ABSTRACT
The emotional and mental life is structured in a relation of the self to objects. This is the view pioneered by Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Bion, and analysts within the Kleinian School. In this view the infant is object-related from birth, although the object is denuded of wholeness and referred to as a part-object or partial object. This latter is a specific description of the object type and does not detract from the general proposition of this theory that the newborn child is object-related from birth. At one stroke this dispenses with the theory of Primary Narcissism, which posits an objectless state at birth. Narcissism occurs when someone has taken his own self as love-object. Psychoanalytic investigation into motives assumes this as a fundamental principle. This principle is a basic assumption in the many examples that Freud gives in the Interpretation of Dreams. It is, however, in contradiction to Freud's metapsychology of the Unconscious.
