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Our Adult World is a collection of four papers written between 1955 and 1959. Two of them, Some Reflections on 'The Oresteia' and On the Sense of Loneliness, have not been published before; the latter was extensively edited after Mrs. Klein's death.
The first essay, Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy, is a condensation of her well-known theories, prepared for an audience of anthropologists. She assumes that the infant has an innate unconscious awareness of the existence of the mother similar to the instinct of young animals who at once turn to the mother for nourishment. In Klein's opinion the ego operates from birth. There is the additional assumption that the superego operates as early as the fifth or sixth month of life. Persecutory anxiety and the splitting of impulses and objects are the primal activities of the ego in the first three to four months of life. This is called the 'paranoid-schizoid position'.
Klein singles out greed and envy as the disturbing influences during this period. In tracing the later development of greed and envy, she concludes that the child's ability to identify himself with his parents and siblings may counteract the destructive forces of these affects. In adulthood and particularly in old age the reverse takes place: by identifying with the young, the old are able without envy to enjoy their childrens' growth and development. The achievement of such an attitude endows old age with serenity.
In the chapter, On Identification, Mrs. Klein briefly summarizing her hypothesis that superego development can be traced back to the earliest stages of infancy, makes the supposition that the roots of 'projective identification' are formed 'during the first three or four months of life (the paranoid-schizoid position) when splitting is at its height and persecutory anxiety predominates'. As an example, she analyzes a novel by Julian Green, If I Were You. This story well illustrates the demoniacal character of projective and introjec