Theory II: The Internal World and the Depressive and Paranoid-Schizoid Modes of Experience

Abstract

We have seen that the Oedipus complex describes a drama which is not only external, to do with the child’s relationships with family members, but also an internal one about a series of Oedipal figures in the mind, who have different kinds of relationships with each other. Melanie Klein, and those influenced by her thinking, expanded this ideas of figures in the mind into the idea of an internal world, as a counterpart to the external world. She envisaged this internal world as made up of parts of the ego and parts of external objects which have been taken inside, and which are in constant interaction with each other. She thought the content and boundaries of the internal world were established early in life, in infancy, although subject to modification and development later on. For the baby the internal world starts off as the internalization of aspects of his or her parents. The baby, having incorporated his parents, feels them to be live people inside his body in the concrete way in which deep unconscious phantasies are experienced — they are, in his mind, ‘internal’ or ‘inner’ objects, as I have termed them. Thus an inner world is being built up in the child’s unconscious mind, corresponding to his actual experiences and the impressions he gains from people and the external world, and yet altered by his own phantasies and impulses. (Klein, 1940, p. 148)