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terms of the processes of projection and introjection. Isaacs (1948) makes a seminal contribution, here, concerning the idea of the internal object as an unconscious phantasy of the relationship between the drive and the object.
III. A. Klein: Internal Objects and the Intentionality of Drives Melanie Klein laid the foundations for object-relations theory, which has continued since the 1970s to extend beyond its point of origins in the British school. In the general psychoanalytic framework that remains applicable to the contemporary Kleinian group in Britain (Schafer 1997), 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. Klein judged her account of the internal origins of human experience as continuous with classical Freudian theory; she saw her work, essentially, as an amplification of Freud’s work and, in particular, sought to articulate her account of the internal world in terms of Freud’s (1923) theory of the structure of the personality (cf. Caper 1988). The superego, for instance, is seen as a composite of “the various identifications adopted on the different levels of development whose stamp they bear” (1929: 204). And yet contra Freud, the drives are conceived by Klein as irreducibly psychological or subjective in nature and experientially available – that is, inextricably linked with the infant’s emotions and anxieties. Thus, Klein’s use of the term ‘object-relations’ is based on her “contention that the infant has from the beginning of post-natal life a relation to the mother (although focusing primarily on her breast) which is imbued with the fundamental elements of an object-relation, i.e. love, hatred, phantasies, anxieties, and defences” (1952a: 49). 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; in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life” (1952a: 53). Internal objects furnish the content of unconscious phantasy for Klein, where phantasy is seen as a primary component of the drives themselves. This position is evident above all in the way that Klein viewed the relationship between objects and the body. While the body is central to the phenomenology of the internal world, Klein continued to emphasize the corporeal expression of drives, rather than bodily tension itself, as a source of instinctual energy. This provided an alternative to the regulatory principles of classical drive theory. The term and concept ‘internal’ may refer variously to ‘mental’, ‘imaginary’ or ‘inside’ (Strachey 1941). Kleinians have continued to debate this question. Karin Stephen, in an early attempt to clarify the nature of internal objects, notes that “the belief in these fantastic internal objects originates in actual bodily experiences of very early childhood, connected with violent, often uncontrollable, discharges of emotional tension” (1934: 321). Paula Heimann, while still loyal to the Klein group, in turn underlines the basic assumption that drives are object-seeking from the point of view of the body: “Under the sway of hunger and oral desires the infant in some way conjures up the object that would satisfy these impulses. When this object, the mother’s breast, is in reality offered to him he accepts it and in phantasy incorporates it” (1949:
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