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object relations. Object-seeking is considered by Melanie Klein to be fundamental, constituting a prerequisite for psychic life whereas, for Freud, the satisfaction of drives is independent of object-seeking. These differences produce a profound divergence in their respective theories of transference: whereas, in Freud’s view, transference is mainly based on drives seeking discharge and on the reconstruction of the past, for Klein, the evolution of the transference becomes the centre of attention: “[…] fundamental changes (in analysis) come about through the consistent analysis of the transference; they are bound up with a deep-reaching revision of the earliest object relations and are reflected in the patient’s current life and altered attitudes towards the analyst” (Klein, 1952, p. 438). Klein does not favour ‘here-and-now’ interpretations that would be disconnected with the patient’s past but she recognizes that the patient projects an internal world determined by past experiences onto the analyst and the structure of this internal world evolves throughout the process of transferential reliving. The discovery of splitting mechanisms in the 1920’s (Klein 1929, 1946, 1952) enables psychoanalysts to conceptualize transference as experienced by psychotic patients: the splitting into good and bad objects which dominates very early childhood bears directly on the understanding of transference as the interconnection of positive and negative feelings of love and hate. The interplay of the various aspects of the objects towards which these emotions are directed instigates a vicious circle of aggression, anxiety and guilt which has to be worked through over and over again in the transference, “There are in fact very few people in the young infant’s life, but he feels them to be a multitude of objects because they appear to him in different aspects.” (Klein, 1952, p. 436). Klein asserts that analysing the negative transference is a precondition for gaining access to the deeper layers of the mind, although positive and negative transferences are always combined. Klein emphasizes the notion of unconscious phantasy in the here-and-now of the session. ‘Real’ events must always be considered, according to Klein, in their interaction with the patient’s unconscious phantasy life. Klein’s (and Susan Isaacs’s) definition of unconscious phantasy was at the heart of the Controversial Discussions in the early 1940’s and, according to Elizabeth Bott-Spillius and Ron Britton, the use of the same words for different concepts has contributed to the intensity of the debate. According to the Kleinian view, unconscious phantasy includes every early form of infantile thought - it is the mainspring of the unconscious mind and the psychic representative of drives, but it also includes other forms of thought that emerge later on, through development of the original phantasies. Transference in this view is the unconscious experience in the here-and-now yet mapped onto the infantile mechanisms with which the patient managed his conflicts long ago. Unconscious phantasy influences and colours the experience of reality, and vice versa. Melanie Klein advocates interpreting in terms of unconscious phantasy, rather than in terms of impulse versus defence. As a result, she would consistently interpret within the transference instead of interpreting the transference itself. “In this way, Segal describes, one can show the patient how he experiences a relationship which gives rise to anxiety or guilt, and how he alters it in phantasy, to avoid pain (Segal, 1979). Klein focuses in this way on the patient’s anxieties and his relations to objects in the past and in the present, as well as on the experiences that have occurred in between. She calls
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