ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein spoke of the balance between love and hate in the infantile ego being easily disrupted by frustration, deprivation, and conflicted attachments. When this imbalance predominates, greed and oral rage emerge. If the ego tries to save the object from these aggressive feelings and phantasies, several defensive systems arise, including the manic use of optimism. When the ego experiences objects that it depends on to be unavailable, fragile, or prone to shifting into being rejecting and abandoning, the ego may try to create or reinforce a good object through manic optimism. Optimism is a way to make amends and reparation in that it overrides any ill feelings and replaces them with positive feelings, much like a peace offering to an angry or offended God. The resulting manic defensive system includes denial, splitting, and the over reliance on optimism to cure any potential strife between self and object.
