ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on examples of Melanie Klein's own work with children to exemplify her theory, believing—as did she—that psychoanalytic observation and work with children also provides insight into the aetiology of processes at work in the adult mind. Freudian theory had established a developmental framework with the notion of stages of psychosexual development, and this concept had been refined in the work of Karl Abraham, whose theories of early infantile aggression and ambivalence towards the object strongly influenced Klein. Klein states that the object can only be introjected if it has been possible to project good parts of the self into it — if in fact there has been, in Wilfred Bion's terms, an experience of containment. By projecting the fear onto a distant object, the phobia keeps the persecutors, internal psychotic terrors, at a distance—a mechanism that could, perhaps, be termed "phobic projection".
