Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms

First published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1946 and reprinted, revised, in Developments in Psycho-Analysis (1952), this paper is Melanie Klein's account of the months that precede the depressive position she had described in the 1930s. In this earliest phase the infant's anxiety is predominantly persecutory and its defences predominantly schizoid; Klein names it the paranoid position, adding the term schizoid, which she takes from Ronald Fairbairn, and from 1952 calls it the paranoid-schizoid position. She holds that an ego capable of anxiety, defence and object relations exists from birth but lacks cohesion, and that its primary anxiety is a fear of annihilation arising from the death instinct within, which it deflects outward and then meets as persecution. Its chief defence is splitting: the object, at first the breast, is divided into a good and a bad one, and since the ego cannot split the object without being split itself, the same division runs through the self, sustained by idealisation, denial and omnipotent phantasies of annihilating what is bad. Klein here describes projective identification, the phantasy of forcing split-off parts of the self into the mother in order to harm, possess and control her, so that she comes to be felt as those parts; good parts of the self are projected too, which is necessary for good object relations but, in excess, depletes the ego. The paper traces how these mechanisms colour schizoid object relations and the transference, with their detachment and splitting-off of feeling, and argues that when persecutory anxiety and splitting are too strong the depressive position cannot be worked through, so that the fixation points of schizophrenia lie in this first position and are bound up with those of manic-depressive illness. Klein discusses Fairbairn's work at length, accepting much of his account of schizoid phenomena while objecting to his neglect of anxiety, aggression and the death instinct.