PSYC 356 Final: Ch5_StudyGuide_Answers
20 Jun 2018
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Chapter 5
Klein: Object Relations Theory
1. Define object relations theory and compare it to Freudian theory.
Many personality theorists have accepted some of Freud's basic assumptions
while rejecting others. One approach to extending psychodynamic theory has
been the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and others. Unlike Jung and
Adler who came to reject Freud's ideas, Klein tried to validate Freud's theories.
In essence, Klein extended Freud's developmental stages downward to the
first 4 to 6 months after birth.
Object relations theory differs from Freudian theory in three important ways:
(1) it places more emphasis on interpersonal relationships, (2) it stresses the
infant's relationship with the mother rather than the father, and (3) it suggests
that people are motivated primarily for human contact rather than for sexual
pleasure. The term object in object relations theory refers to any person or
part of a person that infants introject, or take into their psychic structure and
then later project onto other people.
2. Discuss the psychological life of the infant as seen from Klein's
point of view.
Klein believed that infants begin life with an inherited predisposition to reduce
the anxiety that they experience as a consequence of the clash between the life
instinct and the death instinct.
A. Fantasies
Klein assumed that very young infants possess an active, unconscious fantasy
life. Their most basic fantasies are images of the "good" breast and the "bad"
breast.
B. Objects
Klein agreed with Freud that drives have an object, but she was more likely to
emphasize the child's relationship with these objects (parents' face, hands,
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breast, penis, etc.), which she saw as having a life of their own within the
child's fantasy world.
3. Explain Klein's concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive
positions.
In their attempts to reduce the conflict produced by good and bad images,
infants organize their experience into positions, or ways of dealing with both
internal and external objects.
A. Paranoid-Schizoid Position
The struggles that infants experience with the good breast and the bad breast
lead to two separate and opposing feelings—a desire to harbor the breast and
a desire to bite or destroy it. To tolerate these two feelings, the ego splits itself
by retaining parts of its life and death instincts while projecting other parts
onto the breast. It then has a relationship with the ideal breast and the
persecutory breast. To control this situation, infants adopt the paranoid-
schizoid position, which is a tendency to see the world as having both
destructive and omnipotent qualities.
B. Depressive Position
By depressive position, Klein meant the anxiety that infants experience around
6 months of age over losing their mother and yet, at the same time, wanting to
destroy her. The depressive position is resolved when infants fantasize that
they have made up for their previous transgressions against their mother and
also realize that their mother will not abandon them.
4. List and discuss Klein's psychic defense mechanisms.
According to Klein, children adopt various psychic defense mechanisms to
protect their egos against anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies.
A. Introjection
Klein defined introjection as the fantasy of taking into one's own body the
images that one has of an external object, especially the mother's breast.
Infants usually introject good objects as a protection against anxiety, but they
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