Object Relation Theories Melanie Klein, Study notes of Social Psychology of Emotion

Download Object Relation Theories Melanie Klein and more Study notes Social Psychology of Emotion in PDF only on Docsity! Object Relation Theories Melanie Klein Object relations theories  Focus more on interpersonal relationships (mother–child relationship,) with such objects than they do on instinctual drives. Although drive satisfaction is important, it is secondary to the establishment of interrelationships.  This primary emphasis on personal relations, over instinctual needs, tells us that unlike Freud, object relations theorists accept social and environmental factors as influences on personality.  object relations theorists tend to agree that the crucial issue in personality development is the child’s growing ability to become increasingly independent of its primary object: the mother  She is the mother of object relations theory, Mother  primary object inner objects  She emphasized the first 5 to 6 months of a child’s life  She assumed babies are born with active fantasy lives that harbor mental representations (images) of Freudian id instincts, which the images temporarily satisfy. For example, a hungry baby can imagine sucking at the mother’s breast and so, for a time, assuage the hunger.  fantasies experienced in infancy, which Klein called inner objects  are real and vivid because infants lack the ability to distinguish between real and fantasy worlds  Infants relate, initially, only to parts of objects, and the first such part-object for babies is the mother’s breast.  Gradually, as the world expands, infants relate to whole objects rather than part objects, for example, to the mother as a person rather than solely a breast. Play therapy  Klein developed the new technique of play therapy through which children express their thoughts, feelings, and their abundantly rich fantasies Defense Mechanism  The early defense mechanisms that infants use to control these intense impulses, terrors, and urges are primarily projection, introjection, splitting, and projective identification, which refers to "imaginatively splitting part of oneself and attributing it to another for the sake of controlling the other"  infants control their inner needs, establish object relations, and build an inner world of fantasy through constant cycles of projection and introjection.  internal psychic representations of early significant objects, such as the mother’s breast or the father’s penis, that have been introjected, or taken into the infant’s psychic structure, and then projected onto one’s partner.  The ego, according to Klein, is present at birth, but goes through substantial development as the infant internalizes the good part-object with which the ego identifies-the nurturing breast.  Klein viewed the death instinct as the cause of the child's inner anxieties and felt that the primary aim of therapy is to lower the level of anxiety and modify the harshness of internalized persecutory objects. Frued Vs Klein  First, object relations theory places less emphasis on biologically based drives and more importance on consistent patterns of interpersonal relationships.  Second, as opposed to Freud’s rather paternalistic theory that emphasizes the power and control of the father, object relations theory tends to be more maternal, stressing the intimacy and nurturing of the mother.  Third, object relations theorists generally see human contact and relatedness —not sexual pleasure—as the prime motive of human behavior Phylogenetic endowment  To her, 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 Phantasies  These phantasies are psychic representations of unconscious id instincts;  She simply meant that they possess unconscious images of “good” and “bad.” For example, a full stomach is good; an empty one is bad. Thus, Klein would say that infants who fall asleep while sucking on their fingers are phantasizing about having their mother’s good breast inside themselves. Similarly, hungry infants who cry and kick their legs are phantasizing that they are kicking or destroying the bad breast. This idea of a good breast and a bad breast is comparable to Sullivan’s notion of a good mother and a bad mother (see Chapter 8 for Sullivan’s theory). Objects  Thus, the hunger drive has the good breast as its object, the sex drive has a sexual organ as its object, and so on Positions  positions, or ways of dealing with both internal and external objects.  represent normal social growth and development. The two basic positions are the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. Paranoid-Schizoid Position  Is the splitting of both self and object into good and bad, with at first little or no integration between them.  the infant fears the persecutory breast.  ideal breast, which provides love, comfort, and gratification.  To control the good breast and to fight off its persecutors, the infant adopts what Klein (1946) called the paranoid-schizoid position, a way of organizing experiences that includes both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external objects into the good and the bad.  paranoid-schizoid position during the first 3 or 4 months of life, during which time the ego’s perception of the external world is subjective and fantastic rather than objective and real. Depressive Position