You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In 1946 Melanie Klein published one of her most important works entitled ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms.’ In this paper Klein described the psychic processes occurring in the first three months of life; she delineated the characteristics of the early ego as well as the form and nature of its object relations and anxieties. Klein described schizoid states including idealization, ego disintegration, and projective processes connected with splitting for which she introduced the term ‘projective identification’. For Klein, splitting was the key concept of this stage of development and state of mind.
Klein (1921) had also examined splitting processes in her first published paper and continued her investigation of splitting throughout the 1930s, from the pathological to the more normal forms. She suggested that the ego's first defence against anxiety was not repression, wherein the anxiety, although unconscious, remained attached to the self, but expulsion, a violent form of splitting that relieved the ego of pain, distress, and anxiety. Since Klein believed that the phantasy of expulsion was also object related, any split-off part of the self would go into the object. Just as introjection, like feeding, is always from an object, so projection, like evacuation, is always onto or into an object. Feeding (or introjection) can be gentle, loving, voracious, greedy, biting, tearing or violent; and projection can be invasive, fragmenting, erotic, possessive, or a host of other qualities which depend upon the particular phantasies of the projector at any given moment. It is precisely the same with projective identification, which is a combination of expulsion and acquisition.