ABSTRACT
The preference for the term “death drive” in the Kleinian tradition underscores how life and death drives constitute powerful ever-present psychological processes or forces in the mind. This approach is based on clinical experience and tries to minimize terminological ambiguity by stressing the psychological character of the death drive and by avoiding simplistic biological equivocation. The use and application of the concept of the death instinct was at the centre of debates between the Vienna and British Societies from early on. Melanie Klein and her followers were particularly interested in the fate of the superego and that of incorporated objects. Melanie Klein developed her ideas on the basis of observations made in the course of psychoanalytic work with children. The Kleinian concept of the inner world describes a largely unconscious subjective experience of ego and objects, good and bad, built up through the constant operation of splitting, projection, and introjection.
