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gradually to accept his unconscious identification with both victim and persecutor and, at the same time, to understand that his idealizations also have an unrealistic quality, and represent a protective function against the opposite, negative segment of his experience. The therapist, maintaining technical neutrality while protecting the therapeutic frame, permits a gradual introduction of a “three-person psychology”. Here, the therapist’s function is that of an “excluded” outsider who helps the patient to diagnose the split-off idealized and persecutory states. These states can be subsequently linked together with the metaphorical significance of activated object relations in the transference (Kernberg, 2015). III. C. Melanie Klein and the Post-Kleinians In Kleinian schools as well conflict plays a pivotal role, but this occurs from the very beginning of life, prior the consolidation of the tripartite structure of the mind. The interplay between the three emerging structures, set in motion by the conflict between unconscious impulses from the id and ego defenses directed against them, reinforced by superego pressures, is backdated to the very early levels of development, contributing to the construction of the psychic structure. The struggle between idealized love and destructive aggression through splitting, projective identification, denial and omnipotent control characterizes psychic life from its very beginning, giving rise to the building blocks of psychic life, i.e. the primitive defensive constellations of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. This dynamic highlights a deeper dimension of unconscious conflict taking place before the consolidation of id, ego, and superego as three clearly differentiated structures. For Kleinian and post-Kleinian analysts, the view of an unconscious conflict working in the early stages of development has given proof to be helpful in clarifying and approaching therapeutically the severe psychopathologies (as borderline personality organization, narcissistic pathology, sexual perversion, eating disorders, antisocial behavior) characterized by a fixation at the primitive developmental levels in which splitting and other primitive defense mechanisms predominate (Kernberg 2005). Such a view implies that unconscious conflict concerns any affective psychic structure, both the primitive one represented by internalized object relations and the advanced one constituted by the tripartite structure that has integrated its constituents internalized object relations into ego, superego and id structures (Joseph 1989; Klein 1928; Segal 1962; Segal and Britton 1981; Steiner 2005). In stark contrast to ego psychology, Melanie Klein developed her theory of object relations as an expansion of Freud’s view of the psyche as innately conflicted. Klein’s seminal paper on object relations appeared in 1935, in chronological relation to Anna Freud’s 1936 book and Hartmann’s 1937 paper (published in 1939). While A. Freud and Hartmann were focused on the traits of the ego and how it defends itself against the id while adapting to external reality, Klein was plumbing the depths of the internal world and how it interacts with the external world, expanding Freud’s view of the superego. It is interesting to follow the divergence between ego psychology-Freud and object relations-Freud in several papers written in the 1950s. First, in 1952, at the International Psychoanalytic Congress, a symposium was held on ‘The Mutual Influences in the Development of Ego and Id’. There, Klein stated: “Since
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