Freud's Object Relations Theory

According to Klein, “infants are constantly engaging in basic conflict between the life and death instinct, which is between the good and the bad, love and hate, and creativity and destruction” (Alvarez et al, 1998). Infants naturally prefer gratifying sensations over frustrating ones as the ego shifts towards integration and away from disintegration. Klein introduced some new conceptual statements from her object relations theory in contrast to Freud’s. Klein organize the good and bad feelings into “positions”; ways of dealing with both internal and external objects. She indicated that positions alternate back and forth throughout development. The first position is the Paranoid-Schizoid position and the second is the Depressive Position (Mitchell et al, **). Her most important and abiding contribution to the development of psychoanalysis. …show more content…
These experiences either gratify or frustrate the very existence of the infant’s ego. Also, the infant’s innate destructive self urges to create fantasies of biting, tearing, annihilating the breast. The infants mixed good and bad feelings toward the same object splits the ego, retaining parts of its life and death instincts into the breasts. The infant fears the persecutory instinct rather than fearing its own death instinct. But the infant also has a good relation with the breast which provides gratification and love, so the infant keeps good breast inside for projection. Klein developed this position in way to organize experiences which include both paranoid feelings and a splitting of internal and external objects of good and bad