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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 Herbert Rosenfeld (1971) does the same in his theory of 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 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 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 factors in the development and pathogenesis alike, unconscious 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
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