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Klein subsequently focuses attention on the relation between these internal objects and the external world, as well as–and perhaps most importantly–on the relation between them and the ego. To understand the complexity of Klein’s idea of conflict, it is crucial to see that the internal objects are the personification of the instincts. Thus, the conflict between instinctual desires for both life and death creates conflicting ideal and persecutory internal objects–objects with which the ego must form a relationship. For Klein, the analysis of the ego’s relations to internal objects (the superego) is at the core of her theory of psychoanalysis as it formulates around the premise of unavoidable conflict. From this core element stems her entire theory. The first conflict is innate – the life and death instincts and their emotional manifestations of love and hate, that, through the cycle of projection into the external world and then, introjection into the internal world, create what Freud called emotional ambivalence. Life and death desires create love and hate emotions that in turn create good and bad, ideal and persecutory objects, which often conflict with the actual external object. Then, we have a conflict of instincts, a conflict of emotions and a conflict of internal objects; that, in turn, cause a conflict within the ego as well as with the external object, the last of which, could be called a conflict between phantasy and reality. From these inherent conflicts, Klein then fashioned a theory of development between two differing mental positions. The most direct way to understand these two mental positions is to consider that they are conceptualized around a single fundamental issue in psychic life–love. Klein’s theory is most essentially a theory of love and how love survives in a psyche that also generates hatred. The above forms the primary conflict in mental development. One can understand this by considering what many Kleinian thinkers regard as a key, unspoken assumption of Klein’s thinking: that hate is easier than love. Consider a building. It can take years to build a structure, but it can be leveled in a minute. Construction is complex; destruction is simple. Loving an object that frustrates, requires a complicated development; hating an object that frustrates, requires no development. From this realization, Klein’s theory recognizes that in the undeveloped psyche, while love exists from the first, hate when it emerges, dominates love. By contrast, when the mind develops beyond this instinctive state, love is enabled to dominate hate. Klein names these mental-emotional configurations as the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, respectively and places them in a developmental relation – the paranoid- schizoid occurring first and the depressive evolving later. The essential defining element in discriminating these two positions is in how one conceptualizes and interacts with one’s objects. In the paranoid position, one is primarily concerned with one’s own survival, and one’s objects are seen as either helping or threatening one’s survival. For this reason, Klein refers to the paranoid position as the narcissistic position. In the depressive position, the defining object relation is that concern for the object’s survival becomes more important, or equal, to the self’s survival – because it is understood that one cannot survive without a relation to another person. The term used for each position reflects the nature of the defenses implicated. Projective identification is also an organizing principle because it geographically places highly differing
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