4 - Precarious love: Kleinian object relations theory

Summary

Introducing Klein and “object relations”

We have now examined the foundations of psychoanalysis, laid down by Sigmund Freud. Part II of this book will consider developments of psychoanalytic theory after Freud. Melanie Klein's object relations approach to psychoanalysis represents one of the most original trajectories to have emerged in psychoanalysis after Freud. Klein discovered psychoanalysis in Budapest. But it was only after moving to London that her work took on its distinctive, original character. Perhaps, Juliet Mitchell suggests, this was because of the peculiarly practical and “nononsense” culture of England, in which divergence from orthodoxy was better tolerated than on the European continent. However that may be, Klein was explicit about her departures from Freudian orthodoxy. As we shall see, Klein offers a vivid account of this psychology: one that focuses much more than Freud's on the violent and erotic relation between the infant and its mother. In this relation, Klein holds, the erotic desire to possess the mother goes hand in hand with wanting to cut her up, rob her body of its good contents, poison her with excrement, and destroy her.

Yet Klein's analysis of children opens the way to a particularly sympathetic account of the infantile psyche, and the problems children face in the normal course of their development. Kleinian object relations theory also opens up new insights into adult psychology, and pathologies such as schizophrenia and depression.