HS 9 M4 Flashcards
OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY
MELANIE KLEIN
The child’s relation to the _____ is fundamental and serves as a prototype for later relations to whole objects, such as mother and father.
Breast
Klein stressed the importance of the first_____
4 or 6 months
One of Klein’s basic assumptions is that the infant, even at birth, possesses an active phantasy life.
Phantasies
Provides love, comfort, and gratification
THE GOOD BREAST
Experiences of starving, enraged, terrified, and vengeful.
THE BAD BREAST
A way of organizing experiences that include both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and
external objects into the good and the bad.
Paranoid-Schizoid Position
According to Klein, infants develop the paranoid-schizoid position during the first _______of life,
3 or 4 months
A way of organizing experiences that include feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object constitutes what Klein called the depressive position
DEPRESSIVE POSITION
An infant begins to view external objects as a whole and to see that good and bad can exist in the same person.
Begins during the 5th or 6th months of life.
To protect their ego against the anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies
Psychic defense mechanisms
Klein simply meant that infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the external object, originally the mother’s breast.
Introjection
Is the fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one’s body
Projection
Infants can only manage the good
and bad aspects of themselves and
of external objects by splitting them,
that is, by keeping apart
incompatible impulses.
Splitting
In order to separate bad and good objects, the ego must itself be split.
Splitting
A psychic defense mechanism in
which 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.
Projective Identification
When object relations theorists speak of
internalizations, they mean that the person takes in (introjects) aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjections into a psychologically meaningful framework.
Internalizations
One’s sense of Self
EGO
TERROR, harsh cruel part of the self. Klein’s picture of the superego differs from Freud’s in at least three important respects.
SUPEREGO
Sense of self directing love towards the parents.
OEDIPUS COMPLEX
FEMALE OEDIPAL DEVELOPMENT
Adult Caregivers act as ”______” to gratify the physical and psychological needs of an infant.
selfobjects
MALE OEDIPAL DEVELOPMENT
A child becomes an individual
separate from his or her primary
caregiver, an accomplishment that
leads ultimately to a sense of
identity.
Psychological Birth
The self evolves from a vague and undifferentiated image to a clear and precise sense of individual identity.
Heinz Kohut’s View
The attachments formed during childhood
have an important impact on adulthood.
John Bowlby’s View
Human and primate infants go through a
clear sequence of reactions when
separated from their primary caregivers.
John Bowlby’s View
When the caregiver is first out of sight, infants will cry, resist soothing by other people, and search for their caregiver.
Protest
As separation continues infants become quiet, sad, passive, listless, and apathetic.
Despair
When infants become
emotionally detached from people, including their caregivers.
Detachment
A responsive and accessible caregiver (usually the mother) must create a secure base for the child.
First Assumption:
A bonding relationship (or lack thereof) becomes internalized and serves as a working mental model on which future friendships and love relationships are built.
Second Assumption:
Influenced by Bowlby’s Attachment Theory
Mary Ainsworth’s View
Developed a technique for measuring the
type of attachment style that exists between the caregiver and infant known as “Strange Situation.”
Mary Ainsworth’s View
