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The preservation of the good object inside is the primary thrust of her theory. There is indeed a special focus on the effect of destructive forces on that internal good object being held inside, but the therapeutic focus is to help the constructive, loving forces to prevail. To quote Klein,”A contented baby who sucks with enjoyment, allays his mother’s anxiety; and her happiness expresses itself in her way of handling and feeding him, thus diminishing his persecutory anxiety and affecting his ability to internalize the good breast” (1963, p. 312). Like Freud’s, Klein’s theory is drive based. Their differences lie in terms of the time parameters, the substance of the final stage of development (and of therapy), and the relative importance of internal vs. external (environmental) factors in the development and etiology of psychopathology: Klein’s theory posits the attainment of the depressive position (and full resolution of the Oedipal conflicts with a fully structured superego) within the first 18 months of life, in terms of the integration of attitudes of love and hate towards the object. This differs from the integration of various partial components of the drive, as in the psychosexual stages posited by Freud, which results in gradual internal structuralization with resultant superego formation around age five. In Klein’s system, in terms of the relative importance of the internal and external (environmental) factors in the development and pathogenesis alike, the phantasy is dominant, while the impact of the external factors, including maternal anxiety or depression, is minimal. There is no equivalent of the explicit acknowledgement of complex complementarity, as in Freud’s ‘complementary series,’ and only rare hints that the quality of parental psychic processing might have an impact on the child’s “level” of splitting. Yet, the concept of ‘unconscious internal objects’ represents Klein’s major enduring contribution to psychoanalysis and object-relations theory. The Kleinian development rests on this discovery, where descriptions of the paranoid-schizoid position (1946) and the depressive position (1935; 1940) provide the framework for addressing drive as a determinant of motivation, precisely, from the standpoint of internal objects. III. B. Bion Wilfred Bion expanded Klein’s theories of projection-introjection., most notably, with respect to the communicative role of projective-introjective processes in normal human development: “I shall suppose that there is a normal degree of projective identification, without defining the limits within which normality lies, and that associated with introjective identification this is the foundation on which normal development rests.” (1959:103). In this case, projective identification is understood as the infant’s link to the breast, which makes it possible for him to cope with “feelings too powerful to be contained within his personality” (1959:106). Bion indicates the extent to which this fundamental link can be disturbed, “attacked,” in two ways, either by the mother’s refusal to receive the infant’s projective identification or the infant’s envy of the good breast or a combination of the two. In either case, this results in “excessive projective identifications” where the original communicative intention of the projective identification is destroyed leading to a “severe arrest of development…[T]hanks to a denial of the main method open to the infant for dealing with his
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