ABSTRACT
It is implicit in Klein’s description of the depressive position (Klein, 1935) that the Oedipus complex is unavoidably part and parcel of working through the depressive position. Klein characterizes the depressive position as that phase of development in which the infant begins to relate to mother as a whole person. That means he perceives her more as she is in reality; that is, not split into a good and a bad one, not a part-object, like the breast, in the infant’s possession, not saturated by projective identification, but as a separate person, having a personality and a life of her own. That ‘life of her own’ principally includes the father as a sexual partner.
