Object Relations Theory: Melanie Klein Flashcards
In contrast to Freud, who emphasized the first 4 to 6 years of life, Klein stressed the importance of the first _____ months after birth.
4 to 6
_____ believed that children’s sense of identity rests on a three-step relationship with their mother.
Margaret Mahler
_____ theorized that children develop a sense of self during early infancy when parents and others treat them as if they had an individualized sense of identity.
Heinz Kohut
_____ investigated infants’ attachment to their mother as well as the negative consequences of being separated from their mother
John Bowlby
_____ and her colleagues developed a technique for measuring the type of attachment style an infant develops toward its caregiver.
Mary Ainsworth
One of Klein’s basic assumptions is that the infant, even at birth, possesses an active phantasy life. These phantasies are psychic representations of ___ instincts.
unconscious id
Splitting is a coping strategy where a person categorizes experiences, objects, or people into extreme and polarized categories, such as all-good or all-bad. This defense mechanism is associated with both paranoid feelings of persecution and a division of internal and external objects into positive (good) and negative (bad) aspects.
To manage the conflicting feelings towards the same object, the ego employs splitting. This involves the ego separating itself and assigning aspects of life and death instincts while projecting other parts of these instincts onto external objects, particularly the breast. This process allows the individual to maintain a sense of cohesion while dealing with complex emotions and experiences.
Paranoid-Schizoid Position (3rd or 4th month)
Beginning at about the 5th or 6th month, an infant begins to view external objects as whole and to see that good and bad can exist in the same person
Depressive Position
The depressive position is _____ when children fantasize that they have made reparation for their previous transgressions and when they recognize that their mother will not go away permanently but will return after each departure.
resolved
Her analysis of young children led her to believe that the early superego produces not guilt but _____
terror
By _, Margaret Mahler meant that the child becomes an individual separate from his or her primary caregiver, an accomplishment that leads ultimately to a sense of identity.
psychological birth
Normal Autism - unhatched bird egg
Normal Symbiosis - shell is now beginning to crack
Separation-Individuation
Mahler’s three major developmental stages:
During this time, children must develop a constant inner representation of their mother so that they can tolerate being physically separate from her
Margaret Mahler’s Libidinal Object Constancy substage on separation-individuation stage of development.
Kohut believed that _____, not innate instinctual drives, are at the core of human personality.
human relatedness
Kohut defined the _____ as “the center of the individual’s psychological universe”.
self
