Melanie Reizes Klein - Psychic Defense Mechanisms

Psychic Defense Mechanisms

[Psychic Defense Mechanisms]

• To protect their ego against the anxiety around by their own destructive fantasies
• Controls these anxiety through

             - Introjection, Projection, Splitting, Projective Identification

[Introjection]

• First feeding : Incooperate the mother's breast into the infant's body
• Introjects good things to protect against anxiety
• Introjects bad things in order to gain control over them

             - Dangerous objects become internal persecutors

                    - Terrifies the infant and leaves frightening residues that may be expressed in dreams :

                       sometime in fairy tales

• Introjected objects are not accurate representations of the real object but are colored by children's fantasies

             - Fantasizes that mother is consistently present

             - Feels that mother is always inside their body

             - The real mother is not perpetually present, but infants devour her in fantasy

               so that she becomes a constant internal object

[Projection]

• Get rid of object 
• Projection is the fantasy that one's own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one's body
• Unmanageable destructive impulses onto external object
• Alleviate the unbearable anxiety of being destroyed by dangerous
• Children project both bad and good images onto external object

             - ex) Young boy desires to castrate his father may instead project these castration fantasies

                     onto his father, thus turning his castration wishes around the blaming his father

                     for wanting to castrate him

• People can also project good impulses

             - Infants who feel good about their mother's nurturing breast will attribute their own feeling

               of goodness onto the breast and imagines that the breast is good

    Later on ...

• Adults project their own feelings of love onto another person and become convinced that the other person loves them
• Projection always people to believe that their own subjective options are true

[Splitting]

• Infants can only manage the good and bad aspect of themselves and of external objects by splitting them
• Ego must be split

             -"Good me" and "Bad me"

• Positive effect : Can evaluate behavior as good or bad like/unlike
• Negative effect

             - Excessive and inflexible splitting can lead to pathological regression

             - Cannot introject bad experiences into the good Ego

             - When children can't accept their own bad behavior, represses them instead

[Projective identification]

• Psychic defense mechanism in which infants split off unacceptable parts of themselves, project them into another object, and finally introject them into themselves in a changed or distorted form
• Taking back the object inside themselves make infants feel that they have become like that object. They identify with the object
• Projective identification exerts a powerful influence on adult interpersonal relations

             - Exists only in the world of real interpersonal relationship

• Examples

             - Husband with strong but unwanted tendencies to dominate others

             - Projects those feelings into his wife

             - See her as domineering

             - Subtly tries to get his wife to become domineering

             - Behave with excessive submissiveness in an attempt to force his wife to display

               the very tendencies that he has deposited in her