Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Klein: Object Relations
Theory
(^154) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
148 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
toward his father. Next, he moves to a heterosexual relationship with his mother, but
because of his previous homosexual feeling for his father, he has no fear that his fa-
ther will castrate him. Klein believed that this passive homosexual position is a pre-
requisite for the boy’s development of a healthy heterosexual relationship with his
mother. More simply, the boy must have a good feeling about his father’s penis be-
fore he can value his own.
As the boy matures, however, he develops oral-sadistic impulses toward his fa-
ther and wants to bite off his penis and to murder him. These feelings arouse castra-
tion anxiety and the fear that his father will retaliate against him by biting off his
penis. This fear convinces the little boy that sexual intercourse with his mother would
be extremely dangerous to him.
The boy’s Oedipus complex is resolved only partially by his castration anxiety.
A more important factor is his ability to establish positive relationships with both
parents at the same time. At that point, the boy sees his parents as whole objects, a
condition that enables him to work through his depressive position.
For both girls and boys, a healthy resolution of the Oedipus complex depends
on their ability to allow their mother and father to come together and to have sexual
intercourse with each other. No remnant of rivalry remains. Children’s positive feel-
ings toward both parents later serve to enhance their adult sexual relations.
In summary, Klein believed that people are born with two strong drives—the
life instinct and the death instinct. Infants develop a passionate caring for the good
breast and an intense hatred for the bad breast, leaving a person to struggle a lifetime
to reconcile these unconscious psychic images of good and bad, pleasure and pain.
The most crucial stage of life is the first few months, a time when relationships with
mother and other significant objects form a model for later interpersonal relations. A
person’s adult ability to love or to hate originates with these early object relations.
Later Views on Object Relations
Since Melanie Klein’s bold and insightful descriptions, a number of other theorists
have expanded and modified object relations theory. Among the more prominent of
these later theorists are Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, John Bowlby, and Mary
Ainsworth.
Margaret Mahler’s View
Margaret Schoenberger Mahler (1897–1985) was born in Sopron, Hungary, and re-
ceived a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1923. In 1938, she moved
to New York, where she was a consultant to the Children’s Service of the New York
State Psychiatric Institute. She later established her own observational studies at the
Masters Children’s Center in New York. From 1955 to 1974, she was clinical pro-
fessor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Mahler was primarily concerned with the psychological birth of the individual
that takes place during the first 3 years of life, a time when a child gradually surren-
ders security for autonomy. Originally, Mahler’s ideas came from her observation of
the behaviors of disturbed children interacting with their mothers. Later, she