Melanie Klein Flashcards
differs from Freudian theory in three important ways:
(1) it places more emphasis on interpersonal relationships,
(2) it stresses the infant’s relationship with the mother rather than the father, and
(3) it suggests that people are motivated primarily for human contact rather than for sexual pleasure
Object relations theory
in object relations theory, this refers to any person or part of a person that infants introject, or take into their psychic structure and then later project onto other people.
object
infants begin life with an inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety that they experience as a consequence of the clash between the life instinct and the death instinct
Psychic Life of the Infant
Klein assumed that very young infants possess an active, unconscious life. Their most basic images of the “good” breast and the “bad” breast.
Fantasies
ways of dealing with both internal and external
objects.
Positions
a tendency to see the world as having both destructive and omnipotent qualities
paranoid schizoid position
the anxiety that infants experience around 6 months of age over losing their mother and yet, at the same time, wanting to destroy her ;is resolved when infants fantasize that they have made up for their previous transgressions against their mother and also realize that their mother will not abandon them.
Depressive Position
the fantasy of taking into one’s own body the images that one has of an external object, especially the mother’s breast.
Introjection
The fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses reside within another person
Projection
Infants tolerate good and bad aspects of themselves and of external objects; can be beneficial to both children and adults, because it allows them to like themselves while still recognizing some unlikable qualities.
Splitting
is the psychic defense mechanism whereby infants split off unacceptable parts of themselves, project them onto another object, and finally introject them in an altered form.
Projective Identification
After introjecting external objects, infants organize them into a psychologically meaningful framework, a process that Klein called
Internalizations
emerges only after first splitting itself into the two parts—those that deal with the life instinct and those that relate to the death instinct.
Unified Ego/Ego
To her, this preceded rather than followed the Oedipus complex. Klein also saw the this as being quite harsh and cruel.
Superego
begins during the first few months of life, then reaches its zenith during the genital stage, at about 3 or 4 years of age—the same time that Freud had suggested it began.
Oedipus Complex
