IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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the death instinct—the drift from the organic to the inorganic state and the deflection of its force from the self to the outside world, Klein saw it as only destructive and conceived of envy as its prime mental expression. Although Klein (1929. 1946, 1957) became more identified with the trend toward observing and addressing aggression, the preservation of the good object inside is the primary thrust of her theory (Mitrani 2007), and the therapeutic focus is to help the constructive, loving forces to prevail (Klein 1963). The Kleinian conceptualization of development, resting on the descriptions of the paranoid-schizoid (PS) position (1946) and the depressive (DP) position (Klein 1935, 1940) provide the framework for addressing drive as a determinant of motivation from the standpoint of internal objects. Various aspects of Klein’s work, transformed, extended and reformulated, have been directly and indirectly influential in a wide range of North American theorizing on drives of James Grotstein, Otto Kernberg, and others. III. Bbc. Wilfred Bion Wilfred Bion (1959, 1962, 1963) expanded the communicative dimension of Klein’s theory of projective identification, to depict early normal development., along the lines of ‘container/contained’, describing the interplay between the infant’s projective identifications and the mother’s receptive function both in their creative, life-promoting and destructive aspects. (See also entries CONTAINMENT: CONTAINER-CONTAINED, THE UNCONSCIOUS, OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES). Bion (1963) completes the shift in Klein’s thinking from a theory of successive developmental stages to a theory of ‘positions’ – namely, the paranoid schizoid and depressive positions. Thus, rather than thinking in the form of PS →DP he uses the equation PS↔DP, indicating how the positions oscillate throughout life. Bion uses terminology of ‘ emotional drives’, ‘distress drives’, and ‘reparative drives’ (in the context of depressive position), in line with Klein’s view of drives as irreducibly psychological or subjective in nature, and experientially available, linked with emotions and anxieties. North American Kleinians and Bionians, i.e., James Grotstein, retain and further expand this view. III. Bbd. John Bowlby: Attachment as a primary drive John Bowlby (1958) in his attachment theory stressed the importance of feelings of security; and argued that the child does not explicitly look for drive release but for an attachment figure who supplies feelings of safety. Fairbairn’s and Bowlby’s main critique of the Freudian drive concept became part of the broader question of motivation . For Freud, the human subject is put on the move by his drives: drives are the “things” and “forces” which make him “tick”. Fairbairn and Bowlby both

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