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.