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projective identification, where parts of the self have been located in external objects. The concept ‘internal object’ is used in this way to refer to the primitive belief in a physically present object (Money-Kyrle 1968), or the experience of objects as concretely real. And real people, including the actual parents, are assigned a role or an identity against the background of this concretely imagined internal world, where object-relationships are formed of universal a priori imagos . Most notably, the superego of the child, according to Klein (1933: 249), “does not coincide with the picture presented by its real parents, but is created out of imaginary pictures or imagos of them which it has taken into itself”. Klein came to a view early on about the intrapsychic origins of introjected and internal objects; in recounting her analysis of Rita from 1923, she writes that the prohibition due to an internal persecutory object did not emanate “from the real mother, but from an introjected mother” (1926: 132). Nonetheless, Klein doesn’t avoid reference to the real, external world, but views projection-introjection as an ongoing process of interaction or “interplay” of environmental and intrapsychic factors (1936: 292): “From its inception analysis has always laid stress on the importance of the child’s early experiences, but it seems to me that only since we know more about the nature and contents of its early anxieties, and the continuous interplay between its actual experiences and its phantasy-life, can we fully understand why the external factor is so important.” (Klein 1935, p. 285) Klein states that from “the very beginning of psychic development there is a constant correlation of real objects with those installed within the ego” (1935: 266). Object imagos are seen in this way as “doubles” of real situations (1940: 346). The notion of “doubles” presupposes a theory of psychic mentation (internal objects, representations and symbols) based on the idea of correspondence (rather than verisimilitude), a view that is maintained on the grounds that internal imagos are “a phantastically distorted picture of the real objects upon which they are based” (1935: 262). More than a mechanism of defence, the process of projection-introjection is seen as a normal mode of encounter, a way of relating to the outside world in general. On this reckoning, the internal object imago is formed around a core of real perceptual experience; the internal world is populated by objects derived from the infant’s actual environment and interpersonal history. As cycles of projection and introjection continue, at a certain point (beginning, according to Klein, at 4-6 months) the infant realises that the hated object who is expelled and viciously attacked in phantasy is the same as the nourishing, loved object whom the infant wishes lovingly to take in. The infant thus has a dawning awareness of his attacks on the loved object. If this confluence of loved and hated figures can be borne, instead of the persecutory, survival anxiety of the early so called ‘paranoid schizoid position’, where phantastic ‘part objects’ reign, anxiety begins to centre on the welfare and survival of the other as a more real and complexly perceived ‘whole object’. Gradually persecution gives rise to remorseful guilt and poignant sadness, linked to deepening of love. With pining for what has been lost or damaged by hate comes an urge to repair. Ego capacities enlarge and the world is more richly and realistically perceived. Omnipotent control over the object, now felt as more real and
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