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Certain patients are theoretically challenging and therapeutically difficult. Their transferences seem to be centered around oedipal dynamics, but careful examination reveals a pre-oedipal profile prone to primitive triadic conflicts. Oral and anal struggles predominate within an apparently oedipal organization. I believe these patients are exhibiting a trauma-induced regression to an early state of paranoid-schizoid (Klein 1946) triangulation. This more undifferentiated state, in turn, has usually been the sight of prior overstimulation, deprivation, or attack from the internal and external environment.
Melanie Klein (1952) brought attention to the infant's emerging triadic fantasies when she said,
early stages (of the oedipus complex) are characterized by the important role which part-objects still play in the infant's mind while the relation to complete objects is being established…. Powerful oral desires, increased by the frustration experienced in relation to the mother, are transfered from the mother's breast to the father's penis. (p. 78)
Klein goes on to quote Abraham who points out how the penis is regularly equated to the breast and that other body parts can stand for those two organs in the infant's mind. These could be a finger, hair, urine, mouth, and so forth. I am proposing that within the paranoid-schizoid position, the infant builds precursors to paternal body parts by establishing crude triadic relationships between internal and external experiences and the subsequent fantasies about those experiences.
The infant's early experiences with paranoid-schizoid and depressive (Klein 1935) anxieties bring on fears of and concerns for the object. This object is at first quite undifferentiated from the ego and is in parts, blurred