Back to Table of Contents
Even though Fairbairn’s views corresponded directly with Melanie Klein’s thinking in positioning the object as the central factor constituting the human subject, his theory was distant from Freud’s and Klein’s drive concepts.
III. Bbb. Melanie Klein Klein and her followers developed as early as in the 30’s some new and broader applications of the drive concept in terms of object relations. Seen retrospectively, Klein – even 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 1943 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, 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
143
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online