Klein's Importance Of Transference In Psychosocial

For Klein, there were two major stages or positions of development: the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. The paranoid-schizoid position is a phase of life characterized by; how the infant or individual deals with anxieties, the defenses they utilize to cope with theses anxieties, and the internal and external object relations that begin to form starting at birth and continues throughout life to a greater or lesser extent. The primary defense seen utilize in the paranoid-schizoid position is the splitting of both self and object into good and bad. During this phase, the objects are seen as separate parts not related to each other. As a result, of the infant’s ego splitting bad and good emotions and projecting the negative emotions out, paranoia starts to develop.
Klein posited that infants suffer a great deal of anxiety caused by the death instinct. Due to the infant’s limited understanding of the unintegrated ego, which attempts to address experiences of anxiety through the use of fantasies or defenses of splitting, projection, and introjection. Healthy development in this stage requires the infant to split different aspects or objects in their life into good and bad. The splitting allows the infant to identify with the good and separate from the bad without feeling the bad will destroy or take
Klein felt that negative transference can be useful to analyst it allows for deeper analysis of the mind. She states that the client’s anxiety is a starting point for the analyst to understand how the patient’s unconscious fantasies work and what defenses are used. Furthermore, she saw transference as a means of transferring the past into the present along with the emotions, defenses, and object-relations that were tied to these situations. Therefore, the client is reenacting the past feelings towards the therapist, and the transference allows them to work out these