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though insisting that she was walking in Freud’s footsteps – offered a new perception of the psychoanalytic subject as constituted by its internalized objects and the unconscious inner phantasy world. This development can be seen in Susan Isaacs´ (1948) classical paper on unconscious phantasies, presented in the Controversial Discussions. The basic motivational force was now described as ‘drive-seeking-for-an-object’. The phantasies comprise various dramas and exchanges between inner objects in the internal world and between inner objects and real objects in the external world . The last can be perceived only when there is a move (always temporally) from the paranoid-schizoid split view of the world (the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’) into a ‘depressive position’ in which objects are perceived in their wholeness and their separateness from the subject. In contrast, internal objects and phantasies are always structured and put on the move by the drives (which thus kept a basic motivational position). Generally, however, the main stress moved from the drive energizer – the economical aspect and the bodily needs – to the psychical structuring of the object in terms of ‘partial’ and ‘whole’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ object; ‘good’ when it is libidinally cathected and ‘bad’ when it is ‘attacked’ by aggression, envy or hatred, all seen as derivates of the death instinct. Splitting the object now became the main defence mechanism – side by side with ‘projective identification’, a mechanism described by Klein, by which the subject (the ‘baby’, the ‘patient’) gets rid of unbearable parts of himself by projecting them into the object (or actually its representation in Klein’s theory). ‘Reparation’ became the main psychological ‘life mission’ of the subject. Based on clinical findings in children, Melanie Klein put stress on early destructive phantasies. These were seen as echoes of basic sadism, and from the early 30´s they were conceptualized as derivatives of the death drive, a universal and constitutionally given destructive fundament. The death drive was seen by Klein as originally directed towards the ego and therefore perceived as the main cause for splitting the object into a ‘good breast’ (serving life drives) and a ‘bad breast’ (reflecting the destructive death drive) – as well as the main source of persecutory qualities, disintegration, negation, annihilation anxiety and death fears. All of these qualities were connected to the paranoid-schizoid position – while the depressive position was marked by the integrative Eros principle (Klein, 1946). On the clinical level, the phenomena of envy , one of the fundamental concepts in Kleinian theory, has also been attributed to the death drive (Klein, 1957). The human subject is characterized by a fundamental difficulty in seeing and meeting the nutritive, good, lively, loving and life-giving objects. Being the recipient (not the provider) of these qualities makes the subject too vulnerable, and the death drive – the destruction of life and life giving objects – takes the upper hand. Bion (1959) elaborates on this in his paper on the attack on (loving and life-giving) linking, and Rosenfeld (1971) does the same in his theory on the narcissistic triumph in the destruction of potential life-giving processes. The interpretation of the death drive in terms of aggression, envy and attacks on the object, has been criticized as a concretization of basic psychic principles (like negation, binding, and unbinding). To this should be added that aggression may be considered as raising tensions and not discharging them – and in that sense belonging to the life drive principle. At the same time the main characteristic attributed to the death drive, namely discharging energies
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