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Although her earlier work had borne the stamp of an emphasis on the concreteness of psychic reality and thus of internalized objects (the structural elements of the Superego), and established that the mechanisms of defense were implemented by unconscious phantasies, it was not until the 1946 paper on schizoid mechanisms that Melanie Klein embarked on a path that clearly distinguished her work from Freud's, following a direction already indicated by Abraham's “Short Study of the Libido”. While she never abandoned the distinction between Life and Death Instincts, her methods of description moved more and more away from differentiating between ego and id in clinical phenomena in favour of talking of the Self. This was ushered in by the description of splitting processes, in which parts of the self not only embraced Id aspects but also internal object aspects (Narrative Notes to the 24th Session).
The thrust of “Notes on some Schizoid Mechanisms” is, as its title suggests, towards defining mechanisms characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position, therefore of the first part of the first year of post-natal life, and consequently the source of points of fixation, in her view, for the psychoses: that is schizophrenias, paranoia and manic-depressive states. “The persecutory fears arising from the infant's oral-sadistic impulses to rob the mother's body of its good contents, and from the anal-sadistic impulses to put his excrements into her (including the desire to enter her body in order to control her from within) are of great importance for the development of paranoia and schizophrenia.” (p. 293, Works III).
It must be remembered that at that time she was viewing the earliest splitting processes as passive. “It seems to be in keeping with the lack of cohesiveness that under the pressure of this threat” (i.e. of anxiety of being destroyed from within) “the ego tends to fall to pieces” (p. 296). Active splitting was seen as probably a later development. Also of importance