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10). More recently, Robert Hinshelwood has drawn attention to the fact that the primitive experience of internal objects “creates an animistic world in which everything [animate and inanimate] feels and has intentions ” (1989: 75; emphasis added). The attribution of intentionality to psychic energy, to both the life and death drives, is seen from the Kleinian perspective as applicable from the beginning of life: “love and hatred, phantasies, anxieties and defences are…operative from the beginning and are ab initio indivisibly linked with object-relations” (Klein 1952a: 53). From the beginning, according to Klein, “the ego introjects objects ‘good’ and ‘bad’, for both of which the mother’s breast is the prototype” (1935: 262). Unlike Freud, for whom the object is always the object of an instinctual aim, Klein posits object-relatedness as an ‘additional’ primary determinant of human action (1952a: 51). This applies to both love and hate understood as purposive or intentional force relations inherent from the beginning. In the case of libidinal attachment, Klein proposes that “feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother” (1937: 311). Destructive impulses are understood along the same lines as a manifestation of innate purposive hatred, and envy of the all-powerful, good object (1959: 249). “In the very first months of the baby’s existence it has sadistic impulses directed , not only against its mother’s breast, but also against the inside of her body” (1935: 262; emphasis added). The Freudian notions of ‘libido’ and ‘aggression’ are reconceived as directional emotions. As such, Klein seeks to integrate drive theory and object-relations theory; in fact, her account of the drives as inherently purposive phenomena is a theory of the origins and nature of the object. This raises questions concerning the constitution of the psyche, with respect to the balance of constitutional and environmental factors. The balance of internal and external factors – i.e., the complex of biological and personal elements and the nature of the early environment – is expressed differently at different points in Klein’s writings. Klein, in a consistent line of argument, posits a state of “innate unconscious awareness of the existence of the mother” (1959: 248); objects are seen as inherent in the drives and, in that sense, relatively autonomous from external objects, in particular the baby’s actual mother. Instinctual knowledge, or innate preconception, is understood as “the basis for the infant’s primal relation to his mother” (1959: 248). 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. “By projection, by turning outward libido and aggression and imbuing the object with them, the infant’s first object-relation comes about. This is the process which, in my opinion, underlines the cathexis of objects. Owing to the process of introjection, this first object is simultaneously taken into the self” (1952b: 58). The omnipotent nature of primitive unconscious phantasy means that the external object at first, in the early paranoid schizoid position, is experientially indissociable from the introjected object, while projection results in what feels like a real loss of parts of the self or the internal world. A feeling of depersonalization or fragmentation may result from excessive
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