Klein: Object Relations Theory Flashcards
Melanie Klein, the woman who developed a theory that emphasized the nurturing and loving relationship between parent and child.
was built on careful observations of young children
Object Relations Theory
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
believed that children’s sense of identity rest on a three-step with their mother.
Margaret Mahler
theorized that children develop a sense of self during early infancy when parents and others treat them as if they had an individualized sense of identity.
Heinz Kohut
Investigated infants attachment to their mother as well as the negative consequences of being separated from their mother.
John Bowlby
developed a technique for measuring the type of attachment style an infant develops toward its caregiver.
Mary Ainsworth
is an offspring of Freud’s instinct theory
object relations theory
Infants do not begin life with a blank slate but with an inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety they experience.
Psychic Life of the Infant
are psychic representations of unconscious id instinct
Phantasies
phantasies possessed unconscious ___ and ___ images
good, bad
humans have innate drives or instincts, including a death instinct.
Object
dichotomy of good and and bad feelings (ways of dealing with both internal and external objects)
Positions
2 basic position
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 objects into the good and the bad.
Paranoid-schizoid position
infant fears
persecutory breast
provides love, comfort, and gratification
ideal breast
infants develop the paranoid-schizoid position during
3 or 4 months of life
infants begins to view external objects as whole and to see that good and bad can exist in the same person.
(months)
5 or 6 months
the feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object.
Depressive position
to protect their ego against the anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies.
Psychic Defense Mechanism
infants use several psychic defense mechanism such as:
Introjection
Projection
Splitting
Projective Identification
infants fantasize taking into their body those perception and experiences that they have had with the external object, originally the mother’s breast. (to take in both good and bad objects)
Introjection
is the fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one’s body. (the use is to get rid of them)
Projection
keeping apart incompatible impulse
Splitting
excessive and inflexible splitting can lead to
pathological repression
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
The person takes in (introjects) aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjections into a psychologically meaningful framework.
Internalizations
3 important internalizations
Ego, Superego, Oedipus Complex
mostly unorganized at birth, it’s strong enough to feel anxiety, to use defense mechanism, and to form early object relations in both phantasy and reality.
ego
produces not guilt but terror
early superego
it emerges earlier in life
superego
serves the same need for both genders, that is, to establish a positive attitude with the good or gratifying object (breast or penis) and to avoid the bad terrifying object.
Oedipus Complex
a little girl sees her mother’s breast as both “good and bad”.
Female Oedipal Development
the little boy sees his mother’s breast as both good and bad
Male Oedipal Development
Klein believed that people are born with two strong drives, what is it?
Life instinct and death instinct
three major developmental stage (Mahler’s)
Normal Autism
Normal Symbiosis
Separation-Individuation
four substages of separation-individuation
Differentiation
Practicing
Rapprochement
Libidinal object constancy
two basic narcissistic needs (Kohut)
- the need to exhibit the grandiose self
- the need to acquire an idealized image of one or both parents
three stages of separation anxiety (Bowlby)
Protest stage
Despair
Detachment
three attachment style (Ainsworth)
Secure Attachment
Anxious-resistant attachment
Anxious-avoidant attachment
2 insecure attachment
anxious-resistant
anxious-avoidant
believing that young children express their conscious and unconscious wishes through
Play therapy
