Klein

The Paranoid-Schizoid Condition

1. Case Study: Rachel

a. Facts of the case

b. Two modes of experience, worlds that Rachel lived in. Longed for integration, a sense of continuity, reliable connections, loving moments. Risk of disappointment, provocation of her explosive rage and hatred. Seemed important to keep the good experiences separate from the bad ones, the flowers from the shit people. Don’t rely on the flowers but view the shit world as the norm.

c. Klein would hold that Rachels iner world reflects a universal organization of experience. We all share it in the early months and years of life, we maintain in episodically throughout life.

d. Understood in terms of Freud’s dualistic theory: life and death instincts. But the stuff of the mind is different.

e. For Freud: impulse is primarily physical, uses objects in the external world (breast) to eliminate libidinal tension. Entirely distinguishable form the object through which it seeks gratification. The aim is discharge.

f. For Klein: impulse are bodily but more personal and complex – ways of experiencing oneself and others as loved and loving, or hated and hateful. More complex organizations of experience and senses of self. The object (person) is not just a means but an end.

2. The notion of a position: Not a “stage” (Freud) but an organizaion of experience of the world and oneself in relation to others.

3. Early experience: the ego is discontinuous, vacillates between loving and hateful orientations toward self and others.

a. The infant experience: two sharply polarized states, contrasting conceptually and emotionally. A divided world.

b. For Klein, the paradigm = infant at the breast.

i. Infant bathed with love. A good breast filled with love and nourishment, infuses infant with sense life-sustaining milk, envelopes in loving protection. Infant loves the good breast, deeply grateful for its protection and love.

ii. Infant filled with sense of persecution and pain. Empty belly, hunger attacking him from within and without. The bad breast is hateful and malevolent, feeding him with bad milk that now poisons him from within, then abandons him. Hates the bad breast, filled with destructive and retaliatory fantasies.

c. Using adult language to speculate about pre-verbal infantile experience; can never do justice to it. Infants experience is amorphous and unclear; verbal language cannot capture it fully.

d. Infant believes that his fantasies, of love and hate, actually have a powerful impact on their object – love for good breast are protective and restorative, hate for bad breast annihilates, destroys = the omnipotense of thought (Freud); infant’s impulses make its world an extremely dangerous place.

e. In early experience, equinimity achieved by keeping the two worlds separate. Finding a safe refuge for the good breast, distinguishing it clearly form the bad breast.

i. Containing destructive, dangerous rages within the relationship with the bad breast.

ii. Confusions between the two risks annihilation of the good, vulnerability to the bad.

f. “Paranoid”: Entails terrifying persecutory anxiety, fear of invasive malevolence from outside and inside. The shit people threaten to overrun and destroy the flowers and Rachel’s love for them.

g. “Schizoid”: entails the central defence of splitting. The separation of the loving and loved from the hating and hated in perception of the breast(s). Infant keeps them segregated.

h. The PSP results from defensive need to defend against persecutory anxieties created by the death instinct. Infants anxiety about imminent annihilation, deriving from the sense of its own aggression. The first major problem in life is to escape this anxiety, sense of threatened existence.

i. Projection of bad impulses: The primitive ego projects a portion of the self-directed impulses outside of the boundaries of the self, creating the bad breast. Malevolence placed outside the self is easier to deal with than if it is interior, one can escape from it, then a remaining portion of aggression is directed toward the bad object. There is something trying to destroy me and I am trying to escape and to destroy it.

ii. Projection of loving impulses creates good breast, balances sense of malevolence in the world with the good, remaining libidinal impulse directed at good breast.

The Depressive Position

1. Depressive position: organization of experience in which child relates with both love and hate toward whole objects.

2. A tendency toward integration in the patterning of experience. Encourages in the infant a sense of a whole object, neither all good nor all bad.

a. What is gained?

i. Experiencing others as whole objects. Less paranoid anxiety, pain and frustration not caused by pure evil but by fallibility and inconsistency.

ii. Threat of persecution abates. One doesn’t have to be so vigilant in splitting. Experince of oneself as more durable, in less danger of contamination or annihilation.

3. New terrors: the management and containment of aggression.

a. In PSP, aggression contained in hateful relationship with bad breast, safely distanced from loving relationship to good breast.

b. In the DP, one draws together experiences of goodness and badness into an ambivalent relationship to a whole object. The equinimity of PSP is destroyed.

i. When mother disappoints or fails you, the badness is not eliminated

ii. The whole object is destroyed in infants rageful fantasies – infant eliminated single provider of goodness as well as frustration, protector and refuge.

c. Depressive anxiety: intense terror and guilt generated by damage to loved object.

4. Cycle of destruction and reparation