Epistemophilia
Melanie Klein had a system inside her mind, but she was resistant to organizing her theories. This is especially true since she was focusing more on which theories of Freud’s needed to be updated as opposed to start from cart blanche. Klein instead found stages of childhood development appearing a little earlier than Freud believed was possible, while also adding in some of Karl Abraham’s contributions. In Melanie Klein, Penelope Garvey summarized that “in the early oral stage the infant wants to suck and swallow goodness and then in the later oral sadistic stage when teeth are developing, he wishes to bite and also to destroy the loved object. The following early anal stage also contains destructive urges; during this stage the infant aggressively expels his faeces. In the second anal phase the infant attempts to hold on to and conserve the good within.”
Infants observed under Klein’s modality were already roiling with a desire to be free and unimpeded. “She conceived of the young child as alive with jealousy, envy and hatred of the parent’s creativity and filled with the desire to take possession of the mother and to banish and kill off the father and all rivals. Klein pictured these oedipal frustrations and urges as being fueled by oral and anal phantasies.” For children to have these wishes and goals requires a desire to explore and understand. “She described the Oedipus complex as involving early oral and anal sadistic epistemophilic wishes; that is the wish to get in, to know about and to possess or destroy the contents of the mother’s body. The child then fears that his mother or the united parents will get in and attack the inside of his body.”
The desire to know then creates internal views of the world even at this early age. These “phantasies” were unconscious ones as opposed to regular daydreams. They would go anywhere, including into areas of darkness and evil that would frighten the child and make them fear retaliation from the parents. “Klein reasoned that the violent phantasies might lead to a fear of harming the mother, cause the child to become inhibited, leave him unable to be curious and lead to difficulties in learning.” For example, anger released from repression in analysis could contain phantasies of revenge, which may then cause fear of punishment, and then those unethical desires would instill fear in oneself and low self-esteem for being so greedy and selfish. Already at an early age, the child is developing pathological secrets and starting to attack themselves. Like in my brief introduction to Klein in Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism, there are phantasies about getting the good from someone, without reciprocity, especially if you’re a child with nothing to give back, while at the same time becoming more independent and warding off retribution. I used the example of treating people like a chocolate bar, enjoying the contents and throwing out the wrapper, but that exploited wrapper is what is left of the mother. “In Klein’s view the infant’s oral, anal and oedipal desires drive the infant to want to phantasize about the experience of getting inside the mother, taking possession of her goodness and killing off the rivals.”
Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtssd-sexuality-pt-5-sadism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Some of this early sexual knowledge Klein felt was already innate, like in other animals that seem to know how to cooperate with the mother in order to survive. Klein said, “infants of both sexes experience genital desires directed towards their mother and father, and they have an unconscious knowledge of the vagina as well as of the penis.” This knowledge wasn’t the kind of adult knowledge mixed with words and language. “Klein thought that infants have an innate capacity to phantasize and that they are born with an unconscious knowledge of the body and bodily functions: ‘The fact that at the beginning of post-natal life an unconscious knowledge of the breast exists and that feelings towards the breast are experienced can only be conceived of as a phylogenetic inheritance.'” Klein said, “analytic work has shown that babies of a few months of age certainly indulge in phantasy-building. I believe that this is the most primitive mental activity and that phantasies are in the mind of the infant almost from birth.” This knowledge of course is before the child has yet to learn how to talk. “Although Klein described the infant’s sensations and phantasies in words, she was aware that the experiences that she was describing are pre-verbal physical sensations rather than thoughts; words can be no more than an approximation of the sensation.”
The world is also one with no demarcation or boundaries and the ego is just starting development. “Klein pictured the infant as being engaged in powerful emotional relationships right from the start of life. She concluded that the infant’s first focus is the mother and that all his longings, impulses and curiosity are focused on her body which is believed to be full of goodness, rival siblings and the father. Klein had the view that the infant treats the world as though it is an extension of the mother’s body. In this way, his anxiety about the power of his own destructive urges towards his mother, along with his uncertainty about her capacity to survive them, is crucial to whether he then feels safe enough to explore the world around him.”
Birth and the Paranoid-Schizoid Position
Agreeing with Otto Rank, Melanie felt that the entrance into this world from birth leaves a mark in the unconscious that influences the individual from childhood into adulthood. “The first external source of anxiety can be found in the experience of birth. This experience, which, according to Freud, provides the pattern for all later anxiety-situations, is bound to influence the infant’s first relations with the external world. It would appear that the pain and discomfort he has suffered, as well as the loss of the intrauterine state, are felt by him as an attack by hostile forces, i.e. as persecution. Persecutory anxiety, therefore, enters from the beginning into his relation to objects in so far as he is exposed to privations…Birth is the first anxiety because of the combination of helplessness and need.”
Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v1gvrq9-object-relations-otto-rank-pt.-1.html
On Narcissism – Sigmund Freud (Narcissism 1 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gtgdl-on-narcissism-sigmund-freud-narcissism-1-of-4.html
From the beginning, there’s a seesaw between stress and soothing that continues throughout life. The main source of soothing for the infant is the mother’s breast. “The gratification and love which the infant experiences in these situations all help to counteract persecutory anxiety, even the feelings of loss and persecution aroused by the experience of birth. His physical nearness to his mother during feeding—essentially his relation to the ‘good breast’—recurrently helps him to overcome the longing for a former lost state, alleviates persecutory anxiety and increases the trust in the good object.”
The difference between being in the womb and relying on a breast, is that the womb provides instant gratification, a human form of heaven, whereas the breast’s availability is more intermittent. This already is a demarcation of Freud’s Pleasure Principle followed by a need to accept the Reality Principle. The child’s Id is already prepared to react with more or less patience. Those reactions are influenced by the life and death instincts, which for Melanie, all reside in the Id, but she treats the death instinct as more of a fear of death compared to Freud’s Nirvana Principle of desiring to be free of tension in morbid repose. “This relation is at first a relation to a part-object, for both oral-[craving] and oral-destructive impulses from the beginning of life are directed towards the mother’s breast in particular. We assume that there is always an interaction, although in varying proportions, between [craving] and aggressive impulses, corresponding to the fusion between life and death instincts. It could be conceived that in periods of freedom from hunger and tension there is an optimal balance between [craving] and aggressive impulses. This equilibrium is disturbed whenever, owing to privations from internal or external sources, aggressive impulses are reinforced. I suggest that such an alteration in the balance between [craving] and aggression gives rise to the emotion called greed, which is first and foremost of an oral nature. Any increase in greed strengthens feelings of frustration and in turn the aggressive impulses. In those children in whom the innate aggressive component is strong, persecutory anxiety, frustration and greed are easily aroused and this contributes to the infant’s difficulty in tolerating privation and in dealing with anxiety. Accordingly, the strength of the destructive impulses in their interaction with [craving] impulses would provide the constitutional basis for the intensity of greed. However, while in some cases persecutory anxiety may increase greed, in others it may become the cause of the earliest feeding inhibitions.”
The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Freud & Beyond – War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html
The paranoia in the Paranoid–Schizoid Position, involves anger and impatience that the baby has towards the breast and there is a fear of retaliation from the mother because of the baby’s negative attitude and how it is so dependent. “In the paranoid-schizoid position, anxieties are connected with survival, with fears of persecution, annihilation and suffocation; being taken over or swallowed up.” The main defense in the paranoid-schizoid position is that of schizoid splitting. The confusion about female breasts for the infant is in their potential to gratify or frustrate. The life instinct attaches to good experiences that make up good memories of periodic satisfaction. These memories are internal objects, and in this case a part-object, the breast. As time goes on the child is able to expand the breast to memories of a whole-person, the whole mother. The death instinct is afraid of abuse or neglect and attaches bad experiences with the breast as a separate “bad breast.” Like with black and white, or all or nothing thinking, that type of thinking is needed in certain situations where survival is paramount, but needs to be relaxed when the environment is safe.
Because the child’s ego is so undeveloped at this time, there is strong splitting with alternating experiences of being soothed and desperation. The ego is developed by memories, both good and bad ones. It starts with incorporation, or a sampling of experience. Introjections follow as preferences chosen from an array of sampling, and identifications are strong habitual tendencies developed from repeated imitations. You could say that each introjection becomes a re-introjection as experiences repeat and become predictable. If re-introjections are mostly positive, it creates a sense of trust that overcomes splitting. To add more detail, psychological splitting also has sub-defenses. “Klein links the life instinct with the good ego (good object relationship) and the death instinct with the bad ego (bad object relationship). She also comes to distinguish ordinary healthy binary splitting of this sort from pathological splitting or fragmentation, where the good as well as the bad object is attacked and broken up, often through envy or fear of retaliation: [paranoia].”
For Klein, splitting is necessary in all periods of life, but it’s pathological when it cannot move beyond the paranoid-schizoid position. Repeatedly being unsatisfied, frustrated, neglected, or abused, leads to fragmentation. With abuse or neglect, fragmentation in splitting is experienced by the infant as a lack of integration and a feeling of falling apart and going to pieces. A loss of survival. When the breast and mother appear hostile, the infant is trying to annihilate the “bad-self” in relation to the “bad-object.” Because the self requires memories and stories to hang reality together, there is a learning in identification when the mind copies behaviors based on external experiences. So the internal memories, stories, or ego, provide opportunities for adaptation, which connects the internal and external worlds with a sense of stability, but if there is a mental poverty, due to a strenuous environment, the consequence is a “bad-ego,” where adaptation fails and resorts to fragmentated defenses. It makes sense that if good experiences are sparing or not at all, the ego cannot trust the world and finds good object relations in others as mysterious.
If the infant is stuck in fragmentation, there isn’t enough good experience to provide an oasis in memory to trust in and rely on as an anchor to explore the world. The effort to hold experiences together into something understandable then gives up, but leads to a confusing world with repeated attempts to escape, where no escape is possible. “When bad experiences predominate, the individual may repeatedly resort to fragmentation. For bad experiences that threaten to overwhelm, the only defence may be to fragment the mind and break the bad experience into small pieces. Klein’s daughter, Melitta, thought that fragmentation reduced the power of the bad experience. Klein agreed and wrote that ‘the ego in varying degrees fragments itself and its objects, and in this way achieves a dispersal of the destructive impulses and of internal persecutory anxieties.’ A fragmented individual is weakened and no longer has the mental capacity that is needed to piece things together and make sense of his experience. Some individuals whose lives are dominated by bad experiences may repeatedly resort to fragmentation.”
In extreme cases, this kind of fragmentation can lead to Schizophrenia, a loss of connection with reality, especially with constitutional pathologies that already lean in this direction before birth. It’s always a mixture of genes and environment, and the ego cannot split the object into all good and all bad without splitting itself, and its ego potentials, in the same way. This process leads to different pathologies depending on the child’s genetic inheritance. If the mind develops in this direction, without Schizophrenia, the result is a fragmented goal orientation where bits and pieces of phantasy are challenged by the patient with fabricated successes, plans, and goals, to create a false sense of calm, mixed with repeated troubles arising. The other sense of calm comes from taking unwanted “fragments” of the personality and projecting blame externally. The mind is trying to find a way to feel better that works only temporarily. The unwanted parts of the self have to be understood and integrated via adaptation to a life that is a mixed bag between good and bad: Whole objects.
Fragmentation has been attributed by Melanie to many disorders, including hypochondria resulting from internal persecution. “Klein looks at loneliness in schizophrenia. Excessive projection and fragmentation leave the sufferer ‘hopelessly in bits’, and unable to internalize his primal object, [the mother.] He feels alone with his misery, often confused, and surrounded by a hostile world. He withdraws from people in a vicious circle of loneliness and isolation…The manic depressive patient is less fragmented but still cannot keep ‘an inner and external companionship with a good object’, because hatred and thus paranoia continue to intrude. Loneliness here is characterized by a hopeless longing to restore things, and in severe cases Klein comments that this can lead to suicide…Withdrawal to an inner world occurs through the fear of introjecting a dangerous external world; but such withdrawal brings not peace but heightened fear of internal persecutors. This vicious circle in turn can lead to a state of overdependence on the external representative of one’s own good parts, as in situations where the mother becomes the ego-ideal to a point that the ego is weakened and impoverished…Klein had encountered the developmental connections between schizoid [splitting] and depressive positions in patients who, filled with self-reproaches and unable to surmount the anxiety of having destroyed their good object, slip back into a state of panic about their inner tormentors. That there is a connection between manic-depressive and schizophrenic disorders she recognized only as a ‘tentative hypothesis’ at this point…”
Since fragmentation involves continuous splitting with external and internal objects, the fear of introjection described above is connected with negative empathy, or projective identification, related to the fears of one’s own potential for harming others and the potential for external figures to retaliate in the same way. The internal representatives of external people make predictions of retaliation and torture the patient to prevent them from acting on those impulses in reality. “Rosenfeld gave a good working definition of projective identification: ‘Projective identification’ relates first of all to a splitting process of the early ego, where either good or bad parts of the self are split off from the ego and are as a further step projected in love or hatred into external objects which leads to fusion and identification of the projected parts of the self with the external objects. There are important paranoid anxieties related to these processes as the objects filled with aggressive parts of the self become persecuting and are experienced by the patient as threatening to retaliate by forcing themselves and the bad parts of the self which they contain back again into the ego.”
When things tilt out of balance, it’s the positive relations, external and internal, that are attacked, leading to ever more intrusive thoughts of guilt that impair normal reality testing. “The psychotic ego attacks the idealized object with envy, oral neediness and sadistic demands. In the paranoid-schizoid world, the idealized object is unable to withstand this and is destroyed, only to return as a vengeful enemy. Many psychotic patients suffer with this type of primitive guilt for attacking the object. It is a persecutory guilt in which ‘I will suffer and die for my sins’. This unbearable guilt engenders more and more paranoid defences and brings out phantasies of annihilation. The intrapsychic experience of killing off the object needed for survival combined with the belief in ‘an eye-for-an-eye’ retaliation results in ego fragmentation and psychosis.” This becomes painstaking work for psychoanalysts to deal with when they are bombarded by negative accusations and criticisms that defy logic. If there is a pattern to fragmentation, it starts off as a trauma of some kind in infancy, or even more likely a repeated trauma. A projection of the world as unsafe is absorbed. Then there is a fear of introjection, because the world feels dangerous, but keeping in mind that the world may not in fact be as dangerous as the patient thinks. Afterwards, there’s a projection that wants to attack the dangerous world, when in reality the patient’s inner world is more dangerous, and that’s why it’s a projection, and then this is followed by an inhibition from the internal world to stop the attack, for fear of retaliation from the external world. The patient ceases to function properly for good situations in the external world. Rinse and repeat. In a manic situation, idealization of a good object leads to omnipotence and zeal for experiences without repression or suppression. When boundaries are violated, the guilt leads to a deep depression. With denial, the escape from depression is another manic episode. Rinse and repeat.
“Segal also noted the capacity of psychotic patients to experience guilt. However, she noted that the paranoid-schizoid ego becomes fragmented by the guilt and through projective identification puts the despair and grief into the analyst. Countertransference depression and confusion are therefore common with this patient group…This fight between love [idealization] and hate [devaluation] produces the moral conflicts so classic of neurotic, depressive patients. In the paranoid-schizoid position, however, the ego is not dealing with moral issues, but survival issues.” So when external figures are exposed to this pathology, they also become depressed and confused. The patient may feel better when placing the blame on the analyst or other external figures, and this feeling better can be a dependency where the self is scaffolded on the therapist, which is a kind of parasitic exchange. Their internal justifications make them feel better, but the analyst is exhausted. Part of the exhaustion is that the mind of a healthy person tends to entertain lies and accusations from others as having some partial truth, which is a toxic introjection from the projection or suggestion from the patient. It takes effort to recollect and say “this is not me!” Lies also increase energy draining anger in the target being slandered. Therapists will also show counter-transference to the patient based on their past negative experiences and how they responded back then.
In Fragmentation, persecution and primitive guilt, Waska describes Doris’ experience where she laid out her horrible childhood and how dangerous the environment was. With idealization she would contradict these dangers with denial by talking about family members and the environment as being ideal and harmonious. At times she would be helpful in the community but her idealization led to homeless people, that she was trying to help, taking advantage of her and robbing her, in one example. She had fears that she would kill in retaliation alongside intrusive thoughts of internal persecution preventing her from applying normal boundaries that are assertive, but not too aggressive. Without boundaries she would fear dependence on others, including therapists, which included foreboding projections onto them and the world. This is why having a strong core good object in the mind allows one to be more independent and capable of self-direction. Self-direction is possible when you know where all the good things are. “She felt independent thought caused her mind to spin out of control and ‘talk to itself.’ Doris had to split off and project her feelings. This led to her being plagued by panic attacks and phobias…She felt too that having her own thoughts and feelings was equivalent to being alone, trapped, in danger of attack and ‘crazy’. She feared she would ‘fall into the black hole for ever’, which was her way of describing a terrifying experience of fragmentation and disintegration. These anxieties led to loneliness, desperation and hopelessness. Fear of losing the object was analogous with loss of self.” Projection was so intense that when Doris was in the therapist waiting room she said “I can tell from the vibrations in the air what everyone is thinking. There is a lot of negativity here and that must cause you a great deal of stress. You could be so stressed out that suicide might be an option.”
The Cure – Disintegration: https://youtu.be/MNZxs0TWz8s?si=YB8ADNhuFy5_r3Ew
On the other hand, when the child has positive experiences re-introjected more consistently, the negative experiences warded off by splitting provide that core trust that there are more good experiences to come. This comes about with idealization, which is an unconscious desire to rate experiences that are only satisfactory at the heightened level of instant gratification found only in the womb. Of course, these experiences aren’t at that level of security, but it has the effect of increasing patience for the infant if they are capable of believing in abundance and that more good experiences will repeat. Good objects build from reality, so an adult mind can thread one good, but not ideal, experience after another and fill out in the mind a map that is more realistic. “It is characteristic of the emotions of the very young infant that they are of an extreme and powerful nature. The frustrating (bad) object is felt to be a terrifying persecutor, the good breast tends to turn into the ‘ideal’ breast which should fulfill the greedy desire for unlimited, immediate and everlasting gratification. Thus feelings arise about a perfect and inexhaustible breast, always available, always gratifying. Another factor which makes for idealization of the good breast is the strength of the infant’s persecutory fear, which creates the need to be protected from persecutors and therefore goes to increase the power of an all-gratifying object. The idealized breast [comes after] the persecuting breast; and in so far as idealization is derived from the need to be protected from persecuting objects, it is a method of defence against anxiety…The idealized mother thus becomes a help against the persecutory one.” In this case, the good object is not attacked or confused with the bad object.
Melanie felt that the process of idealization and the internal phantasies related, were hallucinatory and based on denial. We have a conscious short-term attention span that can handle fragmentary quantities of information at one time, so putting the attention on phantasies of future gratification keeps the mind distracted from memories of bad experiences. Denial is a distraction of attention focused on something positive, and one can glean a sense of ownership, possessiveness, and a belief in property with good objects, when reading Melanie Klein. “In wish-fulfilling hallucination, a number of fundamental mechanisms and defences come into play. One of them is the omnipotent control of the internal and external object, for the ego assumes complete possession of both the external and internal breast. Furthermore, in hallucination the persecuting breast is kept widely apart from the ideal breast, and the experience of being frustrated from the experience of being gratified. It seems that such a cleavage, which amounts to a splitting of the object and of the feelings towards it, is linked with the process of denial. Denial in its most extreme form—as we find it in hallucinatory gratification—amounts to an annihilation of any frustrating object or situation, and is thus bound up with the strong feeling of omnipotence which obtains in the early stages of life. The situation of being frustrated, the object which causes it, the bad feelings to which frustration gives rise (as well as split-off parts of the ego) are felt to have gone out of existence, to have been annihilated, and by these means gratification and relief from persecutory anxiety are obtained.” Essentially a successful distraction.
Because this is only a temporary relief, and because new experiences continue, some of them will not be optimum. There needs to be a gradual acceptance of reality where trust and patience in the good experiences predict more to come. “In this state, frustration and anxiety derived from various sources are done away with, the lost external breast is regained and the feeling of having the ideal breast inside (possessing it) is reactivated. We may also assume that the infant hallucinates the longed for pre-natal state. Because the hallucinated breast is inexhaustible, greed is momentarily satisfied. (But sooner or later, the feeling of hunger turns the child back to the external world and then frustration, with all the emotions to which it gives rise, is again experienced.)”
The oasis of the good breast may become as reliable as a stream or river, so the energy in the mind to put together reality and to gradually increase in detail, begins to develop adaptive skills in the child’s ego. “[If there is] a mitigation of the fear of the bad object by the trust in the good one and depressive anxiety only arise[s] in fleeting experiences, out of the alternating processes of disintegration and integration develops gradually a more integrated ego, with an increased capacity to deal with persecutory anxiety. The infant’s relation to parts of his mother’s body, focusing on her breast, gradually changes into a relation to her as a person.”
For Melanie, life is a never ending experience of integration and disintegration, where ideally the integration makes up most of the individual’s lifespan. Periods of disintegration can easily occur, like in the example above of a diagnosis of schizophrenia, or less destabilizing experiences of divorce, for example, or a loss of meaning, or extended periods of stress and depression. Ego-integration involves learning, adapting, and trusting in what is good. Trust comes from predictable routines that are positive. As the child develops in the positive direction, there is a “growing sense of reality and a widening range of gratification, interests, and object-relations.”
The Super-ego and the Depressive Position
In infancy, skills aren’t good enough for negotiation and integration when there are excessive environmental pressures. With more experience, new skills gradually reduce the intimidation of persecutory anxiety so that the depressive position can take place. Now, it isn’t always a smooth ride to the depressive position, which Klein believes first appears within the first 3 or 4 months, because as the definition suggests, there are many humbling feelings that have to be tolerated in order to perceive more reality. There is also more development internally. With the mother’s interactions with other intruding family members, especially the father, “oral frustrations release the Oedipus impulses and the super-ego begins to be formed at the same time.”
So at first, there’s a rudimentary ego supported and energized by the life and death instincts of the Id. “I see the formation of the ego as an entity to be largely determined by the alternation between splitting and repression on the one hand, and integration in relation to objects on the other.” Because these two instincts are opposed, the ego cannot remain the sole operation outside of the Id. “In my view, the splitting of the ego, by which the super-ego is formed, comes about as a consequence of conflict in the ego, engendered by the polarity of the two instincts. This conflict is increased by their projection as well as by the resulting introjection of good and bad objects. The ego, supported by the internalized good object and strengthened by the identification with it, projects a portion of the death instinct into that part of itself which it has split off—a part which thus comes to be in opposition to the rest of the ego and forms the basis of the super-ego. Accompanying this deflection of a portion of the death instinct is a deflection of that portion of the life instinct which is fused with it. Along with these deflections, parts of the good and bad objects are split off from the ego into the super-ego. The super-ego thus acquires both protective and threatening qualities. As the process of integration—present from the beginning in both the ego and the super-ego—goes on, the death instinct is bound, up to a point, by the super-ego. In the process of binding, the death instinct influences the aspects of the good objects contained in the super-ego, with the result that the action of the super-ego ranges from restraint of hate and destructive impulses, protection of the good object and self-criticism, to threats, inhibitory complaints and persecution.” The use of the word deflection has to do with the binary opposition between good and bad where good cannot exist without knowledge of what bad is. Good adaptation or bad disintegration in the ego results in commentary about what is good or bad coming from the superego, behaving as representatives of the life and death instincts.
So the good in oneself as well as the bad is knowledge of one’s potentials, and because there isn’t any knowledge that goes beyond experiences in the environment, that same knowledge is used to predict, or project, the good and dangerous aspects of the environment. It takes one to know one. Repeated experiences lead to hardened worldviews that are maladaptive for adults when they enter safe environments that appear subjectively hostile. The voices of the good super-ego or the bad, can be strengthened with repetition or weakened with inactivity: Re-introjections and re-projections. It’s easy to see that we need to recognize something. If activities are occurring, or not, and they aren’t recognized as such, it’s the current limit for projections and predictions. Projection: “Something of the ego, [knowledge or past experiences,] is thus perceived as occurring in someone else.”
Internal conflict is increased depending on the balance between imitations for helpfulness, criticism or self-sabotage. “The super-ego—being bound up with the good object and even striving for its preservation—comes close to the actual good mother who feeds the child and takes care of it, but since the super-ego is also under the influence of the death instinct, it partly becomes the representative of the mother who frustrates the child, and its prohibitions and accusations arouse anxiety. To some extent, when development goes well, the super-ego is largely felt as helpful and does not operate as too harsh a conscience. There is an inherent need in the young child—and, I assume, even in the very young infant—to be protected as well as to be submitted to certain prohibitions, which amounts to a control of destructive impulses. The infantile wish for an ever-present, inexhaustible breast includes the desire that the breast should do away with or control the infant’s destructive impulses and in this way protect his good object as well as safeguard him against persecutory anxieties. This function pertains to the super-ego. However, as soon as the infant’s destructive impulses and his anxiety are aroused, the super-ego is felt to be strict and over-bearing and the ego then, as Freud described it, ‘has to serve three harsh masters’, the id, the super-ego, and external reality.”
Because the internal world is just developing at this time, the mother’s helping attitude and care, or neglect and abuse, is at first attributed to the breast, like it has a personality of its own. It can appear alternatingly helpful or persecuting. The infant also is becoming more aware of its effect on the mother by his or her hostility, and her retaliations. The internal desire for hostility can turn into hostility to suppress one’s hostile actions, an inner hostility against external hostility. Freud originally said “the prevention of [a satisfaction of craving] calls up a piece of aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and that this aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the super-ego.” This craving initially is oral sucking for Melanie, who was influenced by “Abraham [who] thus contributed materially to our understanding of the origins of anxiety and guilt, since he was the first to point out the connection of anxiety and guilt with cannibalistic desires.”
The infant is beginning to notice the cause and effect of their own intentions on the mother. There is a desire to control external actions as well as internal attitudes. “The early processes of introjection and projection lead to establishing within the ego, side by side with extremely good objects, extremely frightening and persecuting objects. These figures are conceived in the light of the infant’s own aggressive impulses and phantasies, i.e. he projects his own aggression on to the internal figures which form part of his early super-ego. To anxiety from these sources is added the guilt derived from the infant’s aggressive impulses against his first love object, both external and internalized.” One can feel guilt even if the threats of violence are only thought about, and not acted on.
In projection, the child is actively being hostile to the breast for its perceived bad behavior and it’s also hostile towards it’s own aggressive behavior out of fear of retaliation from the persecuting breast, which acts as the external representative of the death instinct. By the infant imitating the punishing aspect from the mother to control his or her attacks on the breast, there can be an identification with an oppressor introjected and re-introjected again and again. External bad experiences create memories and predictions, or projections, about future bad experiences. Defenses arise as a pre-emption to ward off any impending threats to reduce anxiety. “Any danger threatening from outside intensifies the perpetual inner danger situation. This interaction exists in some measure throughout life. The very fact that the struggle has, to some extent, been externalized relieves anxiety. Externalization of internal danger situations is one of the ego’s earliest methods of defence against anxiety and remains fundamental in development…The child feels himself to be bad and he attempts to escape from guilt by attributing his own badness to others, which means that he reinforces his persecutory anxieties.” And if one falsely blames another, there will naturally be a fear of retaliation leading to the said paranoia.
There ends up being a fear of external bad objects, a fear of future external bad situations, and a fear of one’s own power to hurt others. To keep from disintegrating into fragmentation, the child needs craving for positive experiences and actual experiences of satisfaction to increase their patience and strength to make navigation in the environment smoother. Remember, pathological projection is going to happen when fears about an environment are unjustified, because the memories are so negative. “For while the infant’s aggressive impulse through projection plays a fundamental part in his building up of persecutory figures, these very figures increase his persecutory anxiety and in turn reinforce his aggressive impulses and phantasies against the external and internal objects felt to be dangerous.” If we take this last sentence and revise it towards positivity it would show us the direction of integration. For while the infant’s helping impulse, through introjection, plays a fundamental part in his building up of helping figures, these very figures increase his feelings of being supported and in turn reinforce his helping impulses and phantasies that support the external and internal objects which are felt to be encouraging. The child is either helping itself and others or destroying itself and others. Another description for this comes from The Versatility of the Kleinian model by Daniela Carstea. “For the knowledge of a whole object to be kept in an integrated way in the mind, a lack of splitting or of automatic projections of the displeasing aspects, good or bad, is needed, which constitutes, alone, a fixed and loving attachment…Object relation[s] makes conscious the price paid…” for negative reactions like envy and paranoia…”The diminishing of the self is manifold: it is deprived of a connection with the good object and likewise deprived of those prized elements of itself [one’s own good potentials] which were placed in the object by projective identification.”
The external mother is doing her duty by feeding the infant, but the infant begins to think that it’s also being rewarded for having good behavior, and being cooperative. The infant is dependent and feels the need to cooperate in order to survive and has no modern conception of social work and observation by the community towards the mother to reinforce her sense of duty to raise the child properly. The infant feels it’s in the wild and totally helpless and must negotiate with the independence and power of the mother. “One comes to know that one’s mother, for example, has her own separate relationships, indeed her own mind and private thoughts, that exclude oneself. This realisation, essentially a perception of the oedipal situation understood in its broadest sense, provokes a keener sense of need, dependency and loss, and a shrinking of omnipotence. It is also likely to provoke envy and jealousy. These elements are difficult to experience and they are likely to give rise to defences against the depressive position.” Stephen A. Mitchell, in Freud and Beyond, symbolizes this split between good and bad as a projection that “the shit people will overwhelm and bury the delicate flowers…The flowers and the shit people can be integrated only if [the subject] can believe that the flowers will emerge from underneath the shit.”
As the child introjects experiences, preferences, and identities, and projects or predicts future behaviors in the mother, a familiarity and trust develops so that predictability reduces anxiety. The child can empathize with an imperfect mother. “The anxiety relating to the internalized mother who is felt to be injured, suffering, in danger of being annihilated or already annihilated and lost for ever, leads to a stronger identification with the injured object. This identification reinforces both the drive to make reparation and the ego’s attempts to inhibit aggressive impulses.” Repeated introjection and projection is re-introjection and re-projection. Routine feedings, bathing, quality time, etc., is a sign of a stable external world and it produces a stable internal world for the infant. As the world expands, a mother’s routine builds in the mind of the infant where the internal mother is now less idealized or devalued. The imperfections are tolerated when development is going well and a desire for reparation builds up for the infant to lovingly cooperate with the imperfect mother, which makes routines more pleasant and smooth. The child needs to see their way out with adaptive choices so that craving for accessible activities can takeover and calm down persecutory impulses.
Part of the weaning process is progressively the child seeing themselves being of more help to the mother as they age. Stressful situations that are unexpected and beyond what the child can handle can start off a domino effect of regression to the paranoid-schizoid position. Depending on the child’s constitution and how unstable experiences are in the environment, periods of disintegration manifest. These positions can oscillate back and forth, especially when there are jarring changes to routine or threats arising that even parents cannot control. “Constitutional factors cannot be considered apart from environmental ones and vice versa. They all go to form the earliest phantasies, anxieties and defences which, while falling into certain typical patterns, are infinitely variable. This is the soil from which springs the individual mind and personality.”
Mourning for Klein, which is similar to weaning, is the depressive position encountered again and a reestablishing of the lost external object inside of oneself (memories and imitations). With an actual death of a parent, the mind needs strong enough impressions made up from positive experiences of the past so that the child can learn to emulate and take with them those positive character traits of the lost parent and ward off feelings of emptiness or feelings that the parent was like a forgotten stranger. The depressive position is like mourning and weaning from old stages of development that have died. Failure to face those feelings leads to escape back into reuniting with paranoid-schizoid ghosts.
Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Works 1921-1945 (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1) by Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780743237659/
The Language of Psychoanalysis – Jean Laplanche: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367328139/
Waska, R. (2002). Fragmentation, persecution and primitive guilt. Psychodynamic Practice, 8(2), 147–162.
Carstea D. The versatility of the Kleinian model. Melanie Klein’s theory and formulations of morality and forgiveness. J Psychol Clin Psychiatry. 2023;14(3):82‒86.
Essential Readings from the Melanie Klein Archives – Jane Milton: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367337902/
Freud and Beyond – Stephen A. Mitchell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465098811/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/