Melanie Reizes Klein: Object Relations Theory

Overview of Object Relations Theory

 The theory was built on careful observations of young children.

 Klein emphasizes importance of the first 4-6 MONTHS after birth.
 Infant’s drives (hunger, sex..) are directed to an object (breast, penis, vagina..)
 The child’s relation to the breast is fundamental and serves as a prototype for later relations to whole
objects, such as mother and father.
 The very early tendency of infants to relate to partial objects gives their experiences an unrealistic or
fantasy-like quality that affects all later interpersonal relations.
 Thus, Klein’s ideas tend to shift the focus of psychoanalytic theory from organically based stages of
development to the role of early fantasy in the formation of interpersonal relationships.

In addition to Klein, other theories have speculated on the importance of a child’s early experiences with the mother.

 Margaret Mahler believed that children’s sense of identity rests on a three-step relationship with their
mother.
First, infants have basic needs cared for by their mother
Next, they develop a safe symbiotic relationship with an all-powerful mother;
Finally, they emerge from their mother’s protective circle and establish their separate individuality.

Her theory is concerned with the infants struggle to gain autonomy and a sense of self.
 Heinz Kohut 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. Kohut’s theory is focused with the formation of
the self.
 John Bowlby investigated infant’s attachment to their mother as well as the negative consequences of
being separated from their mother. His theory is concerned with the stages of separation anxiety.
 Mary Ainsworth developed a technique for measuring the type of attachment style an infant develops
toward its caregiver. Thus, her theory is concerned with the styles of attachment.

Biograpgy of Melanie Klein/ Some past experiences that might have influenced her theory

 Klein believed that her birth was unplanned – a belief that led to feelings of being rejected by her parents.
 She felt distant to her father, who favored his oldest sister, Emile.
 Klein grew up in a family that was neither proreligious nor antireligious
 During her childhood, she was able to observe that her parents were working at jobs they did not enjoy.
 Klein’s early relationships were either unhealthy or ended in tragedy:
1) She was distant to her father
2) She loves her mother but sometimes she feels suffocated by her
3) Sidonie, her older sister that she loves died when Melanie was 4
4) Emmanuel, her only brother, who also became her close confidant, also died when Klein was 20
(Her infatuation towards her brother may have contributed to her later difficulties in relating to men).
5) Karl Abraham, another member of Freud’s inner circle was also analyzed by
Klein but her later on died
6) Hans, her son, was also killed in a fall
  She was devastated by Emmanuel’s death. While still mourning, she married Arthur Klein, an engineer
who had been Emmanuel’s close friend.
 Melanie believed that her marriage was the reason why she had not become a physician and she regretted
this.
 Klein did not have a happy marriage; she dreaded sex & pregnancy but she still bore 3 children
(Melitta, Hans, Erich)
 When her mother died, Klein was depressed so she entered Psychoanalysis with Sandor Ferenczi who
introduced her to it.
 Klein trained her son Erich according to Freudian principles. Unlike Freud who based his theories on his
therapeutic work with adults. Freud’s only case study of a child was Little Hans whom he only saw once.
Thus, Klein changed that situation by psychoanalyzing children directly.

 Results from this eventually convinced Klein that children internalize both positive & negative feelings
toward their mother & that they develop a superego much earlier than Freud had believed.
 Although Klein considered herself Freudian, neither Freud nor Anna Freud accepted her emphasis on the
importance of very early childhood or her analytic technique with children.
 Klein’s daughter, Melitta was analyzed by Glover, a bitter rival of Klein. Melitta also married Walter
Schmideberg, another analyst who opposed Melanie Klein and openly supported Anna Freud, Klein’s
most bitter rival.

Introduction to Object Relations Theory

 ORT is an offspring of Freud’s instinct theory, but differs in only three ways

1) ORT places less emphasis on biologically based drives and more importance on consistent patterns
of interpersonal relationships.
2) ORT tends to be more maternal, stressing intimacy & nurturing of the mother
3) ORT generally see human contact & relatedness – not sexual pleasure – as the prime motive of
human behavior.
 Klein and other object relations theorists begin with Freud’s basic assumption of the Object of the drive,
which is any person, part of a person, or thing through which the aim is satisfied. They then speculated on
how the infant’s real or fantasized early relations with the mother or the breast became a model for all
later interpersonal relationships.
 An important portion of any relationship is the internal psychic representations of early significant
objects, such as the mother’s breast or the father’s penis that have been introjected, or taken into the
infant’s psychic structure, and then projected onto one’s partner.
--- These internal pictures are not accurate representations of the other person but are remnants of each
person’s early experiences.

Psychic Life of The Infant

For Melanie Klein, infants do not begin life with a blank slate but with an inherited predisposition to reduce the
anxiety they experience as a result of the conflict produced by the forces of the life instinct and the power of the
death instinct. The infant’s innate readiness to act or react presupposes the existence of phylogenetic
endowment, a concept that Freud also accepted.
  Phantasies

Infants, even at birth, possesses an active phantasy life.

These phantasies  psychic representations of unconscious id instincts.

[They should not be confused with the conscious fantasies of older children & adults]

Klein meant to say that infants possess unconscious images of “good” and “bad”.
For example, Klein would say that infants who fall asleep while sucking their fingers are phantasizing
about having their mother’s good breast inside themselves. Similarly, hungry infants who cry and kick their
legs are phantasizing that they are kicking or destroying the bad breast.

As the infant matures, unconscious phantasies connected with the breast continue to exert an impact on
psychic life, but new ones emerge as well = these later unconscious phantasies are shaped by both reality & by
inherited predispositions. These phantasies are unconscious meaning they can be contradictory.

Ex: Oedipus complex is an example of one of these phantasies.

Another example would be a little boy can phantasize about beating his mother & having babies with her.
--- such phantasies spring partly from the boy’s experiences with his mother & partly from universal predispositions
to destroy the bad breast.

 Objects

Klein agrees with Freud that humans have innate drives or instincts, including a death instinct.
 Drives must have some object.

Klein believes that from early infancy children relate to these external objects, both in fantasy and in reality.

In their active fantasy, infants introject, or take into their psychic structure, these external objects,
including their father’s penis, their mother’s hands and face, and other body parts.
Introjected objects are more than internal thoughts about external objects;
they are fantasies of internalizing the object in concrete and physical terms.
For ex, children who have introjected their mother believe that she is constantly inside their own body.

Klein’s notion of internal objects suggests that these objects have a power of their own, comparable to
Freud’s concept of a superego, which assumes that the father’s or mother’s conscience is carried within the child.

Positions

In an attempt to deal with this dichotomy of good and bad feelings, infants organize their experiences into positions,
or ways of dealing with both internal and external objects. These positions represent normal social growth and
development.

 Klein used “positions” to indicate a possibility of back and forth movement

Paranoid-Schizoid Position

 During the earliest months of life, infant comes into contact with both the good breast and the bad breast.
These alternating experiences of gratification and frustration threatens the very existence of the infant’s
vulnerable ego.
  In order to tolerate both these feelings toward the same object at the same time, the ego splits itself,
retaining parts of its life and death instincts while deflecting parts of both instincts onto the breast.
Now, rather than fearing the death instinct, the infants fears the persecutory breast. While also having a
relationship with the ideal breast.
 Infant desires to keep the ideal breast inside itself as a protection against annihilation by persecutors.
 To control the good breast and to fight off its persecutors, the infants adopt what Klein called the
paranoid-schizoid 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 bad.
 The persecutory feelings are considered to be paranoid; they are not based on any real or immediate
danger from the outside world.
(The ego’s perception is subjective & fantastic pa kasi during this first 3 or 4 months of life).
 This preverbal splitting (infants ofc do not use language to split good from bad) of the world serves as a
prototype for the subsequent development of ambivalent feelings toward a single person: they will tend to
love and hate a single person.
 Conscious ambivalence, however, does not capture the essence of the paranoid-schizoid position.
Meaning, when adults adopt this position, they do so in a primitive, unconscious fashion.
For example, projecting their unconscious paranoid feelings onto others as a means of avoiding their
own destruction by the malevolent breast.

Depressive Position

 Begins at the 5th or 6th month, infant begins to view external objects as whole and to see that good and
bad can exist in the same person.
 At that time, infant develops a more realistic picture of the mother, and realized that she is an independent
person who can be both good and bad.
 Also, the ego is beginning to mature to the point at which it can tolerate some of its own destructive
feelings rather than projecting them outward.
 However, infant also realizes that the mother might go away. In fearing the possible loss of the mother, the
infant desires to protect her and keep her from the dangers of its own destructive forces, those cannibalistic
impulses that had previously been projected onto her.
 But infant’s ego is mature enough to realize that it lacks the capacity to protect the mother, and thus the
infant experiences guilt for its previous destructive urges toward the mother.
 The feelings on anxiety over losing a loved object + a sense of guilt = Depressive Position
 Children desire to make reparation for these attacks. Because children see their mother as whole and also
being endangered, they are able to feel empathy for her, a quality that will be beneficial in their future
interpersonal relationships.
 The depressive position is resolved when children fantasize that they have made reparation for their
previous transgressions & when they recognize that their mother won’t go away permanently but returns
after every departure.
 When the position is resolved, children close the split between the good and bad mother. They are able to
experience love from their mother and display their own love for her.
 An incomplete resolution can result in lack of trust, morbid mourning at the loss of a loved one, and variety
of psychotic disorders.
Psychic Defense Mechanisms

 Children adopt several psychic defense mechanisms to protect their ego against the anxiety aroused by their
own destructive fantasies.

Introjection

 Infants fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the
external objects, original the mother’s breast.
 It begins with an infant’s first feeding, when there is an attempt to incorporate the mother’s breast into the
infant’s body.
 Infant tries to introject good objects, to take them inside itself as a protection against anxiety. However,
sometimes infants introject bad objects in order to gain control over them.
 Introjected dangerous objects become internal persecutors that are capable of terrifying the infant and
leaving frightening residues that may be expressed in dreams or in an interest in fairytales such as the big
bad wolf.
 Introjected objects are not accurate representations of the real objects but are colored by children’s
fantasies.

Projection

 The fantasy that one’s own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and
not within one’s body.
 By projecting unmanageable destructive impulses onto external objects, infants alleviate the unbearable
anxiety of being destroyed by dangerous internal forces.
 Children project both bad and good images onto external objects
For example, a young boy who desires to castrate his father may turn this around and blame his father for
wanting to castrate him.
 Projection allows people to believe that their own subjective opinions are true.

Splitting

 Infants can only manage the good and bad aspects of themselves and of external objects
by splitting them.
 Keeping apart incompatible impulses.
 In order to separate bad and good objects, the ego must itself be split.
 Splitting can have either a positive or a negative effect on the child
 It enables people to see both positive and negative aspects of themselves, to evaluate their behavior as good
or bad, and to differentiate between likeable and unlikeable acquaintances.
 On the other hand, excessive and inflexible splitting can lead to pathological repression.
---- When children cannot accept their own bad behavior, they must then deal with destructive and
terrifying impulses in the only way they can – by repressing them.

Projective Identification

 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.
 Example: Infants split off parts of their destructive impulse and project them into the bad breast. Next, they
identify with the breast by introjecting it, a process that permits them to gain control over the dreaded and
wonderful breast.
  Projective identification exerts a powerful influence on adult interpersonal relations.
 Unlike simple projection, which can exist wholly in phantasy, projective identification exists only in the
world of real interpersonal relationships.

Internalizations

 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.
 In Kleinian theory, three important internalizations are the ego, the superego and the Oedipus complex.

Ego

 Klein believed that the ego, or one’s sense of self, reaches maturity at a much earlier stage than Freud had
assumed. Freud hypothesizes that ego exists at birth, but he did not attribute complex psychic functions to it
until about the 3rd or 4th year.
 Klein based her theory on the ego’s early ability to sense both destructive & loving forces and to manage
them through splitting, projection and introjection. (Klein ignored the id).
 Ego is mostly unorganized at birth, but still strong enough to feel anxiety, to use defense mechanisms, and
to form early object relations in both phantasy and reality.
 Infant introjects both the good breast and the bad breast, and these images provide a focal point for further
expansion of the ego.
 Thus, the infant’s first object relation (the breast) becomes the prototype not only for the ego’s future
development but for the individual’s later relations.
 However, before a unified ego can emerge, it must first become split.
 Infants innately strive for integration, but at the same time, they are forced to deal with the opposing
forces. To avoid disintegration, the newly emerging ego must split itself into the good me and the bad me.
 This dual image of self allows them to manage the good and bad aspects of external objects.
 As infants mature, their perceptions become more realistic, they no longer see the world in terms of partial
objects, and their egos become more integrated.

Superego

 Three differences of Klein’s superego to Freud’s:

1) It emerges much earlier in life
2) It is not an outgrowth of the Oedipus Complex
3) It is much more harsh and cruel. It literally crushes down the feeble ego of the small child.
 Klein arrived at these differences through her analysis of young children
 Klein’s analysis of young children led her to believe that the early superego produces not guilt but terror.
 Young children fear being devoured, cut up, and torn into pieces..
 To manage anxiety, child’s ego mobilizes life instinct against death instinct. However, The life and death
instinct cannot be completely separated, so the ego is forced to defend itself against its own actions. This
early ego defense lays the foundation for the development of the superego, whose extreme violence is a
reaction to the ego’s aggressive self-defense against its own destructive tendencies.
 By the 5th or 6th year, the superego arouses little anxiety but a great measure of guilt. It has lost most of its
severity while gradually being transformed into a realistic conscience.
 Klein rejected Freud’s notion that the superego is the consequence of the Oedipus complex. Instead, she
insists that it grows along with the Oedipus Complex and finally emerges as realistic guilt after the
Oedipus complex is resolved.
Oedipus Complex

Klein’s conception departed from the Freudian one in several ways.

1) Oedipus complex begins at a much earlier age than Freud had suggested. For Klein, it begins during the
earliest months of life, overlaps with the oral and anal stages, and reaches its climax during the genital
stage at around age 3 or 4. (Klein preferred “genital” than phallic bc less masculine.)
2) A significant part of the O Complex is children’s fear of retaliation from their parent for their fantasy of
emptying the parent’s body.
3) Importance of children retaining positive feelings toward both parents during Oedipal years.
4) During its early stages, the Oedipus complex serves the same need for both genders: to establish positive
attitude with the good or gratifying object, and to avoid the bad or terrifying object.

Like Freud, Klein assumed that girls & boys eventually come to experience the Oedipus Complex differently.

 Female Oedipal Development

During 1st months of life, a little girl sees her mother’s breast as both good and bad. Then around 6
months of age, she begins to view the breast as more positive than negative. Later, she sees her whole
mother as full of good things, and this attitude leads her to imagine how babies are made…
Little girl sees father’s penis as the giver of children, so she develops a positive relationship to it, and
fantasizes that her father will fill her body with babies….

If the female Oedipal stage proceeds smoothly, the little girl adopts a “feminine “ position and has a
positive relationship with both parents.

If not, little girl will see her mother as a rival & will fantasize robbing her mother of her father’s penis and
stealing her mother’s babies.
 The little girl’s wish to rob her mother produces a paranoid fear that her mother will retaliate against
her by injuring her or taking away her babies..
 Little girl’s principal anxiety comes from a fear that the inside of her body has been injured by her
mother, an anxiety that can be alleviated only when she later gives birth to a healthy baby.

 Male Oedipal Development

During early months of Oedipal Development, a boy shifts some of his oral desires from his mother’s
breast to this father’s penis. At this time, the little boy is in his feminine position; that is, he adopts a
passive homosexual attitude toward his father. Next, he moves to a heterosexual relationship with his
mother.
----- Klein believed that this passive homosexual position is a prerequisite for the boy’s development of a
healthy heterosexual relationship with his mother.

As boy matures, however, he develops oral-sadistic impulses toward his father & wants to bite off his
penis & murder him. These feelings arouse castration anxiety and the fear that his father will retaliate
against him by biting off his penis. This fear convinces little boy that sexual intercourse with his mother
would be extremely dangerous to him.
 Boy’s oedipal complex is resolved only partially by his castration anxiety.
 A more important factor is his ability to establish positive relationships with both
parents at the same time.
At that point, boy sees his parents as whole objects, a condition that enables him to
work though his depressive position.
 For both girls and boys, a healthy resolution of the Oedipus Complex depends on their ability to allow their
parents to come together & have sexual intercourse with each other; No rivalry remains. Children’s positive
feelings towards both parents later serve to enhance their adult sexual relations.

In summary, Klein believed that people are born with 2 strong drives – the life instinct and the death instinct. Infants
develop a passionate caring for the good breast and an intense hatred for the bad breast., leaving a person to struggle
a lifetime to reconcile these unconscious psychic images of good and bad, pleasure and pain. The most crucial stage
of life is the first few months, a time when relationships with mother and other significant objects form a model for
later interpersonal relations. A person’s adult ability to love or to hate originates with these early object relations.

Later Views on Object Relations

Margaret Mahler’s View

Mahler was concerned with the psychological birth of the individual that takes place during the first 3 years of
life. Originally, Mahler’s ideas came from her observation of the behaviors of disturbed children interacting with
their mothers. Later, she observed normal babies as they bonded with their mothers during the first 36 months of
life.

To Mahler, an individual’s psychological birth begins during the first weeks of postnatal life and continues for the
next 3 years or so.

 Psychological birth – the child becomes an individual separate from his or her primary caregiver, an
accomplishment that leads ultimately to a sense of identity.

To achieve psychological birth and individuation, a child proceeds through a series of three major developmental
stages and four substages.

I. Normal Autism (birth – 3 or 4 weeks)

Like an unhatched egg, a newborn infant satisfied various needs within the all-powerful protective orbit of a
mother’s care. Neonates have a sense of omnipotence, because their needs are cared for automatically and without
their having to expend any effort.

Neonate goes thru long period of sleep and general lack of tension. This stage is a period of absolute primary
narcissism; infant is unaware of any other person.

II. Normal Symbiosis (4th or 5th week to 4th or 5th month)

Infant realized they can’t satisfy their own needs, they begin to recognize primary caregiver and seek a symbiotic
relationship with her.

During this time, infant behaves and functions as though he and his mother were an omnipotent system – a dual
unity within one common boundary.

This relationship though is not a true symbiosis, because although the infant’s life is dependent on the mother, the
mother does not absolutely need the infant. The symbiosis is characterized by a mutual cuing of infant and mother.
Infant can recognize mother’s face & perceive her pleasure and distress. However, object relations have not yet
begun – mother and others are still preobjects.

III. Separation-Individuation (4th or 5th month – 30th to 36th month)

Children become psychologically separated from their mothers, achieve a sense of individuation, and begin to
develop feelings of personal identity.

 Because children no longer experience a dual unity with their mother, they must surrender their delusion of
omnipotence, and face their vulnerability to external threats.

Four overlapping substages of separation-individuation:

 Differentiation (5th month until 7th or 10th month)

Marked by a bodily breaking away from the mother-infant symbiotic orbit. Infants smile in response to their own
mother, indicating a bond with a specific other person.

 Practicing (7th or 10th month until 15th or 16th month)

As infants physically move away from their mother thru walking or crawling, they enter this substage.
During this subphase, children easily distinguish their body from their mother’s, establish a specific bond with their
mother, and begin to develop an autonomous ego. Yet, they don’t like to lose sight of their mother.

 Rapprochement (16-25 months)

They desire to bring their mother and themselves back together, both physically and psychologically. Children of
this age want to share every new acquisition of skill and every new experience with their mother. They can now
walk with ease and are more physically separated from their mother, but paradoxically, they are more likely to show
sepanx. Their increased cognitive skills make them more aware of the separation, causing them to try various ploys
to regain dual unity. These attempts are often unsuccessful leading to children fighting mothers dramatically, a
condition called rapprochement crisis.

 Libidinal Object Constancy (until 3rd year of life)

During this time, children must develop a constant inner representation of their mother so that they can tolerate
being physically separate from her. Besides gaining some degree of object constancy, children must consolidate
their individuality; that is, they must learn to function without their mother & to develop other object relationships.

Any errors made during the first 3 years, may result in later regressions to a stage when a person had not yet
achieved separation from the mother & thus a sense of personal identity.

Heinz Kohut’s View

 Kohut emphasized the process by which the self evolves from a vague and undifferentiated image to a clear
and precise sense of individual identity.
 He believed that human relatedness, not innate instinctual drives, are at the core of human personality.
  According to Kohut, infants require adult caregivers not only to gratify physical needs but also to satisfy
psychological needs. In caring for both physical, and psychological needs, adults, or selfobjects treat
infants as if they had a sense of self. Through the process of empathic interaction, the infant takes in the
selfobject’s responses as pride, guilt, shame or envy – all attitudes that eventually form the building blocks
of the self.
 Kohut defined self as the “center of the individual’s psychological universe”
 The self gives unity and consistency to one’s experiences, remains relatively stable over time, and is “the
center of initiative and a recipient of impressions”. The self is also the child’s focus of interpersonal
relations, shaping how he or she will relate to parents and other selfobjects.
 Kohut believed that infants are naturally narcissistic
 The early self becomes crystallized around two basic needs:
1) The need to exhibit the grandiose self (Grandiose Exhibitionistic self)
established when the infant relates to a “mirroring” selfobject who reflects approval of its behavior
2) The need to acquire an idealized image of one or both parents
opposed to the grandiose self because it implies that someone else is perfect. Nevertheless, it too satisfies
a narcissistic need because infant adopts the attitude “you are perfect, but I am a part of you.”

 Both self-images are necessary for healthy personality development, however, both must change as the
child grows older. If they remain unaltered, they result in a pathologically narcissistic personality,
Grandiosity must change into a realistic view of self, and the idealized parent image must grow into a
realistic picture of the parents.

John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory

 In 1950s, Bowlby became dissatisfied with the object relations perspective, primarily for its inadequate
theory of motivation and its lack of empiricism. With his knowledge of ethology, and evolutionary theory,
he realized that object relations theory could be integrated with an evolutionary perspective.
 Bowlby firmly believed that the attachments formed during childhood have an important impact on
adulthood. Because childhood attachments are crucial to later development, Bowlby argued that
investigators should study childhood directly and not rely on distorted retrospective accounts from adults.
 Origins of attachment theory came from Bowlby’s observations that both human and primate infants go
through a clear sequence of reactions when separated from their primary caregivers.
 Bowlby observed 3 stages of this separation anxiety
I. Protest stage
II. Despair
III. Detachment (only one unique to humans).
 Bowlby’s theory rests on two fundamental assumptions:
First, a responsive & accessible caregiver must create a secure base for the child.
Second, a bonding relationship (or lack thereof) becomes internalized and serves as a mental working
model on which future friendships and love relationships are built.
 Attachment style is a relationship between two people and not a trait given to the infant by the caregiver. It
is a two-way street – the infant and the caregiver must be responsive to each other and each must influence
the other’s behavior.

Mary Ainsworth and the Strange Situation

 Ainsworth developed a technique for measuring the type of attachment style that exists between caregiver
and infant, known as the Strange Situation.
  A 20-minute laboratory session in which a mother & infant are initially alone in a playroom. Then a
stranger comes into the room, and after a few minutes, stranger begins a brief interaction with infant. The
mother then goes away for 2 separate 2-minute periods: During 1st period, infant is left alone with stranger.
During 2nd period, infant is left completely alone. The critical behavior is how the infant reacts when
mother returns; this is the basis for attachment style rating.

Secure attachment

 When mother returns, they are happy and initiate contact

Anxious-resistant attachment style

 Infants are ambivalent. When their mother leaves the room, they become unusually upset, and when they
return, they seek contact with her but rejects attempts at being soothed.

Anxious-avoidant attachment style

 Infants stay calm when their mother leaves; they accept the stranger, and when their mother returns, they
ignore and avoid her.

Psychotherapy

*discussion is limited to the approach used by Melanie Klein

Despite Anna Freud contending that young children who were still attached to their parents could not develop a
transference to the therapist because they have no unconscious fantasies or images, Klein still believes that both
disturbed and healthy children should be psychoanalyzed;

She also insists that a negative transference was an essential step toward the successful treatment.

Klein substituted play therapy from Freudian dream analysis and free association. She believes that young children
express their conscious & unconscious wishes through play therapy. She provides each child with a variety of small
toys, pencil, and paper, paint, crayons, etc.

Klein used the verbal attacks of young patients to interpret the unconscious motives behind these attacks.

The aim of Klenian therapy is to reduce depressive anxieties and persecutory fears and to mitigate the
harshness of internalized objects.

 To accomplish this, she encouraged patients to re-experience early emotions and fantasies but this time
with the therapist pointing out the differences between reality and fantasy, between conscious and
unconscious. She also allowed patients to express both positive and negative transference.

Critique of Object Relations Theory

 Ability to generate research: Low on Object relations theory, but high on attachment theory
 Problems with falsification because most of its tenets are based on what happening inside the infant’s
psyche. Attachment theory on the other hand, rates higher on falsification
  High ability to organize information about the behavior of infants. However, beyond the childhood years,
ORT lacks usefulness as an organizer of knowledge
 Better as guide to the practitioner: parents of young infants can learn importance of a warm, accepting, and
nurturing caregiver. Psychotherapists also find ORT useful for understanding early development of their
clients and understanding and working with the transference relationship that clients form with therapist
 High level of internal consistency
 Low on criterial of parsimony: Klein used needlessly complex phrases and concepts

Concepts of Humanity

 High on determinism, low on free choice

 Either pessimistic or optimistic
 More causal than teleology
 High on unconscious determinants of behavior
 Biology more important than environment (death instinct, phylogenetic endowment)
 Social determinants of personality (intimacy, nurturing)
 More toward similarities than uniqueness