ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief overview of the Kleinian and Independent approaches, as shown in the work of their originators, Melanie Klein and D. Winnicott. Klein sees the ego, or self, as existing from birth, taking a variety of subject-object forms and constantly influenced by the life and death instincts. Apart from external objects, she also describes internal objects, both whole objects and part objects, good and bad, deriving not only from the infant's rudimentary sense of the mother but also from a primitive awareness of the major body parts and functions. Winnicott gives an entirely different sense of the earliest weeks and months, he sees Klein's paranoid-schizoid position as a picture of a baby in distress. For both Klein and Winnicott, the key event of the first year of life is the move to whole-object relating: from absolute to relative dependence, or from the dominance of the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position.
