Explanatory Notes1

This is one of Melanie Klein's most important works. It presents for the first time a detailed account of the psychic processes that occur in the first three months of life. This first period, called formerly the paranoid position, and here renamed the paranoid-schizoid position (see her note on p. 2), had been only broadly outlined in ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935) as a contrast to the depressive position. Melanie Klein now sets out the characteristics of the early ego, the form of its object relations and anxieties, and thereby illuminates the nature of—to name the most important—schizoid states, idealization, ego disintegration, and projective processes connected with splitting, for which she introduces the term ‘projective identification’, a concept discussed below. Furthermore, a new era is opened in the understanding, of schizophrenia. The paper provides the first detailed account of the mental processes, particularly the schizoid mechanisms, which result in states of schizophrenic dissociation and depersonalization. It also includes a valuable discussion on the technique of analysing schizoid states, a subject she returns to in a later work, Envy and Gratitude.

In this account of the paranoid-schizoid position, splitting is a key concept. It may be of interest to trace the development over the years of Melanie Klein's ideas on splitting. Splitting occurs in various forms. In her first published paper ‘The Development of a Child’ she remarked on the phenomenon of splitting off a bad aspect of an object in order to preserve it as a good object; she observed of a small boy that his witch figure is ‘obtained by division of the mother imago’ which is ‘split off from his beloved mother, in order to maintain her as she is’ (Writings, I, p. 42). In The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932) this type of splitting is seen as a relatively mature process which occurs as sadism declines. It enabl