Back to Table of Contents
III. Bc. Roots in Melanie Klein As Klein viewed primitive drives, constitutive of both pre-Oedipal and Oedipal strivings, as being of fundamental significance in the early, formative developmental process, she preferred the term ego to self and saw it evolving in relation to its largely unconscious function of the management of potentially annihilating aggression. As her “ego/self” is primarily unconscious and mainly involved with drive regulation, it bears little relation to the notion of a self organized around subjective experience. While in her earlier writings Klein tended to use the terms ego and self interchangeably, later she contended that self covers “the whole of the personality, which includes not only the ego but the instinctual life which Freud called the id …” (Klein, 1959/1984, p. 249, original italics). This delimits the ego as the organized part of the self. Referring to Freud’s paper on Masochism (Freud 1924), Klein described the underpinnings of the fear of annihilation as “The threat to the self from the death instinct working within … bound up with the dangers apprehended from the internalized devouring mother and father …” (Klein 1948), p. 117). Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions “describe the fundamental ways in which love and hate, along with self and object, are managed in the development of the internal world” (Auchincloss and Samberg 2012, p. 232). Klein (1940) considered the depressive position to be dominated by anxieties for the object, whereas the preceding paranoid-schizoid position was dominated by anxieties about the self. For Klein, the formation of a stable, resilient sense of self, is dependent on the ability to regulate affect through the achievement of the depressive position (Klein, 1946). The depressive position thus undergirds the ‘capacity to choose’ which would seem as essential characteristic of the maturing of ‘the self’. Overall, Klein makes a broad use of the term using it interchangeably with the term Ego. However, a nuanced distinction between ego and the self that could be discerned concerns the fact that often the term ‘Ego’ designates an active role in the development of the child, as illustrated in “Our adult world”: “As I came to recognize in the light of my psycho-analytic work with children, introjection and projection function from the beginning of post-natal life as some of the earliest activities of the ego, which in my view operates from birth onwards” (Klein,1959/1984, p 250). The term ‘Self’, on the other hand, is used more frequently in describing the object relationships, e.g. in the description of the paranoid and depressive schizoid positions and more generally when Klein addresses the role of early relationships in the development of infant’s psyche. Moreover, the Self gains a place in her theory of projective identification during the schizo-paranoid position, dominated by anxieties about the self. In ‘Envy and Gratitude’ while exploring the processes of splitting that support the paranoid-schizoid (in English) position Klein distinguishes the strong ego capable of identifying itself with a single object and the weak ego subjected to an indiscriminate identification with many objects. She states, “… full identification with a good object goes with a feeling of the self possessing goodness of its own. When things go wrong, excessive projective identification, by which split-off parts of the self
748
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online