Klein, M. (1946) | References | Narcissus and the Child

What This Research Found

Melanie Klein's 1946 paper "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms" introduced concepts that fundamentally transformed how psychoanalysis understands early development, primitive defences, and severe personality pathology. Published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, this paper established the theoretical foundation for what would become object relations theory and remains essential reading for understanding narcissistic personality disorder and related conditions.

The paranoid-schizoid position describes the infant's earliest psychological world. Klein argued that from birth, infants experience intense anxieties—what she called "persecutory anxiety"—that threaten to overwhelm them. Unable to perceive their caregivers as whole persons with both gratifying and frustrating qualities, infants relate to "part-objects." The mother's breast (or its equivalent) is split into the "good breast" that feeds and satisfies, and the "bad breast" that frustrates and withholds. These are experienced as entirely separate entities. The infant loves and idealises the good breast while fearing and hating the bad breast. This is not metaphor but Klein's description of the infant's actual psychological experience—a world of intense love and hate directed at part-objects rather than whole persons.

Splitting is the foundational defence of this position. To manage the terror that the bad object might contaminate or destroy the good object, the infant keeps them rigidly separated. Good is kept absolutely separate from bad; love is kept absolutely separate from hate. This splitting protects the idealised good object from destruction but prevents integration. The infant cannot yet understand that the breast that frustrates and the breast that gratifies belong to the same mother. This all-or-nothing perception—characteristic of idealisation and devaluation—originates here, in the earliest months of life.

Projective identification expels unbearable parts of the self into others. Klein described a mechanism more sophisticated than simple projection: in projective identification, the infant phantasises projecting unwanted parts of itself—destructive impulses, intolerable anxiety, overwhelming need—into the mother, both to evacuate what cannot be borne and to control the mother from within. The mother then becomes identified with these projected parts; she is experienced as persecutory because the infant's own destructive impulses now seem to inhabit her. This concept would prove enormously influential, explaining how individuals with personality disorders seem to force their unwanted feelings into others, making others actually feel and sometimes enact the projected states.

The depressive position represents developmental achievement. Klein proposed that healthy development involves moving from the paranoid-schizoid position to the "depressive position"—not a pathological depression but a developmental achievement in which the infant can perceive the mother as a whole person with both good and bad qualities, can feel concern for the object it has attacked in phantasy, and can experience appropriate guilt and the wish to make reparation. In the depressive position, love and hate can coexist directed at the same person; object constancy becomes possible. The child can hold an image of the good mother even when temporarily frustrated, and can tolerate ambivalent feelings. When this developmental transition fails or remains incomplete, the primitive paranoid-schizoid defences persist into adulthood, creating the foundation for narcissistic and borderline personality organisation.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

Klein's work appears at crucial points in Narcissus and the Child, providing the theoretical framework for understanding how narcissistic defences operate in families and politics. In Chapter 12: The Unseen Child, Klein's concept of splitting explains how narcissistic parents fragment their families into rigid roles:

"The narcissistic parent cannot tolerate a single, complex reflection. They need mirrors that show only what they wish to see: their brilliance and their victimhood. So they shatter the family into fragments, assigning each child a piece of the parental self to reflect back. This is splitting: the primitive defence Melanie Klein first described, where the world divides into all-good and all-bad—golden child and scapegoat."

The book uses Klein's framework to explain why narcissistic families inevitably create golden children and scapegoats: the narcissistic parent's inability to integrate good and bad requires external containers for each.

In Chapter 15: The Political Narcissus, Klein's concept of projective identification explains how narcissistic leaders operate at national scale:

"Klein called this 'projective identification'—forcing others to embody the narcissist's disowned aspects. This is indicative of the absence of self discussed earlier. An integrated self would be able to understand, accept, and integrate the awareness of the flaws as a means towards natural and reliable repair. The inability to do so and the presence of reactive projecting indicate no underlying self exists to integrate."

The book draws on Klein to show how narcissistic leaders project their own destructive impulses onto designated enemies, making scapegoats carry the leader's disowned qualities while followers identify with the leader's grandiose self-image.

Why This Matters for Survivors

If you experienced narcissistic abuse, Klein's concepts illuminate patterns you may have found bewildering and help you understand that you were dealing with something more primitive than ordinary adult cruelty.

You experienced the world through someone else's fragmented perception. The narcissist could not see you as a whole person—someone with your own feelings, needs, limitations, and strengths existing simultaneously. Like the infant Klein describes, they related to part-objects: you were the gratifying object when you met their needs, the persecutory object when you disappointed them. The wild swings between idealisation and devaluation that left you questioning your own worth reflect not your changing value but their primitive, unintegrated perception. Understanding splitting helps explain why your consistent behaviour never produced consistent responses: their perception of you shifts based on their internal state, not your actual qualities.

You became a container for what they could not bear in themselves. Klein's concept of projective identification explains why you may have felt feelings that didn't seem like your own—why you felt "crazy" when you weren't, "selfish" when you'd sacrificed everything, "cold" when your heart was breaking. The narcissist unconsciously evacuated their unbearable feelings into you, and then attacked you for having them. You were accused of exactly what they were doing because they literally could not perceive those qualities in themselves; they had projected them into you. Recognising projective identification can help you sort through what belongs to you and what you were forced to carry for someone else. The boundaries you rebuild in recovery include psychological boundaries against absorbing others' projected parts.

Their inability to hold you in mind wasn't about your forgettability. Many survivors describe feeling erased—as if their entire relationship history disappears the moment the narcissist becomes frustrated. Klein's framework explains this through the failure to achieve object constancy. In the depressive position, we can hold an image of someone we love even when temporarily angry with them; we can remember their good qualities while experiencing their frustrating ones. The narcissist never developed this capacity. Each moment exists in isolation; each frustration obliterates all previous good. This is why they can discard you as worthless after years of seeming devotion—they cannot hold the integrated memory of who you are across their shifting internal states.

You can develop what they could not. The developmental achievements Klein describes—integration, object constancy, the capacity for concern and reparation—are not forever foreclosed by having been raised by or partnered with someone who lacks them. Through therapy, safe relationships, and self-compassion practices, you can complete the developmental work that your narcissistic parent or partner interrupted. You can learn to hold complexity, to tolerate ambivalence, to perceive yourself and others as whole. The depressive position Klein describes—not depression but mature relating—is achievable in adulthood through what psychoanalysts call "corrective emotional experiences" and the sustained work of psychological growth.

Clinical Implications

For psychiatrists, psychologists, and trauma-informed clinicians, Klein's framework has direct relevance for understanding and treating both narcissistic patients and those they have harmed.

Assessment should include developmental history of object relations. Klein's positions are not stages one passes through once but modes of functioning one can regress to under stress. Understanding where a patient typically operates—predominantly paranoid-schizoid (splitting, projection, persecutory anxiety) or depressive position (integration, ambivalence, concern)—shapes treatment planning. Patients with narcissistic personality disorder typically show stable paranoid-schizoid organisation; survivors of narcissistic abuse may oscillate between positions or show specific deficits in areas their abuser exploited.

Recognise when projective identification is operating in the therapeutic relationship. Klein's followers, particularly Wilfred Bion, elaborated how projective identification operates interpersonally in therapy. The clinician may find themselves feeling bored, hostile, incompetent, or overwhelmed in ways that don't match their usual experience—these may be communications from the patient about their own unbearable states. Recognising and metabolising these projective communications, then offering them back in more bearable form, is central to Kleinian technique. With narcissistic patients, the therapist may be idealised or devalued; with survivors, the therapist may receive projected hopelessness or unworthiness. Using countertransference as information rather than simply enduring it makes the unconscious communication conscious.

Help survivors disentangle what was projected into them. Many survivors carry internalised accusations—"you're selfish," "you're crazy," "you're the abuser"—that reflect projective identification rather than accurate self-assessment. A significant therapeutic task involves helping patients sort through what genuinely belongs to them (everyone has areas for growth) versus what was forced into them by a narcissist who could not tolerate those qualities in themselves. This is delicate work: wholesale rejection of all self-criticism leads to narcissistic inflation, while wholesale acceptance of projected badness perpetuates the abuse internally. The goal is accurate self-perception neither inflated nor deflated.

Treatment aims toward depressive position capacities. Whatever modality is employed, the developmental goal for patients stuck in paranoid-schizoid functioning is movement toward depressive position capacities: the ability to perceive self and others as whole, to tolerate ambivalence, to feel appropriate concern, and to make reparation when one has caused harm. For narcissistic patients (rare in treatment), this means tolerating the pain of recognising their own aggression and its impact on others. For survivors, this means developing stable self-worth independent of others' momentary perceptions, and the capacity to hold an integrated view of their abuser (acknowledging both the harm caused and, sometimes, the suffering that led there) without minimising either.

Consider the intergenerational transmission of paranoid-schizoid functioning. Narcissistic parents who operate in the paranoid-schizoid position cannot help their children move to the depressive position—they lack the equipment to model integrated object relations. The splitting, projective identification, and persecutory anxiety that characterise the parent's internal world become the child's early relational environment. Understanding this transmission helps clinicians contextualise the patient's defences and consider how to provide, in the therapeutic relationship, what the early environment could not.

Broader Implications

Klein's concepts extend beyond the consulting room to illuminate patterns in families, organisations, and society at large.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Splitting

Splitting propagates across generations through the family system itself. The narcissistic parent who cannot integrate their own good and bad parts cannot help their children achieve integration. Instead, they assign children to carry split-off parts: the golden child carries the parent's idealised self-image and must maintain perfection or face devaluation; the scapegoat carries the parent's disowned shame and becomes the repository for everything bad. These roles, assigned through projective identification, can become self-fulfilling. The scapegoated child, forced to carry projected badness, may internalise it and act out; the golden child, never permitted complexity, may develop narcissistic features themselves. Breaking intergenerational cycles requires someone in the chain developing depressive position capacities—the ability to perceive family members as whole people rather than carriers of projected parts.

Relationship Patterns in Adulthood

Survivors of narcissistic abuse often find themselves in relationships that recapitulate Kleinian dynamics. Having been trained to serve as containers for projected parts, they may unconsciously seek partners who need them to carry disowned qualities—or they may become hypervigilant against any hint of splitting, reading benign variation as dangerous inconsistency. The idealisation-devaluation cycle that characterised their original abuse may feel familiar, even normal; genuinely stable relationships may feel boring or suspicious precisely because they lack the intense oscillations of paranoid-schizoid relating. Therapeutic work on relationship patterns often involves recognising these dynamics, mourning what healthy relating should have felt like, and developing tolerance for the less dramatic but more sustaining rhythms of depressive position relationships.

Workplace and Organisational Dynamics

Organisations can operate in paranoid-schizoid mode, with splitting and projective identification pervading the culture. Narcissistic leaders are particularly likely to create such environments: designated scapegoats (departments, individuals, outside groups) carry projected failure while the leader and favoured insiders are idealised. Communication becomes distorted as people manage projected parts rather than addressing actual problems. Whistle-blowers who try to introduce depressive position complexity—acknowledging both problems and strengths—may be treated as persecutors. Understanding Kleinian dynamics helps organisational consultants recognise when they are being recruited to carry projected parts, and helps employees understand their felt experience of workplace dysfunction.

Political and Social Movements

Klein's concepts scale to explain mass phenomena. Authoritarian movements often feature paranoid-schizoid structure: the leader is idealised; designated enemies carry projected badness; complexity is eliminated in favour of simple good-versus-evil narratives. Followers experience relief from depressive position demands—no need to tolerate ambivalence or hold complexity when enemies can be wholly blamed. Klein's colleague Wilfred Bion extended her work to group dynamics, describing how groups under pressure regress to "basic assumption" functioning that mirrors paranoid-schizoid organisation. Understanding these dynamics helps explain why democratic societies, which require tolerating complexity and managing ambivalent feelings about imperfect representatives, may be vulnerable to leaders who offer the simplicity of splitting.

Legal and Custody Considerations

Family courts regularly encounter splitting in high-conflict divorce and custody cases, often without recognising its clinical significance. The narcissistic parent's absolute conviction that the other parent is all-bad, combined with their own presentation as all-good victim, can be compelling without the lens to understand it. Projective identification may recruit professionals into the narcissistic parent's distorted perception, as they unconsciously absorb projected material and act on it. Understanding Kleinian dynamics helps custody evaluators and judges recognise the primitive defences operating, consider which parent can provide integrated object relations for the child, and resist being manipulated by compelling but pathological presentations.

Cultural and Media Representation

Popular culture both reflects and reinforces paranoid-schizoid functioning. Narratives featuring pure heroes and pure villains, relationships characterised by instant idealisation or total betrayal, and simple good-versus-evil frameworks cater to regression while potentially normalising splitting as an acceptable way to perceive reality. More nuanced representations—characters with mixed qualities, relationships with ambivalence, problems with complex causes—support depressive position functioning but may feel less satisfying to audiences seeking the emotional intensity of paranoid-schizoid splitting. Media literacy might include recognising when content activates primitive defences versus supporting integrated perception.

Limitations and Considerations

Klein's influential framework has important limitations that warrant acknowledgement.

Developmental timing remains debated. Klein placed complex psychological processes in the earliest months of life—a claim that has been both supported and challenged by infant research. Some researchers argue that the cognitive capacities required for the processes Klein describes develop later than she proposed; others argue that infant observation supports her developmental timetable. The theory's clinical utility may not depend on resolving these developmental questions, but they remain actively debated.

Theoretical versus empirical foundations. Klein developed her theory primarily through reconstruction from adult analysis and child play therapy, not direct infant observation. While subsequent infant researchers (including Daniel Stern, whose work is also cited in the book) have studied early development more directly, the relationship between observational research and Kleinian theory remains complex. The concepts may be clinically valuable even if the developmental story is imprecise.

Cultural and historical context. Klein developed her theory in early-to-mid twentieth-century Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, and London, working primarily with middle-class patients in a specific cultural context. The universality of her developmental positions across cultures and historical periods is assumed rather than established. What counts as adequate "integration" may vary across cultural contexts that value collectivism differently than Klein's individualistic framework assumed.

Countertransference complexity. While using countertransference as information about projective identification is clinically generative, it also risks attributing to the patient what originates in the therapist. The assumption that the therapist's feelings must be communications from the patient can become self-sealing and obscure the therapist's own contributions to the therapeutic relationship. Contemporary Kleinians emphasise the intersubjective field and the difficulty of cleanly separating projected material from the therapist's own experience.

Historical Context

"Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms" appeared in 1946, immediately following the Controversial Discussions (1941-1945) that had divided British psychoanalysis into Kleinian, Anna Freudian, and Independent groups. The paper consolidated Klein's theoretical innovations developed over twenty years and responded to W.R.D. Fairbairn's concurrent work on schizoid phenomena, clarifying similarities and differences between their approaches.

The paper built on Klein's earlier work establishing child analysis and extending psychoanalytic theory into the first year of life. Her 1935 paper "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States" had introduced the depressive position; the 1946 paper complemented it by elaborating the paranoid-schizoid position that developmentally precedes it.

Klein's ideas remained controversial throughout her life. Anna Freud's followers argued that Klein attributed too much psychological complexity to infants and departed too far from Freud's instinct theory. Contemporary critics questioned the therapeutic technique of interpreting aggressive phantasies to young children. Yet Klein's influence grew steadily. Wilfred Bion extended her work into psychosis and group dynamics; Herbert Rosenfeld applied it to narcissism; Betty Joseph developed technique for working with difficult patients; and in America, Otto Kernberg integrated Kleinian concepts with ego psychology to create the most influential contemporary theory of personality disorders.

Today, Kleinian thinking influences training programs worldwide, particularly in Britain, Latin America, and parts of Europe. The concepts of splitting and projective identification have entered general psychiatric vocabulary. The paper remains widely read and debated nearly eighty years after publication.

Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms

APA Citation