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and reducing tensions – has now to be identified as the ‘pleasure principle’ (and not part of Eros). This paradox may have been one of the reasons that brought Lacan to see the death drive as an aspect of every drive. Like Freud’s, Klein’s theory is drive based. Their differences lie in terms of the time parameters, the substance of the final stage of development (and of therapy), and the relative importance of internal vs. external (environmental) factors in the development and etiology of psychopathology: Klein’s theory posits the attainment of the depressive position (and full resolution of the Oedipal conflicts with a fully structured superego) within the first 18 months of life, in terms of the integration of attitudes of love and hate towards the object. This differs from the integration of various partial components of the drive, as in the psychosexual stages posited by Freud, which results in gradual internal structurization with resultant superego formation around age five. In Klein’s system, in terms of the relative importance of the internal and external (environmental) factors in the development and pathogenesis alike, the phantasy is dominant, while the impact of the external factors, including maternal anxiety or depression, is minimal. There is no equivalent of the explicit acknowledgement of complex complementarity, as in Freud’s ‘complementary series,’ and only rare hints that the quality of parental psychic processing might have an impact on the child’s “level” of splitting. Klein retained Freud’s view of the drives as the underlying motivational principle in human life; while at the same time redefining the concept of the ‘drive’ itself. She conceived of drives as irreducibly psychological in nature and experientially available – that is, inextricably linked with the infant’s emotions and anxieties. Drives are conceived from the point of view of primary object-relatedness. For Klein, “there is no instinctual urge…which does not involve objects, external and internal…” (Klein 1952, p. 53). Internal objects furnish the content of unconscious phantasy. Consequently, the phantasy is seen as a primary component of the drives themselves. North American Kleinians develop the notion of unconscious phantasy as a complex of animated representations of transactions between self and object into the “ dramatic point of view ”, as an addition to the Freudian metapsychology. The attribution of intentionality to psychic energy, to both the life and death drives, is applicable from the beginning of life. Unlike Freud, for whom the object is always the object of an instinctual aim, Klein posits object-relatedness as an ‘additional’ primary determinant of human action (1952, p.51). In this way, Klein’s account of the drives as inherently purposive phenomena is a theory of the origins and nature of the object. Objects are seen as inherent in the drives and, in that sense, relatively autonomous from external objects. The idea that the first objects of the drives are actually extensions of the drives themselves, rather than actual relational events, is supported on two counts: Klein presupposes first that libidinal desire is always the desire for something (intentionality of drives), and secondly, that object-relations are established specifically by the intrapsychic mechanisms of introjection-projection (See the separate entry OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES). Along these lines, Klein (1933) took Freud’s concept of the ‘death instinct’ as an important aspect of the infant’s “always already” unconscious mental life from the very beginning. Whereas Freud emphasized two aspects of
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