Zaya Barrini Psychoanalysis, Art and Cinema Studio

Clarification in Melanie Klein

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Biography

Melanie Reizes was born in Vienna in 1882

Klein’s work confirmed Freud’s discoveries about childhood aggression and sexuality, the role of the…

Klein’s work confirmed Freud’s discoveries about childhood aggression and sexuality, the role of the superego, and the Oedipus complex. However, direct work with children brought new discoveries and allowed a detailed description of the early stages of development, only sketched by Freud.

Melanie Klein had been impressed by the richness of children’s fantasy life and their inner world, which contained at the same time extremely good and extremely terrifying figures; she also noticed that they suffered from great anxieties due to the existence of bad figures, anxieties that had a psychotic character. This internal world resulted from a previous history. At two and a half years old, the child already has a complex history, revealed in a transference that Klein was able to map.

Freud discovered that the child remains active in the adult. Melanie Klein discovered the baby prese…

Freud discovered that the child remains active in the adult. Melanie Klein discovered the baby present in the child and in the adult. She came to the conclusion that from the beginning of life, the baby forms intense object relationships, both in reality and in fantasy. She did not see the baby as a passive being, who suffers the action of the environment and only reacts accordingly. She saw in him countless desires and fantasies, in constant interaction with external reality. These initial relationships, colored by the baby’s fantasies, are internalized and form the basis of the personality.

She describes the child’s relationship first with partial objects, primarily the mother’s breast, sp…

She describes the child’s relationship first with partial objects, primarily the mother’s breast, split right from the beginning into a very good and loved breast, and a very bad and hated one. This relationship gradually extends to the mother’s entire body. Klein describes the intense relationship that the child forms with the mother’s body in fantasy, a relationship marked by curiosity and ambivalence. Melanie Klein considers the desire to investigate the mother’s body as the beginning of the epistemophilic drive. However, since these epistemophilic drives are associated with libidinal and aggressive desires, the anxiety they provoke can lead to their inhibition.

Vol. 01 - Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works

Vol. 02 - The Psychoanalysis of Children

Vol. 03 - Envy and Gratitude and Other Works

Vol. 04 - Narrative of the Analysis of a Child

Style and Thought

The Feeling of Loneliness

Works

The Psychoanalysis of Children

Part I - THE TECHNIQUE OF CHILD ANALYSIS

Psychological Foundations of Child Analysis
The Technique of Analysis of Young Children
An Obsessive Neurosis in a Six-Year-Old Girl
The Technique of Analysis in the Latency Period
The Technique of Analysis in Puberty
Neurosis in Children
The Sexual Activities of Children

Part II - ARCHAIC ANXIETY SITUATIONS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON DESIRECHILDREN’S INVOLVEMENT
Early stages of the Oedipal conflict and the formation of the superego
The relationship between obsessive neurosis and the early stages of the superego
The importance of archaic anxiety situations in the development of the ego
The effects of archaic anxiety situations on the sexual development of girls
The effects of archaic anxiety situationson the sexual development of boys

Appendix — Scope and limits of the analysis of children

After exploring ultra-aggressive fantasies of hatred, envy and greed in very young and disturbed chi…

After exploring ultra-aggressive fantasies of hatred, envy and greed in very young and disturbed children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant state oscillations with the postulated pulsations of Eros or Thanatos. Lego and two concepts: depressive position.

Paranoid position

The paranoid position is the stage in which destructive impulses and persecutory anxieties predominate, and extends from birth to three, four or even five months of life.

Depressive position

The depressive position, which follows this stage and is linked to important steps in the development of the ego, is established around the middle of the first year of life. At this stage, sadistic impulses and fantasies, as well as persecutory anxiety, lose their power. The infant introjects the object as a whole and, at the same time, becomes to some extent capable of synthesizing the various aspects of the object as well as his emotions towards it. Love and hate come together in his mind and this leads to anxiety that the object, internal and external, is damaged or destroyed. Depressive feelings and guilt give rise to the urge to preserve or revive the loved object, and thus make reparation for the destructive impulses and fantasies.

A depressive position is the understanding that good and bad things are one. Fears and worries about…

A depressive position is the understanding that good and bad things are one. Fears and worries about the fate of people are destroyed in the child’s fantasy. The child tries to repair his mother through the phantasy and its elaboration, overcoming his depression and anxiety. He uses fantasies that represent love and restoration to restore the others he has destroyed.

Morality is based on the point of view of depression. Klein called it a depressive position because …

Morality is based on the point of view of depression. Klein called it a depressive position because efforts to restore the integrity of the damaged object are accompanied by depression and despair. After all, the child doubts whether he can fix everything that hurts. Later, she developed her ideas about an earlier psychological state of development corresponding to the tendency of life to disintegrate, which she called the paranoid-schizoid position. She emphasized how the child’s worries manifest themselves as fantasies of persecution and how he defends himself from persecution by separating himself. The paranoid-schizoid position that develops at birth is a common psychotic condition.

Oedipus

Ego

The ego forms an internal world of internalized figures, which, through the processes of projection and introjection, interact with real objects. As a result of sadism towards its objects, the ego suffers from anxiety and its main archaic task is to work through its anxieties, which are of a psychotic character and which gradually, as development proceeds, transform into neurotic anxieties.

Superego

The unsuccessful formation of B.’s superego, that is, the exaggerated action of his more archaic anxiety formations, not only led to serious disturbances in his mental health, to a hindrance to his sexual development and to an inhibition of his capacity for work, but was also the reason why his object relationships, although good in themselves, were sometimes subject to serious disturbances.

The Machine and Its Parts

Trude’s Analysis

Trude’s neurosis manifested itself in severe night terrors, anxiety during the day when she was alone, bed-wetting, general shyness, excessive fixation on her mother and aversion to her father, intense jealousy of her sisters, and various difficulties in her upbringing. Her analysis, which comprised eighty-two sessions in seven months, led to the cessation of the bed-wetting habit and to a great decrease in anxiety and shyness in various respects and to a very favorable change in her relationship with her parents, brothers, and sisters. She also had many colds, which the analysis revealed to be largely psychogenically determined, and these colds also decreased in frequency and intensity. Despite this improvement, her neurosis was still not fully resolved when, for external reasons, her analysis had to be interrupted.

Homosexuality

The father, who had until then been a monosyllabic and rather inexpressive man, became more affectionate under the influence of his younger son. The little boy had determined to win her love and he had succeeded. Analysis showed that he regarded this victory as proof that he had been able to transform his father’s “bad” penis into a “good” one. And his efforts to effect such a transformation and thus dispel a great many fears became in later years one of his motives for having affairs with men.

Good and bad penis

As his belief in the “good” mother grew stronger and, consequently, his paranoid and hypochondriacal anxiety and also his depressions became less intense, Mr. B became proportionately more capable of carrying on his work, showing at first all the signs of anxiety and compulsion, but later doing so with much greater ease. His penis adoration subsided and his fear of the “bad” penis, hitherto covered by his admiration for the “good” penis - the beautiful penis - came to light. At this stage, we became familiar with a particular fear, namely, that the father’s internalized “bad” penis had taken over his own penis and forced it into him.entering it and controlling it from within.

Mr. B felt that he had thus lost control over his own penis and could not use it in a “good” and productive way. This fear had arisen very strongly when he was at the age of puberty. By this time, he was trying very hard to avoid masturbating. As a result, I had nocturnal emissions. This started a fear in him that he would not control his penis and that it was possessed by the devil. He also thought that it was because he was possessed by the devil that he could change his size and become larger or smaller, and he attributed all the changes he underwent in his development to the same cause.

Power

The disproportion between the gigantic penis and the vast quantities of semen he thinks are needed to satisfy his mother and the smallness of his own penis is one of the things that helps to make him impotent later in life.

I have found in such cases that when a boy had a homosexual relationship in childhood, he had a good opportunity to moderate his feelings of hatred and fear towards his father’s penis and to strengthen his belief in the “good” penis. Furthermore, all his future homosexual affairs will rest on this relationship. They will be designed to provide you with various reassurances, of which I will mention some of the most common: .1. that the father’s penis, the internalized and the real one, is not a dangerous persecutor either.a. for him, be .b. for the mother; .2. that your own penis is not destructive; .3. that his fears, when he was a child, that his sexual relations with his brother or a brother substitute would be discovered and he would be thrown out of the house, castrated or killed are unfounded and, even as an adult, can be refuted, since his actions homosexuals are not followed by any evil consequences;

.4. that he has secret allies and accomplices, since early in his life he had sexual relations with his brother, or substitute. meant that the two had grouped together to destroy the parents separately or combined in copulation. In his fantasy, his love partner sometimes assumes the role of the father, with whom he undertakes secret attacks on the mother during the sexual act and thereby pits one parent against the other. Sometimes he takes on the role of the brother who, together with him, instigated and destroyed his father’s penis inside his mother and himself.

Drug addiction

Alcohol, representing the bad penis or bad urine, serves to destroy the internalized bad penis. Melitta Schmideberg, in her article “The Role of Psychotic Mechanisms in Cultural Development” (1930), pointed out that drugs represent the “good” penis that offers protection against introjected “bad” objects. Due to the addict’s ambivalence. the incorporated drug very readily takes on the meaning of a “bad” penis, and this attire gives a new impetus to the addiction.

Reobject lation

The child’s impulse to pit his objects against each other and to gain power over them by securing secret allies has its roots, as far as I can see, in fantasies of omnipotence in which, through the magical attributes of excrement and thought, Poisonous feces and flatus are introduced into the bodies of their objects in order to dominate or destroy them.

Winnicott - sufficiently symbolizable

Understand that the “good enough mother” is the symbolic mother, that is, the psychic duplication of the real person of the mother, a mental statuette that the child can mistreat and attack, without destroying her and without destroying himself.

Little other: another of flesh and blood. Big Other: place of the Unconscious, place of the other as fiction