Excerpts From Envy And Gratitude Analysis

In the first reading on Klein’s “Excerpts from Envy and Gratitude”, she made contributions to understanding the effects on the psyche of early experiences of frustrations and separation in relation to the maternal body. Klein focuses on he focus on mother infant relation and extreme and violent affects such as the feelings of anxiety and separation. Klein talks about how infants suffer a of anxiety and that this is caused by the death instinct within, by the trauma experienced at birth and by experiences of frustration. She talks about the breast, which she refers to as the partial object, as being an important source of nurture and frustration, where one can get pleasure but also be denied it. The infant splits both his ego and his object

The bad breast is the mother that is felt to be frustrating, and a good breast is the mother is felt to be loving. Both the good and the bad objects are introjected and projected. There is a split between love, hate, and aggressive projection of the bad and retaining the good object. Most importantly she focuses on how life and death drives are formative of the ego. For instance, the death drive contributes to dynamics of splitting and fragmentation, and the life drive contributes to reparative and re-integrative dynamics. Finally, Klein focuses on both the paranoid- Schizoid position and the depressive position. The depressive position is when the capacity to introjection the object as a whole gives rise to feelings of guilt. With pining for what has been lost or damaged by hate comes an urge to repair and that requires re-integration the split ego. The paranoid-Schizoid position refers to anxieties and internal and external object relations. My question for this reading is what does Klein mean when she talks about “projective identification”? She talks about this concept, however it still remains unclear to my