3.4 The Early Oedipus Complex

While Freud saw the Oedipus complex as a pivotal stage around age four or five, Klein placed it much earlier in development. She observed oedipal themes emerging in children’s play as young as two or three, suggesting that infants have an innate, unconscious awareness of the parental couple. This shift had far-reaching implications for psychoanalytic theory.

For Klein, the roots of the Oedipus complex lie in the infant’s relation to the mother’s body, which is experienced as containing all that is desirable – breast, milk, babies, penis. From birth, the infant has an instinctual knowledge that mother and father come together in sexual union. This gives rise to intense curiosity, desire and envy towards the primal couple, colored by sadistic fantasies.

The combined parent figure, which Klein saw as a primitive precursor to the Oedipus situation, becomes the focus of the infant’s excited and aggressive desires. The infant imagines entering the mother’s body to control its imagined contents, fusing with the idealized parents in a blissful union. At the same time, it fears retaliation from these powerful figures, whom it imagines attacking each other in sexual intercourse.

For the infant, the parental bedroom becomes a place of both fascination and dread – the feared site of the primal scene. In fantasy, the conjoined parents morph into terrifying hybrid creatures – the phallic mother with a penis inside her, the monstrous father figure that devours and castrates. These imagos, the rudiments of the superego, feel both exciting and persecutory.

Klein saw the vicissitudes of these early oedipal fantasies as crucial for the formation of gender identity. The boy, coveting the mother’s body, has to contend with both castration anxiety and paranoid fears of the “woman with a penis”. The girl, desiring to receive the penis and babies into herself, grapples with both penis envy and a terrifying maternal figure felt to be withholding the gifts of life. Negotiating these conflicts, for Klein, is central to assuming a stable, embodied sense of gender.

The early Oedipus complex also shapes the emerging sense of self and other. Through repeatedly “entering” the mother’s body in fantasy, the infant begins to differentiate between inside and outside, between its own psychic contents and the imagined interior of the object. Gradually, it builds up a representation of an internal world, peopled by internalized imagos of the parents. This lays the groundwork for symbolic thought and sublimations.

At the same time, the oedipal drama also mobilizes intense destructive urges, evoking the infant’s deepest anxieties of loss and annihilation. In fantasy, the infant attacks the parental couple, seeking to destroy the rival and possess the desired object. These aggressive wishes, however, raise fears of damaging the very figures the infant needs for survival. Plagued by guilt, the infant must find ways to make reparation, to restore the good objects it has damaged in fantasy.

Ultimately for Klein, the early Oedipus complex is not something to be resolved once and for all, but a template for all later relationship triangles. It inaugurates the lifelong dance of desire and rivalry, of loving and hating, of the self’s struggle to carve its identity in a world of others. In illuminating its earliest roots in infancy, Klein opened up new vistas for understanding the most intimate dramas of the psyche.

3.5 Projective Identification

Perhaps Klein’s most original and fruitful concept is that of projective identification – a primal fantasy of evacuating split-off parts of the self into another person to control and possess them. First articulated in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), it represented a major addition to the psychoanalytic toolkit, one that would be widely adopted by later theorists.

For Klein, projective identification is a central feature of the infant’s mental life, particularly in the paranoid-schizoid position. Faced with overwhelming anxieties, the infant seeks to rid itself of unbearable psychic contents by projecting them into the mother. These split-off aspects may be felt to be good or bad, edifying or toxic.

Klein described several motives for projective identification:

1. To evacuate the “bad” self – aggressive, paranoid, or otherwise painful parts of the psyche that threaten the ego’s cohesion.
2. To control and possess the object by entering it in fantasy.
3. To protect valuable parts of the self from destruction, by projecting “good” contents into a safe container.
4. To maintain a feeling of omnipotence, by blurring the boundary between self and other.

In the throes of projective identification, the infant experiences the mother as having the qualities of its own projected urges. If it has expelled its aggression, she is felt to be hostile and retaliating. If it has projected its feelings of love and trust, she is experienced as an idealized savior. The mother becomes the repository for the infant’s disowned aspects, identified with its phantasies.

This has a profound impact on the budding sense of identity. By repeatedly splitting off and reinternalizing parts of the self, the infant creates a kaleidoscopic inner world where self and other are fluid, merged and intermingled. Inner and outer lose their boundary, fantasy and reality blend. The ego, lacking a stable center, is at the mercy of its moment-to-moment projections.

Klein saw projective identification as a crucial factor in early personality formation. If the infant’s anxiety is manageable, and the mother can accept and process its projections, it gradually reinternalizes an ego bolstered by her love and understanding. Aspects of the self initially felt to be bad can now be tolerated and integrated. The ego grows more coherent, the inner world more stable.

However, if projective identification is excessive due to overwhelming anxiety, it can lead to severe ego weakening and fragmentation. The self, depleted by its own evacuations, cannot cohere into a stable identity. The object, flooded by massive projections, becomes a terrifying, engulfing presence that the infant cannot escape. This, for Klein, lies at the root of schizophrenia and other psychotic states.

Klein also described an extreme form of projective identification, which she called projective transidentification, where the infant enters the mother’s body in fantasy and identifies with her internal imagos. For example, it may identify with her fetus felt to be growing inside, or with her internalized parents. This can generate very complex, layered object relations, where aspects of the self nestle inside aspects of the other, like Russian dolls.

The clinical implications of the concept are far-reaching. Klein saw projective identification as a crucial tool in therapy, a way for patients to communicate primal anxieties and phantasies by evoking them in the analyst. By monitoring one’s countertransference – the feelings stirred up by the patient’s projections – the analyst can sense the emotional texture of the patient’s inner world, and interpret it back to them.

Projective identification also sheds light on the mechanisms of empathy, and its potential downsides. By “putting oneself in another’s shoes”, one can attune to their psychic reality. Yet one can also become flooded by their projected contents, losing touch with one’s own autonomous self. Analysts must walk a tightrope between receptivity and self-preservation, between being used by the patient and maintaining their own integrity.

Later theorists like Wilfred Bion and Heinz Kohut would extend Klein’s insights, exploring how projective identification shapes the earliest exchanges between mother and child. In Bion’s model of container/contained, the mother detoxifies the infant’s projected anxieties by taking them in, processing them, and returning them in a more manageable form. In Kohut’s self psychology, the child uses the parent as a selfobject to regulate self-esteem and provide a sense of cohesion.

Projective identification has also been fruitfully applied to the dynamics of groups, institutions and the wider culture. Scholars have explored how societies collectively project unwanted traits onto scapegoated others, maintaining a fragile sense of group cohesion through the fantasy of “the enemy within”. Leaders become screens for the public’s split-off hopes and fears, transference figues of idealization or demonization.

Ultimately, Klein’s concept opened up a new way of imagining the traffic between self and other, inside and outside, fantasy and reality. By revealing the ego’s permeability, its tendency to spill across its own boundaries, she anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary psychoanalysis. In a world of flux and interconnection, projective identification remains an indispensable key to the psyche’s workings.

4. Clinical Innovations

4.1 Child Analysis and Play Technique

Klein pioneered the psychoanalysis of children as young as two or three, an age previously thought to be too early for analytic work. She argued that young children express their unconscious conflicts through symbolic play, and that their ludic activities are equivalent to the free associations of adults. By interpreting children’s play, she opened up new horizons for child therapy.

In Klein’s view, toys are the child’s words – the symbolic language through which they express their deepest anxieties and desires. When a child enters the playroom and reaches for a toy, it is communicating something immediate and alive about its inner world, enacting a primal scene from the realm of unconscious fantasy.

For example, a child hammering a toy may be expressing aggression towards a sibling, or enacting sadistic attacks on the mother’s body. A child burying a toy in the sandpit may be evoking its fear of losing a loved object, or its wish for the object’s death. By interpreting these symbolic equations, the analyst can access the child’s primitive anxieties and bring them to consciousness.

Klein furnished her clinic with simple toys she called her “tools” – small figures, blocks, pencils, paper. She avoided toys that predetermined a scenario, like dolls’ houses or electric trains. The toys were kept in drawers, so the child could choose them freely. This setup aimed to create an analytic space where the child’s phantasy could unfold without constraint.

Central to Klein’s technique was the concept of neutrality. Like her mentor Ferenczi, she got down on the floor to play with her small patients, yet she maintained an attitude of technical neutrality. She did not praise or scold, but offered interpretations in a matter-of-fact tone. This created a safe space where the child could express the full range of its loving and destructive impulses.

Klein’s interpretations focused on the here-and-now of the transference, the child’s unconscious relation to the analyst as it unfolded through play. She made this transference interpretation explicit from the start, linking the child’s activities to its feelings towards her. This was a departure from classical technique, which focused on uncovering the patient’s past.

For Klein, the intensity of the child’s transference to the analyst mirrors its original intensity towards the mother. The analyst becomes the target of the child’s oral-sadistic attacks, its Oedipal longings, its desperate defenses against loss and persecution. By interpreting these primitive reactions, the analyst can help the child integrate its split-off urges into a more coherent self.

Klein’s clinical approach was remarkably courageous, unflinching in the face of the darkest human emotions. She confronted her child patients’ death wishes, terrors and agonies head-on, rather than shying away from their pain. She believed that only by making contact with its deepest anxieties could the child build up a stable ego structure.

At the same time, Klein’s technique was also highly contestable, attracting criticism from many quarters. Some, like Anna Freud, felt that her interpretations were too forceful and premature, risking traumatizing the child. Others questioned whether children’s play could really be equated with adult free association, or whether Klein was reading too much into their symbolic activities.

Nonetheless, Klein’s innovations laid the groundwork for all later developments in child analysis. By creating a space for children’s phantasies to unfold, she demonstrated that even very young children have a rich inner life shaped by unconscious conflict. She showed how the child’s primary objects relationships are internalized and repeated in the transference, and how interpretive work can help resolve early developmental failures.

Klein’s play technique has been widely adopted and refined by subsequent generations of child analysts. It remains a cornerstone of psychodynamic work with children, a vivid testament to Klein’s enduring clinical legacy.

4.2 Analysis of Psychotic States

Klein’s work opened up new possibilities for the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis, an area previously seen as beyond the scope of classical technique. By applying her model of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, Klein shed light on the primitive anxieties and defenses underlying psychotic states, and pioneered ways of working with them in the clinic.

For Klein, psychosis represents a regression to the earliest stages of psychic life, a time when the ego is fragmented and overwhelmed by persecutory anxiety. In the psychotic’s inner world, objects are split into idealized and demonized part-objects, and the boundary between self and other is blurred through massive projective identification. The psychotic is caught in a terrifying realm of phantasy, haunted by bizarre somatic sensations and delusions of bodily persecution.

Klein saw these symptoms as manifestations of the death instinct, an innate destructiveness that the psychotic cannot master. Overwhelmed by its own aggression, the psychotic ego resorts to omnipotent defenses, projecting its violent urges into the external world. This results in a frightening transformation of reality, as the environment becomes suffused with the psychotic’s own sadism.

At the same time, the psychotic also suffers from a profound envy of the good object, which it experiences as withholding and sadistic. The good breast that could soothe and contain the psychotic’s anxieties is felt to be keeping its riches for itself, mocking the self’s neediness and pain. This raises an unbearable sense of grievance and rage, further fueling the cycle of aggression and persecution.

For Klein, the key to treating psychosis lies in interpreting these primitive object relations in the here-and-now of the transference. By discerning the psychotic’s projections and putting them into words, the analyst can help the patient begin to differentiate self from other, phantasy from reality. This is a delicate and painstaking process, requiring great patience and tact.

Klein described how psychotic patients often use the analyst as a “toilet breast”, dumping their toxic projections into the analytic space. The analyst must be able to take in these violent communications without retaliating or withdrawing, providing a containing function for the patient’s unmetabolized anxieties. This helps the patient gradually reintegrate their split-off psychic contents, and build up a more stable sense of self and other.

At the same time, the analyst must also be attuned to the fragility of the psychotic’s ego, and the ease with which it can be overwhelmed by interpretation. Premature or overly forceful interpretations can feel like an intrusive attack, shattering the patient’s precarious defenses. The analyst must titrate their interventions, respecting the patient’s need for psychic distance and control.

Klein emphasized the importance of the negative transference in working with psychosis. By attending to the patient’s suspicion, hatred and envy of the analyst, one can make contact with their deepest anxieties and bring them into the light of understanding. This is a challenging and often uncomfortable process, requiring great emotional resilience from the analyst.

Klein’s approach to psychosis was further developed by her followers, notably Herbert Rosenfeld and Hanna Segal. Rosenfeld elaborated on the concept of “thick-skinned” and “thin-skinned” narcissistic defenses in psychosis, while Segal explored the role of symbolization in ego integration. Their work extended Klein’s insights and refined her clinical techniques.

Today, Kleinian ideas continue to inform the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis, alongside other approaches such as Lacanian and intersubjective models. While no longer seen as a panacea, Klein’s emphasis on primitive object relations, projective identification and containment remains a vital tool in the clinician’s arsenal. By engaging the psychotic’s phantasies with empathy and understanding, analysts can help them find a way out of their terrifying inner world, and back to a shared reality.

4.3 Extending Psychoanalysis to Severe Pathology

Beyond her work with psychosis, Klein’s ideas had a profound impact on the psychoanalytic understanding of other severe disorders, such as borderline and narcissistic pathologies. Her concepts of splitting, projective identification, and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions provided a new framework for grasping the primitive anxieties and defenses underlying these conditions.

For Klein, borderline and narcissistic states represent fixations at early stages of development, where the ego lacks the capacity to integrate good and bad object experiences. In the borderline’s inner world, objects are starkly polarized into idealized and persecutory part-objects, and relationships are marked by intense instability and fear of abandonment. In the narcissist’s psyche, the grandiose self is split off from a depreciated and impoverished reality, leading to a desperate search for admiration and validation.

Klein saw these disorders as rooted in early environmental failures, particularly in the infant’s relation to the mother’s breast. If the mother is experienced as overwhelmingly frustrating or persecutory, the infant may resort to pathological splitting and projective identification to ward off unbearable anxieties. This interferes with the normal integration of the ego, leading to a fragmented and unintegrated sense of self.

In the case of borderline pathology, Klein emphasized the role of early aggression and its projective defenses. The borderline infant experiences intense oral-sadistic urges towards the breast, which it fears will retaliate and annihilate the self. To defend against this persecutory anxiety, it resorts to splitting, projective identification, and other primitive defenses. This results in a fragile and unstable ego, prone to sudden shifts between idealization and denigration of the object.