Klein: Object Relations Theory Flashcards
In contrast to Freud, who emphasized the first 4 to 6 years of life, what did Klein stress?
Importance of the first 4 to 6 months after birth
Psychic representations of unconscious id instincts.
Phantasy
Ways of dealing with both internal and external objects.
Positions
2 basic positions.
Paranoid schizoid position
Depressive position
A way of organizing experiences that includes both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external objrcts into the good and the bad.
Paranoid schizoid position
The feeling of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object.
Depressive position
Infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the external object.
Introjection
The fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one’s body.
Projection
The ego must be split in order to separate bad and good objects.
Splitting
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
The person takes in (introjects) aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjections into a psychologically meaningful framework.
Internalizations
MM’S: The child becomes an individual separate from his or her primary caregiver.
Psychological birth
3 major developmental stages in Mahler’s theory.
Normal autism
Normal symbiosis
Separation-individuation
During this stage, the infant behaves and functions as though he and his mother were an omnipotent system—a dual unity within one common boundary.
Normal symbiosis
During this stage, children become psychologically separated from their mothers, achieve a sense of individuation , and begin to develop feelings of personal identity.
Separation-individuation
