ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein established the first prominent analytic community in London. She insisted that her theory was an extension of Freud’s, but both her theory and practice were very different from his. She worked with children and moved the area of focus back in time to the earliest months of life. She hypothesized good and bad “objects”—parts of people or functions that have life and death meaning for the baby. A “good object” soothes a “good baby,” creating a felt sense of a “good world.” This is the baby’s first way of apprehending the world, with constant splits between good and bad experiences involving no continuity. This is an emotional world of need and rage and envy.
She maintained that the human mind is always in one of two “positions”—the paranoid-schizoid position, the earliest split world outlined above, and the depressive position, an innate push for wholeness that allows remorse, repair, and gratitude. Among her other important contributions is “projective identification,” the experience on the part of analysts that they have been given feelings to experience that are not theirs.
Wilfred Bion, Otto F. Kernberg, and Thomas Ogden were all profoundly influenced by Klein, extending her lineage into modern psychoanalysis while making significant contributions of their own.
