as
a Freudian, neither Freud nor Anna Freud
accepted her emphasis on the importance of
very early childhood or her analytic
technique with children.
• Despite having a theory emphasizing the
mother-child relationship, Klein did not have
a healthy relationship with her daughter
Melitta.
• Melitta was the oldest of three children born
to parents who did not particularly like one
another.
• When Melitta was 15, her parents separated,
and Melitta blamed her mother for this
separation and for the divorce that followed.
• Melitta also became a psychoanalyst and
achieved recognition and a position similar
as her mother.
• Her analyst, Edward Glover, was a bitter
rival of Melanie Klein. Glover encouraged
Melitta’s independence.
• Melitta married Walter Schmideberg, another
analyst who strongly opposed Klein and who
openly supported Anna Freud, Klein’s most
bitter rival.
• When Melitta’s brother (Hans) was killed,
she maintained that her brother had
committed suicide, and she blamed her
mother for his death.
• On the day of her memorial service, her
daughter Melitta delivered a final
posthumous insult by giving a professional
lecture wearing flamboyant red boots, which
scandalized many in her audience.
OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY
FREUD VS KLEIN
• Object relations theory places less emphasis
on biologically based drives and more
importance on consistent patterns of
interpersonal relationships.
• As opposed to Freud’s paternalistic theory,
object relations theory tends to be more
maternal, stressing the intimacy and nurturing
of the mother.
• Object relations theorists generally see human
contact and relatedness—not sexual
pleasure—as the prime motive of human
behavior.
PSYCHIC LIFE OF THE INFANT
• Klein stressed the importance of the first 4 or
6 months of life.
• Infants do not begin life with a blank slate but
with an inherited predisposition to reduce the
anxiety they experience as a result of the
conflict produced by the forces of the life
instinct and the power of the death instinct.
• The infant’s innate readiness to act or react
presupposes the existence of phylogenetic
endowment.
PHANTASIES
• Infants, even at birth, possess an active
phantasy life.
• These phantasies are psychic
representations of unconscious id instincts
that cannot put into words yet.
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• Infants only possess unconscious images of
“good” and “bad.” For example, a full
stomach is good; an empty one is bad.
• Infants who fall asleep while sucking their
fingers are phantasizing about having
mother’s good breast inside themselves.
Hungry infants who cry and kick their legs
are phantasizing that they are kicking or
destroying the bad breast.
OBJECTS
• Same as Freud, object is to which the drive
is directed to.
• The hunger drive has the good breast as its
object, the sex drive has a sexual
organ as its object, and so on.
The earliest object relations are with the
mother’s breast, but “very soon interest
develops in the face and in the hands which
attend to his needs and gratify them”.
POSITIONS
• In infants’ attempt to deal with the dichotomy
of good and bad feelings (or life and death
instincts), infants organize their experiences
into positions.
• Positions are ways of dealing with both
internal and external objects.
• Klein chose the term “position” rather than
“stage of development” to indicate that
positions alternate back and forth; they are
not periods of time or phases of
development through which a person
passes.
PARANOID-SCHIZOID POSITION
• First 3-4 months of life
• During the earliest months of life, an infant
comes into contact with both the good breast
and the bad breast.
• These alternating experiences of gratification
and frustration threaten infant’s vulnerable
ego.
• The infant wants to devour the breast, but its
innate destructive urges create fantasies of
damaging the breast by biting, tearing, or
annihilating it.
• To manage this, the infant splits off the
persecutory and ideal breast or the good
and the bad - the good breast is devoured,
and the bad breast is damaged.
DEPRESSIVE POSITION
• Beginning at about the 5th or 6th month
infants recognize objects as whole and
acknowledge that good and bad can exist in
the same person.
Arises when the infant realizes that it is
separate from the mother, and the
mother can go away and be gone forever.
• Fearing the possible loss of the mother, the
infant desires to protect her and keep her
from the dangers of its own destructive
forces, however it recognizes that it is not
capable of doing that.
• Also, upon realizing that the good and bad
breast is owned by one person (mother), the
infant experiences guilt upon displaying
destructive urges upon the person who also
provides it nourishment.
PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS
• From very early infancy, children adopt
several psychic defense mechanisms to
protect their ego against the anxiety aroused
by their own destructive fantasies.
INTROJECTION
• Infants fantasize taking into their body those
perceptions and experiences that they
have had with the external object, originally
the mother’s breast.
• Ordinarily, infants introject good objects, to
use as a protection against anxiety.
• However, sometimes they introject bad
objects, such as the bad breast to gain
control over them. When dangerous objects
are introjected, they become internal
persecutors, capable of terrifying the infant
and leaving frightening residues that may be
expressed in dreams.
PROJECTION
• Projection is the fantasy that one’s own
feelings and impulses actually reside in
another person and not within one’s body.
• Children project both bad and good images
onto external objects, especially their
parents.
o For example, a young boy who
desires to castrate his father may
instead project these castration
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 fantasies onto his father, thus
turning his castration wishes around
and blaming his father for wanting to
castrate him.
PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION
• Infants split off unacceptable parts of
themselves, project them into another object,
and finally introject them back into
themselves in a changed or distorted form.
o For example, infants split off parts of
their destructive impulse and project
them into the bad breast. Next, they
identify with the breast by
introjecting it, a process that permits
them to gain control over the
dreaded and wonderful breast.
o For example, a husband with strong
but unwanted tendencies to
dominate others (split off “bad
aspect”) will project those feelings
into his wife (projection), whom he
then sees as domineering. The man
subtly tries to get his wife to become
domineering to him. He behaves
with excessive submissiveness in an
attempt to force his wife to display
the very tendencies that he has
deposited in her (introjection /
controlling).
INTERNALIZATIONS
EGO
• One’s sense of self
• Reaches maturity at a much earlier stage
than Freud had assumed. For Freud, an
infant is dominated by the id.
Klein ignored the id and based her theory on
the ego’s early ability to sense both
destructive and loving forces and to manage
them through psychic def. mech.
• The ego begins to evolve with the infant’s
first experience with feeding, when the good
breast fills the infant not only with milk but
with love and security.
SUPEREGO
Klein’s picture of the superego differs from
Freud’s in at least three important respects.
• it emerges much earlier in life.
• it is not an outgrowth of the Oedipus
complex.
• it is much more harsh and cruel - the early
superego produces not guilt but terror.
OEDIPUS COMPLEX
Klein believed that her view of the Oedipus
complex was merely an extension and
not a refutation of Freud’s ideas but their
concept differs in a lot of ways:
• Klein’s Oedipus complex begins at a much
earlier age than Freud had suggested.
For her, Oedipus complex begins during the
earliest months of life, overlaps with
the oral and anal stages, and reaches its
climax during the genital stage at
around age 3 or 4. (she uses genital stage
instead of phallic stage because phallic
suggests masculine psychology).
• Klein stressed the importance of children
retaining positive feelings toward both
parents during the Oedipal years.
• Klein believed that a significant part of the
Oedipus complex is children’s fear of
retaliation from their parent for their fantasy
of emptying the parent’s body.
• Klein stressed the importance of children
retaining positive feelings toward both
parents during the Oedipal years.
• During its early stages, the Oedipus complex
serves the same need for both genders - to
establish a positive attitude with the good or
gratifying object and to avoid the bad or
terrifying object. In this position, children of
either gender can direct their love either
alternately or simultaneously toward each
parent.
FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
• During the first months of life a little girl sees
her mother’s breast as both “good and bad.”
Then around 6 months of age, she begins to
view the breast as more positive than
negative.
• Later, she sees her whole mother as full of
good things, and this attitude leads her to
imagine how babies are made.
• She fantasizes that her father’s penis feeds
her mother with riches, including babies.
• Because the little girl sees the father’s penis
as the giver of children, she develops a
positive relationship to it and fantasizes that
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 her father will fill her body with babies. OEDIPUS COMPLEX
• If the female Oedipal stage proceeds • For both girls and boys, a healthy resolution
smoothly, the little girl adopts a “feminine” of the Oedipus complex depends on their
position and has a positive relationship with ability to allow their mother and father to
both parents. come together and have sexual intercourse
• Under less ideal circumstances, the little girl with each other without remnants of rivalry.
will see her mother as a rival and will
fantasize robbing her mother of her father’s
penis and stealing her mother’s babies.
• This wish produces a paranoid fear that her
mother will retaliate against her by injuring
her or taking away her babies.
• Penis envy stems from the little girl’s wish to
internalize her father’s penis and to receive a
baby from him - Klein find no evidence that
girls hate their mothers for bringing them into
the world without penis.

MALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

• Like the young girl, the little boy sees his
mother’s breast as both good and bad.
• During the early months of Oedipal
development, a boy shifts some of his oral
desires from his mother’s breast to his
father’s penis - adopting a feminine position
or a passive homosexual attitude toward his
father.
• Next, he moves to a heterosexual
relationship with his mother, but because of
his previous homosexual feeling for his
father, he has no fear that his father will
castrate him.
• Klein believed that this passive homosexual
position is a prerequisite for the boy’s
development of a healthy heterosexual
relationship with his mother.
• As the boy matures, however, he develops
oral-sadistic impulses toward his father and
wants to bite off his penis and to murder him.
• These feelings arouse castration anxiety and
the fear that his father will retaliate against
him by biting off his penis.
• This fear convinces the little boy that sexual
intercourse with his mother would be
extremely dangerous to him.
• The boy’s Oedipus complex is resolved only
partially by his castration anxiety.
• A more important factor is his ability to
establish positive relationships with both
parents at the same time.