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.
Development
1935
introduced by Melanie Klein
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.
In A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States (1935);Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant (1952)
Relations
- 1935 introduced by Melanie Klein
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.
Works
- 1952
Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant
Melanie Klein's paper, published in 1952 in Developments in Psycho-Analysis, is her most systematic account of the infant's emotional life in the first year. The volume, edited by Joan Riviere, was where Klein's group set out its views after the Controversial Discussions. Klein first describes the paranoid-schizoid position of the earliest months. In it the object is split into a good one and a bad one, and the infant relates to it through projection, introjection and projective identification. She then describes the depressive position that follows, when the mother is felt to be a whole person who is both loved and hated. Klein links both positions to the Oedipus complex and to the development of the ego.
See also
People
References
- A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States1935Evidence for a relation
- Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant1952Evidence for a relation