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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 death instinct as an important aspect of the infant’s unconscious mental life from the very beginning. Whereas Freud emphasized two aspects of 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 normal early 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’ 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.
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