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Development of the Ego” (1930a, b, c), she describes Dick, a four-year old autistic boy, who showed little or no anxiety or interest in the outside world except for door-handles, trains and stations. Klein understood that her young patient feared his aggressive attacks against his mother’s body and its contents (breast, babies and father’s penis) and had erected powerful defences against these phantasied attacks: “The excess of sadism arouses anxiety and sets in motion the most primitive defense mechanisms of the ego… In relation to the subject's own sadism the defence implies expulsion, whereas in relation to the object it implies destruction.” (Klein 1930a, p. 25; 1930b, p. 219; 1930c, p. 210). Sadism directed towards the object, destroys the object, which is now perceived as a potential persecutor by the ego, that fears its retaliation. Obstacles to symbolism can occur when more primitive defences based on splitting, fragmentation and projective identification are employed. This may be in the context of developmental deficits, trauma and psychotic or narcissistic solutions. It was Klein who linked the capacity for symbol formation with recognition of reality (especially the separateness of the object) in the depressive position. Difficulty in tolerating depressive anxieties is related to the recognition of both destructive (hateful) and loving impulses towards the object as well as the complexity of the object, neither idealized nor denigrated - neither exclusively good nor totally bad. (Developmentally, the baby who is dependent on the object, is thus confronted with a person with their own needs and vulnerabilities.) Maintaining defensive splitting as a defense against paranoid anxieties as well as manic defences stand in the way of true symbol formation. Omnipotent defences can then be employed where nuance is lost and phantasy is equated with reality. Overall, Klein regarded symbols as the representations of unconscious phantasy in the form of derivatives of the unconscious. She described the capacity to symbolize unconscious frightening, sadistic aggressive feelings towards the object as an important step in Ego development. She described two processes in the usage of symbols: splitting and projective identification. Latin American analysts are especially attentive to how, in Klein’s theorizing, the process of displacement becomes the basis for symbolization: Through his massive projections into her, the analyst (Klein) became filled with Dick’s own dangerous part-objects (poisonous urine, faeces, bad penis) while Dick’s own mind appeared to empty itself. Klein stated that sadism is activated in each of the various sources of libidinal pleasure. Regarding the oral sadistic phase, she described phantasies where the mother's body —which contains babies, and also the father's penis— is attacked. She proposed that Dick sadistically wanted to destroy an object that represents the penis. This object becomes persecutory, leading the child to displace this object to other objects. Klein then theorizes that this displacement from one object to another, is the origin of symbolization. In “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” (Klein 1930 a) draws on her previous conclusion that “symbolism is the foundation of all sublimation and of every talent, since it is by way of symbolic equation that things, activities and interests become the subject of libidinal phantasies” (1930a, p.25).Through the ‘Symbolic Equation’, in which sexual organs come to stand for the objects, and since the child desires to destroy these organs (penis, vagina, breast), he develops a dread for the latter (1930b, p. 220). This anxiety
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