Depressive position

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The depressive position is one of two positions in child rearing.

[edit] Origins

Melanie Klein, one of the founders of the Object-Relations school of psychoanalysis, describes the earliest stages of infantile psychic life in terms of a successful completion of development through certain positions. A position for Klein refers to a set of psychic functions that correspond to a given phase of development. They always appear during the first year of life, but are present at all times thereafter and can be reactivated at any time. There are two major positions: the depressive position and the paranoid-schizoid position.

[edit] Paranoid-schizoid position

The paranoid-schizoid position is the first position and is supposed to prepare the way for the depressive position. The paranoid-schizoid position was conceived as the state of mind of children from birth to six months of age. In this period, there is a vigilant separation of the good object from the bad object. Any object is thus seen as either good or bad. After going through the paranoid-schizoid position successfully, people will go through the depressive position. In this depressive position the child fuses the "good object" with the "bad object". The coming together of good and bad objects, and of the impulses of love and hate, mark the onset of a new respect for the reality of external people. Crucially, absence of the object (for example the mother) can begin to be tolerated without it being marked as a "bad object" (as was the case in the paranoid-schizoid position). So, the object now can also be seen as a good or loved object, who was present and will also come back again. In this way the internal object (eg. the image the child has of the mother) becomes more similar to the real object (eg. the mother, who can be both good and bad). This fusion disturbs the goodness of the good object and so the child feels guilty. Childhood depressive position involves an interplay of anxieties and aggressive fantasies. The internally projected image of the mother is exposed in fantasy to sadistic tendencies. On behalf of the death drive, the good internal mother can be psychically destroyed. It is crucial that the real parental figures are around to demonstrate the continuity of their love. In this way, the child perceives that what happens to good objects in fantasy does not happen to them in reality. Melanie Klein saw this surfacing from the depressive position as a prerequisite for social life. Moreover, she viewed the establishment of an inside and an outside world as the start of interpersonal relationships. Klein argued that people who never succeed in working through the depressive position in their childhood will, as a result, continue to struggle with this problem in adult life. For example: the cause that a person may maintain suffering from intense guilt feelings over the death of a loved one, may be found in the unworked- through depressive position. The guilt is there because of a lack of separation between inside and outside and also as a defense mechanism to defend the self against unbearable feelings of intense sadness and sorrow and subsequently the internal object against the unbearable rage of the self, which can destroy the (internal) object forever.