Concept
Depressive position
Melanie Klein's name for the constellation of anxieties, defences and object relations that she first described in 1935 and dated to around the middle of the first year of life. In it the infant comes to experience the mother as a whole person who is both loved and hated, rather than as split good and bad part-objects. This brings guilt over its own aggression, mourning for the object it fears it has damaged, and the wish to make reparation. Klein saw the position as never finally achieved: it is reworked throughout life and alternates with the paranoid-schizoid position.
- Broader concept
- Object relations theory
- Narrower concepts
- Reparation
- Introduced by
- Melanie Klein
- Key works
- 9
introduced by
- Melanie Klein 1935 Klein first used the term in this 1935 paper and elaborated it in 'Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States' (1940).
developed by
- Hanna Segal 1952 Segal carried Klein's depressive position into new fields: she made the mourning and recreation of the lost object the source of artistic creation and aesthetic experience (1952), and the condition for forming true symbols as opposed to symbolic equations (1957).
reworked by
- Thomas H. Ogden 1986 For Ogden the depressive position marks the birth of a historical subject: a self that experiences itself as the author of its thoughts and feelings and can live in time with a history. He held that it exists in continuous dialectical tension with the more primitive modes, never replacing them.
- Julia Kristeva 1987 In Soleil noir Kristeva reads melancholia as a failure of the depressive position: the subject cannot carry out the necessary matricide and symbolise the loss of the mother in signs.