Concept
Part-object
An object of the drives that is a part or a function of a person rather than the person as a whole, such as the breast, the penis or faeces, or something the infant equates with them. Karl Abraham had described a stage of "partial love" of the object (1924). Melanie Klein made the part-object the starting point of mental life. The infant's first relation is to the breast, felt as a being in its own right and split into a good, gratifying breast and a bad, frustrating one, each loved or hated with full intensity. In the depressive position the infant begins to relate to whole objects: it sees that the good and the bad come from one mother, a separate person it loves and hates at once. Part-object relating persists in phantasy and returns in psychotic and borderline states.
- Broader concept
- Object relations theory
- Introduced by
- Melanie Klein
- Key works
- 2
introduced by
- Melanie Klein 1935 Taking Abraham's notion of partial love as her starting point, Klein contrasts the infant's relation to part-objects, above all the breast, with the move to the whole object that marks the depressive position (1935). She restates the contrast in her 1952 account of infant emotional life.