ABSTRACT
The concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions enabled Melanie Klein to formulate a coherent and comprehensive theory of psychological development and its pathology. In The Psycho-Analysis of Children, though she was pursuing always the thread of anxiety, and always analysed in terms of object relations, in her theory she tried to accord all her findings with S. Freud's and Karl Abraham's formulations of the libidinal phases. The formulation of the positions enabled her also to clarify her views on the nature of anxiety and guilt. Projections may produce the threatening figures as the combined parental figure – often seen by Melanie Klein in the analysis of small children. Manic defences are put into play involving splitting, on slightly different lines, between destroyed parental figures and idealized and powerful ones with which, in a manic state of mind, the child identifies himself.
