ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on M. Klein’s over-valuation of spatial metaphors in her accounts of the mother/infant relationship and in her conception of splitting. It discusses the limitations of Klein’s emphasis, although her concept of anxiety implicitly includes a notion. Klein, like Sigmund Freud, prioritizes the theorizing of sequential time over other experiences of temporality. The chapter explains the importance for the analyst in being attuned to the temporal dimensions of splitting as a defence. It examines Klein’s notion of the death drive and her association, following Freud, of death with destruction. A split occurs whereby the mother’s breast is experienced as persecutory, retaliatory towards the baby’s aggressive impulses towards the breast. Both the “good” and the “bad” breasts are introjected and then projected back on to the external world. Not only does the infant want to consume the mother’s breast but also to devour and scoop out her entire body and its contents.
