PSY 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Melanie Klein, Psych, Major Trauma

• School: Tunxis Community College
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 111
• Professor: O'brien

Document Summary

7 points: in early infancy child"s perceptual & cognitive mechanisms are very undeveloped. Can perceive person only as separate parts (object-relations) Examples: a mother"s smile, a mother"s hand, cannot integrate these parts into whole person, also, each part-object associated with either goodness or badness. Mother relaxed: smiling mouth = good object. Mother stressed: hands rough, painful = bad object. World is populated with separate good & bad objects. Salvador dali paintings: child"s emotional reaction to good vs. bad objects are entirely opposite. To good objects child feels warmth, relaxation, love. To bad objects - child feels sadism, anger, hatred, paranoia: next stage of development the major problem for children. Age, about 6 months, child perceptual & cognitive mechanisms have developed sufficiently to discover that good & bad objects are part of the same whole person! Disaster: the central problem is the conflict of emotions.