Object Relations: from Freud to Klein
Nov 4, 2021
Object of Sigmund Freud
Object is a term chosen by Freud to describe the target of drive gratification, be it something imaginary (an idea, fantasy), or real (food, sexual partner, etc.). Despite the fact that other people play a crucial role in Freud’s work, “object” is the most accidental and least inherent concept in his theory of drive. A certain source, goal, and impetus are a priori, so to speak, an inherent part of the drive, but the object itself is dependent on the experience. It is discovered through the interaction with the outer (or inner) world and only later does it become attached to the drive. Object is merely a medium with which the drive gratification occurs (Mitchell, 1981).
For an infant, for example, the mother’s breast is desirable only because that is the first thing he encountered to gratify his oral desire. This nature of the object, as Freud noted, is due to the fact, that in the earliest development stage an infant experiences the so-called primary narcissism. An infant channels libido towards his ego and only later does he learn to redirect it to other external objects. In classical theory, this is what determines the secondary nature of the objects. A child is predisposed to have the ability to channel his sexual energy but needs to come in contact with the objects to overcome primary narcissism and henceforth internalize objects.
As for the term “internal object” - Freud never mentions such a concept, but in his early works, he describes the phenomena about inner voices, images, and values. That is something he would later formulate as the Super-Ego. It functions as an autonomous inner entity with certain structural features - In the child’s psyche, therefore in his imagination and fantasy, there are the images and values of his parents, which help the ego to direct the drive or desire in regards to those values. For example, a child learns, that he must not steal, therefore when he passes a bakery while hungry, he will not grab the first cake he sees, but check if he has enough money to buy it, because in his mind there are his parents, reminding him that stealing is wrong, promising him a variety of undesirable consequences. System of such dynamics ensures that the drive is gratified while the social well-being or a good relationship with the authority (the parents) remains.
In conclusion, for Freud outer objects and the super-ego, i.e inner objects, have similar functions: they are the mediums for drive reduction. To better understand the extent of object’s role in psychoanalysis, we need to take a look at the concept of identification.
The ego doesn’t have its own source of energy, so to perform any necessary psychic tasks such as drive regulation, object-cathexis, or bringing perception, memory, and reasoning to a higher level, it has to draw energy from somewhere. The process of identification is the means for the ego to draw energy from the id. With identification ego acquires the features of the object, which could be someone or something else towards which the id has channeled the energy. The most common example of this process is the “identification with the aggressor”, in other words, becoming like the parent of the same sex. That is how the central structure of the super-ego is formed. A child tries to think and behave like his parent, he begins to reason with the same values and beliefs. In this process the id is tricked, so to speak, as the ego displays itself as the object of desire and since the id has no sense of reality, fills the ego with libido. A child, as he grows, gains maturity and self-esteem by becoming like the ones he admires.
Identification is sometimes used as a defense mechanism, such as in the case of identification with the lost object. When one loses the object of cathexis, the ego internalizes its features for the means of compensation and prolongation of drive reduction. As I mentioned earlier, it presents itself as the object of love to ease the sense of loss, saying “look, I am so much like that object, you may as well love me” (Freud, 1962).
As with any defense mechanism, identification can also get out of hand. If the amount of object-identifications grows significantly, their intensity and incompatibility can cause pathology. Freud suspected that the identity disorder could be explained as different identifications taking over the consciousness one after the other. In summary, for Freud, object is a medium of drive arousal and reduction, which in itself is not inherent, but acquired with experience via introjection. This internalization serves a variety of purposes: drive gratification, regulation, and social security.
Melanie Klein and Object-Relations
Melanie Klein was one of Karl Abraham’s students, who made great advancements in psychoanalysis. Her vision of the human mind contains many modifications of Freudian theory. Among them, most interesting for this topic are concepts such as inner objects and phantasy (written with “ph” to differentiate it from the classical understanding of “fantasy”). Freud describes fantasy as a result of frustration from unfulfilled gratification. In his theory, fantasy is an alternative to direct drive gratification. Klein’s vision of the phantasy introduces elements that Freud didn’t pay attention to (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983):
- elaborate unconscious fantasy apart from specific and conscious compensation of frustrated desire;
- A reservoir of unconscious images and knowledge for phantasy to draw on, possessed by child by virtue of a phylogenic inheritance;
- Phantasy, which serves not as a substitute for, but as an accompaniment to, actual gratification.
Freud’s notion of parents’ inner “voices”, described as images and values, is limited within the boundaries of the super-ego. Klein’s development of that concept is related to her usage of phantasy with a broader meaning. According to her description of the Oedipus complex, a child’s life is full of elaborate, mostly sadistic and erotic phantasies directed at his parents.
An important distinction to make is that in Freud’s metapsychology, drives have no knowledge of reality and nature of the objects, which underlines the id’s pleasure principle. This “objectlessness” persists until the object presents itself to the newborn and becomes associated with the drive gratification. For Klein, drives have inherent, a priori images of the outside world which seek gratification through either love or destruction (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). It is easy to notice a certain Jungian influence in such formulations.
Klein claims that there exist not just traces of specific phylogenic memories and images, but a whole spectrum of inherent images and phantasized activities such as breast, penis, womb, infant, perfection, poison, convulsion, incineration, etc. A child’s earliest object-relations consist of interactions with the images of body parts, despite the fact that the child has never seen those objects in reality. This is what Klein calls a “universal mechanism” (1932). The images acquire the forms of real objects later, when the child - through interaction with the outer world - associates images with their real-world representations (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
According to Klein (1935), in the second half of the first year, an infant develops an ability to internalize whole objects, which determines a certain shift of focus in his psychic life. If previously child only perceived mother’s parts, at this stage he can integrate once separate objects and realize, that there’s only one mother with good and bad features. If there’s only one mother, the whole of her becomes the subject of anger and not the separate “bad mother”, which could be a bad breast, bad hand that took away his toy and so on. This is her beloved mother - both the real outer object and reflected, as an inner object - which the child destroys in evil orgies of his fantasy, when he’s frustrated or anxious, for example, because of weaning (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
At a first glance, it seems odd, as to why a child should have such strong aggressive tendencies towards the mother. It has a lot to do with Klein’s modified concept of what Freud called the Death Drive.
According to Freud, since birth, a child has an active death drive, which is directed towards the self. This would be devastating, if the life instinct didn’t redirect the death drive outside, as sadistic energy. We can picture two active sources of energy in the child, one of which, if maintained inside, could be damaging, therefore the other source of energy, functioning as a life preserver, redirects it, thus saving the child from himself. The part of the death drive that is not redirected, remains as erotogenic masochism. And so, a child’s sadomasochistic tendencies come to be (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
So what did Klein add to that?
Along with Freud’s description, Klein offers us the following: An additional portion of the death drive is redirected outwards. The life instinct phantasizes an outer object, projects the part of the death drive towards it, and therefore channels the destructive part outside, onto a newly created object.
“By projection, by turning outward libido and aggression and imbuing the object with them, the infant’s first object-relation comes about. This is the process which . . . underlies the cathexis of objects” (Klein, 1952).
The world with projected death drive is full of “bad” objects, and since it would be very damaging for the child’s psyche to go on living in such a place, to balance this, a part of life instinct is projected outwards as well, the “good” objects are created, towards which the child is directed with love. Good and bad objects are defined by the child’s motivation. He develops beliefs that there are friendly figures - a belief that is based on the nature of his libido. In this sense, the primary objects of drive represent the extension of the drive itself (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
This view accounts for the fact that a child imagines punishments in a fashion that matches his own aggressive tendencies. A child lives in dread of his objects burning, poisoning, and mutilating him, exactly because such activities dominate his phantasies towards those objects and therefore constitute the substance of his projections onto them (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
“External reality is mainly a mirror of child’s own instinctual life . . . peopled in the child’s imagination with objects who are expected to treat the child in precisely the same sadistic way as a child is impelled to treat the objects" (Klein, 1936).
And so it is - as Mitchell and Greenberg (1983) put it - “in child’s psychic economy the punishment always fits the crime”. This train of thought leads Klein to the formulation of “depressive anxiety”. A child’s fear and dread caused by the thought that the child has destroyed a whole object. If paranoid anxiety means the fear of destruction of self from outside, depressive anxiety means worrying about other’s well-being, be it inner or outer other, which is a victim of destructive phantasy born from child’s aggression.
A child is scared of his phantasies, which are directed on others and could potentially destroy them. At the same time, he is afraid of others, who are imbued with the child’s own destructive phantasies. The same could be said about the life instinct although it would be better to discuss this as we contrast Freudian and Kleinian understanding of drives.
Nature of Drive for Freud and Klein
There is one way we can picture Freud’s view of drives as originally objectless. The psychic apparatus has multiple layers, at the bottom of which there is a seeping cauldron of drives, directionless and isolated from the outer world, operating with primary processes. The ego operates in an organized fashion, with reality principle and its duty is to direct psychic forces with secondary processes (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
For Klein, drives themselves have inherent object-relatedness, which in Freud’s theory is the realm of ego’s secondary processes. Drives are directed towards others, towards reality, and contain information about objects from which they seek gratification. If Freud considers psychic energy to be derived from certain organic tension, for Klein psychic energy is an independent force. In this case, the body is merely a vehicle of the drive’s expression.
“There is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation no mental process which does not involve objects, internal or external; in other words, object relations are at the centre of emotional life” (Klein, 1952).
So, libido for Klein is directed, organized, personal and complex. It is out of love for his objects that a child is concerned about his destructive impulses and seeks parents’ help in order to control them. This reasoning leads us to conclude, that the Oedipus complex is resolved because the child is driven by the feeling of love and guilt, he wants to preserve his father as an external and internal figure (Klein, 1945).
In summary, For Klein drive is discrete psychic energy, not derived from the tension of the organism. These are feelings of passionate love and hatred directed towards others and for that drive uses the body as its vessel of expression. As Mitchell and Greenberg wonderfully put it – “Drives, for Klein, are relationships”. And So, relationships as such, are at the center of the investigation, for Object-Relations theory.
References
Freud, S., & Strachey, J. (1962). The ego and the id. New York: Norton.
Greenberg, J. R., & Mitchell, S. A. (1983). Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Klein, M. (1932). The Psycho-Analysis of Children., London: Hogarth.
Klein, M. (1952). The mutual influences in the development of ego and id., Psychoanal. Study Child, 7:51-53.
Klein, M. (1952). The origins of transference., Int. J. Psychoanal., 33:433-438.
Klein, M. (1988). Love, guilt and reparation: And other works 1921-1945. London: Virago.
Mitchell, S. (1981). The Origin and Nature of the 'Object' in the Theories of Klein and Fairbairn. Contemp. Psychoanal., 17:374-398. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.1981.10745670
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