Projective identification may be used as a type of defense, a means of communicating, a primitive form of relationship, or a route to psychological change; used for ridding the self of unwanted parts or for controlling the other's body and mind. In his report on the case of Miss Lucie R., Freud asserted that it was primal repression that exerted an attraction on all other ideas or affects that were to be subsequently repressed: "When this process occurs for the first time there comes into being a nucleus and center of crystallization for the formation of a psychical group divorced from the ego - a group around which everything which would imply an acceptance of the incompatible idea subsequently collects" (Freud, 1893/1964, p. 123). For Kleinians, the aim of psychoanalysis is to enable the adult client to tolerate the Depressive Position more securely, even though it is never fixed and we all topple into paranoid phantasies and polarizing viewpoints. Melanie Klein described this defense mechanism as the fantasies into which the subject inserts themselves ... Introjection, on the other hand, is like swallowing without chewing and results in inner conflict. projecting unwanted split-off parts onto the object as though onto a blank Object relations theory is a variation of psychoanalytic theory, which places less empha… The construct of internalization can be traced back at least 150 years to the early writings of Freud, who conceptualized it as a component of his defense mechanism of introjection. Melanie Klein has her religion, but it immediately raises all the questions about the pre- existence of angst, the origin of the life instinct and the death instinct, the meaning of 'instinct' itself, etc. 28. In contrast, in projection, the owner of an unacceptable thought or feeling projects the thought outward and attributes it to some other individual: the unacceptable thought ‘I hate Tom’ becomes ‘Tom hates me.’ For both displacement and projection, the object of the unacceptable feeling is changed (anger at boss changes to anger at son; anger at Tom changes to anger at me) but projection involves additionally a change in the subject of the emotion (‘I hate’ becomes ‘Tom hates’). person or object. But from the ruins there arises first the feeling of guilt, then the drive for reparation and love. The reason this question is so critical is that, if it were possible for people to be autonomous while doing an activity for extrinsic or instrumental reasons, then perhaps some of the performance and adjustment advantages that have been found for intrinsic motivation might also accrue when people were autonomously extrinsically motivated. More specifically, the theory states that there are various forms of extrinsic motivation: one where the regulation is external to the person, one where the regulation has been merely introjected and so must be buttressed by internal reward or punishment (e.g., guilt) contingencies, one where the person has identified with the importance of the behavior for himself or herself, and one where the regulation has been fully integrated with other aspects of the person’s self. This notion became fundamental after Ferenczi developed it. Where Freud’s development of the superego was seen as a good thing, Klein (1945) saw a hostile superego developing at the oral stage. Her unabashed disagreements with Freudian theory and revolutionary way of thinking was especially important in the development of child analysis. In sum, self-determination, which is based in intrinsic motivation and integrated extrinsic motivation, has been associated with a variety of positive performance and adjustment outcomes and has been found to depend on interpersonal supports for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Thus, Klein would say that infants who fall asleep while sucking on their fingers are fantasizing about having their mother’s good breast inside themselves. The children, she believed, projected their anxieties about the part-objects of their parents – the breast, the penis, the unborn babies in the mother’s stomach – onto their toys and drawings. More than three decades of research has now shown that the quality of people's experience and performance vary as a function of the degree to which a behavior is autonomous or self-determined. In the context of object relations theory, the term "objects" refers not to inanimate entities but to significant others with whom an individual relates, usually one's mother, father, or primary caregiver. eval(ez_write_tag([[336,280],'simplypsychology_org-large-mobile-banner-2','ezslot_19',867,'0','0'])); Lucy Etherington is a published writer and psychotherapist based in Suffolk, England. The conceptualisation of internal objects is linked to Klein’s theory of unconscious phantasy, and development from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. Quite often, they help bring about socially valued achievements. Vaillant’s fourfold hierarchy has extended the concept of defense to both less and more mature levels of defense, thereby highlighting the pathological as well as the adaptive, and even creative, aspects of defense mechanisms. 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