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What ties us to our objects? Is it love and gratitude - a sense that we have been given something freely, that we value it and can tolerate that we need the other person to provide this for us? Or is it envy and grievance - a sense that we are locked in dispute with the one whom we feel has deprived us of something good that should have been ours? Another way of looking at this is to ask whether the tie to our objects is one that supports our development and separateness or one that keeps us enslaved to the object by whom we feel deprived.
Klein’s thoughts about love, gratitude and envy have always deeply moved me as they speak so directly to the struggles we all face when we try to make sense of how love and hate shape our relationship to the good things in our life. Her ideas have been especially helpful to me in my work with adolescent mothers and the children 1 born to young mothers, which is the focus of this chapter.
In her seminal paper Klein (1957) focussed on a question we now all so take for granted it is hard to imagine it not being somewhere in our minds when we are with a patient: how did the baby experience the breast? Was it felt to be full or empty? Was it joyfully offered and received? Or was it felt to be selfish, “mean” and “grudging”, as Klein put it, becoming the source of envy and grievance?