ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein’s view of the ego touches upon a range of analytic issues—narcissism, identity, conscience, thought and reality, development and cure—that are central to Kleinian analysis in her lifetime. Freud’s formulation of mental structure in terms of id, ego and superego has become the basis for all psycho-analytic thinking. Klein was aware that Freud made some statements regarding the biological nature of the instincts that would not support this view. However, she points to other places where Freud notes the instincts’ meaningful psychological nature that requires the involvement of the ego. The ego, Klein explains, responds to this anxiety by performing the functions of projection and introjection. One consequence of Klein’s integration of the life and death instincts into the structural model is that ego strength is now considered a function of the fusion of these instincts.
