ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein shares with nineteenth-century psychiatry, poets, and gothic literature an obsession with splitting. So many of her locutions and concerns are part of psychoanalytic daily life. In Klein’s writings, splits in personality become splits in ego, object, and affect. Klein is very Freudian in her emphasis on active mental processes. She is perhaps more Freudian than S. Freud himself in her emphasis on active ego processes everywhere. The fantasy of passive union with the womb is less important than the ego’s womb-oriented activity. More than most analysts, Klein places Freud’s death drive at the center of psychic life. Not only does she share Freud’s conviction that the death drive plays a constitutive role in psychic phenomena but she also contributes original variations on the theme. For Klein the first object is the breast, which is split into a good and bad breast.
