Psychoanalysis started its life as a ‘drive theory’ or ‘dual instinct’ theory—the idea that mental life and its pathologies could be understood in terms of the interplay between the erotic and death drives, and the ways in which these were repressed, or expressed either covertly via ‘conversion’, or directly. As Freud’s thought evolved, so new paradigms began to emerge. Drive theory had little to say about relationships: other people appear merely as satisfiers or thwarters of an individual’s instinctual needs. Freud began to ask how children, and later adults, reconciled their own wishes and desires—their drives or instincts—with those of their caregivers and peers. Struggling with this problem, while remaining within the confines of drive theory, he now differentiated between self-love, or narcissism, and other, or ‘anaclitic’, love, directed outwards. In this model, the individual gradually emerges from egg-like self-absorption and healthy narcissism into the world of relationships.

A further push towards a more relational theory came from Abraham, later to become Melanie Klein’s analyst, who noticed the parallels between the phenomena of grief and depression. The intense psychic pain and disruption associated with a loss suggested a much more intimate connection between relationships and the architecture of the psyche than drive theory would allow. ‘The unconscious’ is not so much a repository of drives and desires, but an inner world populated by significant others or ‘objects’. The self is forged out of these ‘objects’ with whom the individual has or has had important relationships: ‘the shadow of the object falls on the ego’.⁽¹⁾ A further theoretical move arose from considering the origins of conscience and ideals. It is a matter of observation that much of development depends on processes of imitation and identification. The developing child internalizes, or ‘introjects’, his or her parent’s values and standards. How, and where in the psyche, does this process take place? In Freud’s ‘tripartite model’, the ‘superego’, alongside the ego (i.e. executive and experienced self) and the id (the locus of desire and dreaming), is the focus for these internalized parental values and aspirations. The inner world now contained not just ‘objects’, but value-based relations between them: prohibitions, encouragements, injunctions, and gratifications. Much of post-Freudian theory consists of attempts to develop and elaborate these ideas.

This was the state of theoretical play in psychoanalysis when Melanie Klein first burst on to the scene in the late 1920s. Like Freud, her work can be divided into a number of phases.^{(2, 3)}

Psychoanalysis is concerned with early mental life, which it sees as the basis for much adult psychopathology. But how do we gain access to the thought processes of small children, whose verbal and introspective capacities are limited or non-existent? Klein’s great technical innovation was the introduction of play therapy. She provided her little patients with play materials—paper and pencils, a doll house with figures, a sandpit, and farmyard animals—and observed the pictures and games which the children set-up, making her interpretations around them. She used the methods of dream interpretation to formulate her ideas. What she observed in play— movement of figures in and out; bringing things together, often violently; separation and disruption—she took to represent the workings of the child’s mind. Still deeply influenced by drive theory, and by Freud’s insistence on the pre-eminence of sexuality and castration anxiety, she found sexual and aggressive meanings in all that was presented to her. Every vertical line or orifice-shaped circle drawn had a sexual significance; every conjoining or emitted sound stood for parental intercourse, by which the child was both fascinated and frightened. Exploration and the drive to know were seen
as an expression of the desire to possess the mother’s body, and inhibitions of learning as manifestations of castration anxiety.

Here Klein began to depart from Freud. For him the Oedipus complex arose around the age of three, when the child begins to observe his or her parents’ relationship and to feel such emotions as passionate love, envy, fear, and jealous vengefulness. Klein, by contrast, saw Oedipal phenomena as arising much earlier in development. For example, the infant may experience weaning as a punishment or symbolic castration, and believe that his mother’s breast in his mouth has been displaced by the paternal penis in her vagina. Two other aspects of Kleinian thought emerge from this. First, in Klein’s schema the infant has an instinctual knowledge of the body and its relationships. There appears to be a reservoir of unconscious phantasy, which she saw as the mental accompaniment of bodily function: phantasies about the breast, the mouth, the penis, the vagina, and their relationships that could not have arisen from direct observation, and therefore must be present from within, as correlates of the child’s bodily sensations, which Klein saw as dominating the early years of life. Unconscious phantasies are akin to Jungian archetypes or perhaps the ‘language acquisition devise’ postulated by linguists: preformed mental constructs unconsciously shaping experience and patterns of relationship.

Second, and closely related to unconscious phantasy, is the idea of internal objects—initially body parts, and later ‘whole objects’ that are salient to emotional life—the mother and her breast, the father and his penis, bellies and their contents such as unborn babies, faeces, and sphincters. These objects are endowed with motivational properties reflecting the infant’s emotional life, which Klein saw as dominated by persecutory fears. The ‘death instinct’ ensures that the child reacts to frustration with overwhelming feelings of hatred and destructiveness. These feelings are then projected outwards on to the objects in the child’s emotional environment, which are in turn reintrojected to populate the inner world. To preserve good feelings from these terrifying bad objects, the child also projects goodness outwards. Thus a radical split arises between good and bad experiences, which are attributed to good and bad objects: ‘in the very earliest stage every unpleasant stimulus is related to the ‘bad’, denying, persecuting breasts, every ‘good’ experience to the ‘good’ gratifying breasts’.⁽²⁾

Klein depicts early emotional life as dominated by the infant’s fears of annihilation from without, and the use of the mechanisms of splitting and projection to reduce these fears. She postulated the onset of a new type of anxiety towards the end of the first year of life. Here the infant is beginning to bring the image of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ breast together, and to realize that they are one and the same. With weaning, the child experiences his first major loss. Now ‘depressive’ anxiety comes into the picture. The child believes that he is responsible for the loss, and that he has destroyed the good object with his aggression and sadism. He begins to feel guilt and remorse, and wants to repair the damage he believes he has inflicted on his objects. His attempts at creation, the gifts he offers, and the charm with which he approaches his caregivers are all motivated by this sense of depressive despair and the wish to make reparation.

Klein thus described a developmental sequence: inherent aggression, annihilation anxiety, projection and splitting of the object into good and bad, loss, bringing together the split objects, depressive despair, concern for the object, and finally reparation. For her this was a description of normal development, and she saw pathological states as resulting from developmental arrest along this line. The fulcrum of this sequence is the movement from what, drawing on Fairbairn’s term (see below) Klein now called the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position (PSP) to the ‘depressive’ position’ (DP), a movement from splitting, blaming, and avoidance, to integration, responsibility, and concern for the object (see Hobson et al.⁽⁴⁾ for objective evidence of the validity of the PSP-DP distinction). Klein saw the struggle between PSP and DP as a lifelong process, an equilibrium driven one way or the other depending on life experience and constitutional endowment.

Klein was generally rather unconcerned about the impact of external reality on psychological development (a point which, as we shall see, stimulated Bowlby’s divergence from her ideas). To the extent that she did consider the real as opposed to the phantasized role of the parents, it was as benign figures whose job it is to mitigate the strength of the infant’s need to hate, project, and split. An important late theoretical contribution, however, concerned the role of envy in psychic life. One of the strengths of a psychoanalytical approach to psychotherapy is that it takes seriously the phenomenon of resistance, and the fact that psychic growth is usually hard-won, often with much backsliding and self-defeatingness. With her emphasis on the dark side of human nature, Klein realized that the infant may feel persecuted not just by frustration and separation, but also by the very capacity of the caregiver to satisfy his needs. The breast upon which the baby depends for satisfaction and pleasure can also be a source of envy and hatred in its plenitude and ability to create dependency. This envy then becomes a basis for destructiveness within psychotherapy, and more generally: an explanation, perhaps, for the graffiti which inevitably appear on beautiful buildings, or, at times, the fact that patients attack and seem to want to destroy the very help that is offered to them.

Another key Kleinian concept is that of projective identification (PI), a difficult and perhaps misnamed concept, coined almost casually by Klein in an attempt to describe how parts of the ego may be split-off and projected not just on to objects in the environment as visualized in Freud’s notion of projection, but into them. As originally conceived by Klein PI referred to the solipsistic world of the infant described above, in which unbearable feelings of rage and hatred are split-off, projected into the breast, which is then perceived by the child as ‘having’ properties that in fact originated in the self. Projective identification here is a form of misperception or delusional perception, which can be used both to explain the fact that normal adults’ experience of the world is inevitably coloured by their emotional state (the gloomy or rose-tinted spectacles with which we view the world), and to account for delusional ideas in psychosis, such as paranoid feelings of persecution which, it is hypothesized, originate in the subject’s own aggressive phantasies but are attributed, via projective identification, to persecutors.

Projective identification differs from simple projection in that the objects of PI are induced or controlled by the projection in such a way that they then enact the phantasy, which has been transferred into them. Paranoid people have the capacity to make those around them behave in suspicious or hostile ways, and thus projective identification can be thought of as a form of communication in which the recipient of the projection is induced to think or feel in ways that properly ‘belong’ to the projector. Post-Kleinian authors, notably Bion,⁽⁵⁾ Heimann,⁽⁶⁾ and Ogden,⁽⁷⁾ have extended the concept of projective identification, with an emphasis on this communicative aspect, in that PI requires a recipient as well as a projector.

Bion, an analysand of Klein, realized that projective identification also underlies normal empathy and fellow feeling. PI is ‘primitive’ in the sense that preverbal children rely on it almost exclusively to communicate their feelings, but this denotes immaturity rather than pathology. Bion went on to develop his container-contained theory of early emotional communication. Here the mother, or ‘breast’, acts, via PI, as a recipient or container for the infant’s unmanageable feelings of fear, hatred, annihilation, etc. These feelings are contained or held by the mother, and ‘detoxified’ before they are ‘returned’ to the infant through her understanding and empathic handling. She knows intuitively— through projective identification—when her child cries whether it is hungry or cold, or bored or wet, etc., and responds appropriately. In this way the infant begins to build-up a sense of himself through the reflective awareness of the mother. Disruptions of this process, for example through maternal depression or the violent use by the parent of the infant as a container (role reversal) as occurs in child abuse, may sow the seeds of disorders of identity found in borderline personality disorder in later life.

PI is important in the contemporary understanding of countertransference. Paula Heimann pointed out that the therapist’s reactions to the patient, while no doubt coloured to some extent by her own conflicts (Freud’s classical conceptualization of countertransference), also represent feelings induced by contact with the patient, that is to say they are a manifestation of projective identification. By attending to these thoughts and feelings the therapist gains clues about the patient’s state of mind, which can then be put into words as interpretations. Here the therapist’s mind is the container for the patient’s split-off feelings. Sometimes this container-contained relationship fails, and the therapist is induced to enact some aspect of the patient’s inner world, for instance by forgetting an appointment with a patient who has felt neglected and overlooked as a child, or by expressing anger or boredom in his tone of voice, being himself moved by feelings which properly belong to the patient.

The firm boundaries of psychotherapy are, in part, designed to minimize these occurrences (although they are unavoidable, and often, if reflected on, can be put to good use in the form of deepened understanding), but in the much more uncontained setting of general psychiatric wards or community mental health centres such enactments are widespread. A common example would be the polarization which disturbed people with borderline personality disorder can induce in their carers, some seeing the patient as manipulative and demanding, others feeling intense sympathy, and the wish to repair past hurts on the patient’s behalf. Each perspective represents a split-off aspect of the patient’s inner world that has been picked up via PI by different staff members. This is an essentially interactive process, since, no doubt, what determines which aspect depends on the carers’ own developmental history and defensive strategies.

Working in the relative isolation of Scotland, and coming to essentially similar conclusions to Klein about the importance of splitting, W.R.D. Fairbairn⁽⁸⁾ further developed this interpersonal perspective. For him drives were ‘a signpost to the object’, the glue that held human beings together. Sex is what gets us close to those who matter, rather than vice versa, as originally conceived by Freud. Like Bion later, Fairbairn also placed great emphasis on the role of the mother and of environmental failure as a source of psychopathology. Frustration plays a central part in his schema. With a perfectly responsive mother, the child has no need to think or develop an inner world. When separation and frustration come into play, the child then builds up an image of the object, which is split into three parts: the ideal object (one that would never cause frustration), the libidinal object (one that could satisfy the child’s drive-related needs), and the anti-libidinal object (the one that frustrates). This in turn sets up a split of the self into three corresponding parts—ideal self, libidinal self, and anti-libidinal self. The Fairbairnian model provides clarity in understanding some typical phenomena found in severe personality disturbance: the swing between idealization and denigration of therapists and partners (who become the anti-libidinal withholding object at that point), the self-destructiveness of the anti-libidinal self, or ‘internal saboteur’, and the split-off search for pure libidinal satisfaction unrelated to persons represented by substance abuse and promiscuity.