Object Relation Theory - Melanie Klein

Life is a combination of:
Sunshine and Rain
Sweet and sour
Happiness and Sadness
Life and Death
Love and Betrayal

Melanie Reizes Klein
Object
Relation
Theory

Melanie Reizes Klein
 Was born March 30, 1882, in Vienna Austria.
 The youngest of four children born to Dr. Moriz
Reizes and his second wife, Libussa Deutsch
Reizes.
 Klein believe that her birth was unplanned- a belief
that led to feelings of being rejected by her parents.
 She grew up in a family that was neither
proreligious nor antireligious.

 During her childhood, she observed that her
both parents working at jobs they did not enjoy.
 Her father was a physician who struggled to
make a living in medicine and eventually was
related to working as dental assistant.
 Her mother ran a shop selling plants and
reptiles.
 Despite her father’s meager income as a doctor,
she inspired to become a physician.
Klein’s Family

 She felt neglected by her elderly father, whom
she saw cold and distant, and although she loved
and idolized her mother, she felt suffocated by
her.
 Always felt neglected and devastated when her
elder sister died whom she always idolized
 On her 18th year another elder brother named
Emmanuel died.
Klein’s Family

 Immediately after her brother’s death, she got
married at the age of 21 to an engineer named
Arthur Klein whom she believed to have been
preventing her to pursue medical studies.
 Her marriage to Arthur produced three children:
1. Melitta born in 1904
2. Hans born in 1907
3. Erich born in 1909
Klein’s Family Life
Melanie
Arthur

 Klein met Sandor Ferenczi, a member of Freud’s
inner circle and the person who introduced her
into the world of psychoanalysis.
 When her mother died, Klein became depressed
and entered analysis with Ferenczi. She was
deeply taken by Psychoanalysis.
 She trained her son according to Freudian
principles.
 As part of the program she psychoanalyzes her
children.
Klein’s Family and Career Life
Melanie
Sandor

 Melitta, who became a psychoanalyst, was
analyzed by Karen Horney.
 Unfortunately, Klein did not have a happy
marriage; she dreaded sex and abhorred
pregnancy.
 Klein separated from her husband in 1919 but
did not obtain a divorce for several years.
Klein’s Family and Career Life
Melita

 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.
 Not completely satisfied with her own analysis
by Ferenczi, she ended the relationship and
began an analysis with Karl Abraham (member
of Freud’s inner circle).
 After 14 months Abraham died.
Klein’s Career Life
Melanie
Karl

 At this point of her life, Klein decided to begin a
self-analysis.
 In 1919, psychoanalyst including Freud, based
their theories of child development.
 From Berlin she moved to London to avoid
conflicts with preexisting practice in
Psychoanalysis.
 Although she claimed to practice Freudian
psychology, Sigmund and Anna Freud did not
agree with her emphasis on child
psychoanalysis.

 In 1934, Klein’s older son, Hans was killed in a fall.
 Mellita, who had recently moved to London,
maintained that her brother had committed suicide,
and she blamed her mother for his death.
 Melitta began analysis with Edward Glover, one of
Klein’s rivals in British Society.
 Klein and her daughter then became professionally
antagonistic and Mellitta maintained her animosity
even after her mother’s death (In 1960, due to
cancer ).

 In 1946, the British Society
accepted three training
procedures,
1. Traditional one of Melanie Klein
2. Advocated by Anna Freud
3. A middle group that accepted
neither training school but was
more eclectic in its approach.
Melanie and Anna Freud

 Was based on careful observations of infants.
 While Freud focused on the first 4 to 6 years, Klein
emphasizes the importance of 4 to 6 months after birth.
 Its importance of certain objects like breasts, vagina, and
penis and so on to be of great impact on an infants.
 Klein stresses that the child’s relation to the breast is
considered to be a prototype for later relationships
towards his/her parents and other individuals.
What is Object Relation
Theory?

 Klein did not believe the claim that humans were born
as a black state, but already inherited some
predispositions to reduce anxiety by conflicts between
life and death instincts.
 Fantasies/Phantasies – Infants at birth already possesses
a fantasy about life. They already have their
unconscious images of “good” and “bad”.
 Objects- Drives or instincts must have an object. This is
where exerted and applied. Klein believed that an
infant relates there drives to external objects both in
fantasy and reality.
Psychic Life of infants

 Infants are always in between the
struggle of good and bad, life and death,
love and hate, creativity and destruction.
 Klein chose to use the term “positions”
rather than “stages of development” to
indicate the tendency for humans to go
back and forth.
Different Positions

 Develop during the first 3 or 4 months of life.
 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.
 The ego’s perception of external world is subjective and
fantastic rather than objective and real.
 Infants have a biological predisposition to attach a positive
value to nourishment and the life instinct.
Paranoid-Schizoid
Position

 The infant then identifies the source as an
object of drive or instinct which he desires to be
in control with.
1. Persecutory Breast- Which provide frustrations to
an infant and are incapable of providing love, care
and comfort. This allows the child to develop the
urge to destroy it by biting tearing or even
annihilating it.
2. Ideal breast- this breast provides nourishment and
care, together with love, comfort and gratification
where infant aims to devour and harbor.
Paranoid-Schizoid Position

 Begins to surface by the age of 5-6 months
when an infant can already can already view
an object as incorporated both good and bad
feelings.
 Where are infant feels the anxiety of losing a
loved object accompanied by the sense of guilt
for wanting to destroy that same object.
 Infant realizes that his/her mother might leave
her so he begins to protect her.
Depressive Position

Introjection
 infants fantasize taking into their
body these perceptions and
experiences that they had with the
external object, originally the
mother’s breast.
 When good objects were introjected
it helps them protect their ego from
anxiety, however when bad objects
were the ones introjected they
become internal persecutors.
Psychic Mechanism

Projection
 infants projects one’s own
feelings and impulses actually
resides in another person and not
within them. Children usually
projects good and bad images
towards their parents.
Psychic Mechanism

Splitting
 It enables them to see the positive and
negative side of themselves or others. It may
be both beneficial and destructive since it may
recognize the good me and the bad me.
Psychic Mechanism

Projective Identification
 When an infant projects an undesirable object
onto another person and eventually introjects
them back to themselves in a distorted form.
 It usually exerts a powerful influence on adult
interpersonal relationship.
Psychic Mechanism

Ego
Superego
Oedipus Complex
Three Important Internalizations

Ego
 Unlike Freud who claims that Id dominates a child’s
unconscious, Klein believed that during this stage, ego
though weak and unorganized can already feel anxiety
and is strong enough to use different mechanism.
 The ego matures through the first experience of feeding
providing him/her with love and security.
 The ego can also split distinctions between good and bad
breast and as well as objects and expectations.

Superego
 Klein claims that superego emerges much earlier in life,
not as result of revolved Oedipus complex and is much
more harsh and cruel.
 Klein further believes that early superego produces not
guilt but terror to infants.
 Klein also insisted that superego goes along with the
development of the Oedipus complex and provides
realistic guilt the resolution of the complex.

Oedipus Complex
 Even though Klein claims that her idea of the
Oedipus complex is an extension of Freud’s
many distinct characteristics where recognizable:
 It begins at much eelier time of life
 Significant part of it represents the
child’s fear of retaliation from his/her
parents
 Childs retention of positive feelings
towards both parents.
 It enables children to recognize
between good and bad.

 Klein developed this play therapy technique as a
substitute for Freud’s dream analysis and free
association, believing that children may express
their unconscious wishes through toys and play
things.
 Klein’s therapy is to reduce the depressive
anxieties and persecutory fears and encourages
her patients to re-experience early emotions and
fantasies and help them identify between reality
and fantasy, conscious and unconscious.
How Klein conducts her
Psychotherapy?

“M” is for the million things she gave us,
“O” means only that she’s growing old,
“T” is for the tears she shed to save us,
“H” is for her heart of purest gold,
“E” is for her eyes, with love-light shining,
“R” means right, and right she’ll always be.

“A mother’s love will never end.
It is there from beginning to end.”

Object Relation Theory - Melanie Klein

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