ABSTRACT

In Melanie Klein’s view, sufficient ego exists at birth to experience anxiety, use defence mechanisms and form primitive object-relations in phantasy and reality. This view is not entirely at variance with Sigmund Freud’s. The immature ego of the infant is exposed from birth to the anxiety stirred up by the inborn polarity of instincts—the immediate conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct. It is also immediately exposed to the impact of external reality, both anxiety-producing, like the trauma of birth, and life-giving, like the warmth, love and feeding received from its mother. With splitting are connected persecutory anxiety and idealization. Of course both, if retained in their original form in adulthood, distort judgment, but some elements of persecutory anxiety and idealization are always present and play a role in adult emotions. One of the achievements of the paranoid-schizoid position is splitting. It is splitting which allows the ego to emerge out of chaos and to order its experiences.