On the Development of Mental Functioning

Melanie Klein's late paper, published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1958, is her last general statement of her metapsychology. She places the conflict between the life and death instincts at the very beginning of mental life, and describes the ego and the superego as built up from good and bad objects taken in by introjection. She locates the earliest and most terrifying persecutory figures in the deep layers of the unconscious, split off from both the ego and the superego and kept apart from the more integrated superego.