Paranoid-Schizoid Position
From the Melanie Klein Trust website:
The term ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ refers to a constellation of anxieties, defences and internal and external object relations that Klein considers to be characteristic of the earliest months of an infant’s life and to continue to a greater or lesser extent into childhood and adulthood. Contemporary understanding is that paranoid-schizoid mental states play an important part throughout life. The chief characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position is the splitting of both self and object into good and bad, with at first little or no integration between them.
What is striking about Klein’s terminology for the states of mind of infants and young children is how alarming it sounds. But it has the benefit of making the extreme mental illnesses to which these terms apply much more aligned to how we are mentally.
That is, we all have paranoid and schizoid tendencies, and the paranoid-schizoid position is a normal aspect of our development as well as (to at least some extent) a normal part of our mental lives.
From Kleinian Theory: a Contemporary Perspective:
Mr D describes when he was sent to boarding school at 11 he was horribly homesick and lonely for the first few weeks, feeling that he was ‘falling into a pit of loneliness and despair’. One day he saw a young girl in the school and ‘fell in love’ with her. From that moment on he felt better; he was able to get down to his studies, because, although (and in fact, because) he never spoke more than a word or two to her over the next seven years, he told himself he was studying and working ‘for her’.
He had established an ideal object in his mind, which he could keep completely separated from his anger with his parents and his jealousy of his younger brother who was at home. (41, emphasis mine)
I’m reminded of Don Quixote and his devotion to the (never appearing) Dulcinea.
How do splitting and projection work as a way of viewing Quixote’s madness?
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