3 Object Relations Theory for Classroom Observation
3.2 Klein’s conceptualisation of anxiety and defence
3.2.3 The two states of mind contextualised in stages of
A classroom observer may find it difficult to neatly distinguish materialisation of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive states of mind because their manifestation is impacted by psychodynamic dimensions of the stages of personality development, which differ markedly throughout the life and undergo one a radical change at the point where pupils make the transition from primary to secondary school.
Primary pupils undergo the latency stage of personality development, which falls approximately between the culmination of the Oedipus complex, the set of emotions aroused in children of three to four years of age who develop unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and a corresponding urge to annihilate the parent of the same sex, and the onset of puberty. In both Freudian and Kleinian theory, this period is characterised as the period in which an individual acquires vast amounts of knowledge about the world and assesses her inner capabilities while her sexual drives are dormant. Although family relationships are still important, the formation of the superego at the cessation of the Oedipus complex enables her to explore new ways of learning and to participate in a wider range of social relationships.
Latency stage children demonstrate broadly definable modes of learning and behaving which closely relate to the tasks routinely stipulated in primary school curricula. Their underlying anxieties about separating from her family and discovering new worlds are counterbalanced by the manifestation of defences which limit thinking to a restrictive ordering and sorting mentality. Excesses of imagination are modulated unconsciously by the adoption of learning strategies which focus on the amassing of new information and new skills on a non-analytical level, rather than attempting to know the ‘true meaning’ of
things. Many children enjoy maths in primary school precisely because they enjoy putting numbers in order, filling out tables and obtaining the ‘correct’ answers to simple operational exercises in competitive scenarios or game formats rather than solving multi- step problems or carrying out more complicated analysis.
In general, latency stage children tend to visualise both their academic and extracurricular pursuits within a world view which ruthlessly splits all that it encounters into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ (Waddell, 1998, p.96). They experience potent desires to be ‘a part of something’ and tend to form groups which mirror patterns of family life and external social and political structures. Within these groups, the tendency is for the more aggressive, imaginative children to become the leaders and the more passive ones submit to their authority (Meltzer, 1967, pp.96-97). However, the overriding need for all latency stage children to sustain continuous unconscious defences against the anxiety determinates which lurk beneath the orderly veneer of a primary school classroom is highlighted in much popular school fiction, which frequently features protagonists who are enabled to survive in an adverse external environment by immersing themselves in imaginary worlds marked by loss and fearful emotions (Waddell, 1998, p.97).
An individual’s real growth and development during the latency stage is ultimately contingent upon her ability to sustain her inner imagination while unconsciously exercising defence mechanisms which enable her to acquire knowledge and skills in the face of newly encountered anxiety determinants. As I will discuss in more detail in Sections 3.3.1, the ability to navigate this process is largely dependent on the quality of maternal containment the individual experiences during her first year of life and by what later occurs within her family. An individual’s psychic development may be impacted by the states of mind of other family members or by the organisation of the family of the
whole, which may be ‘split’ in so far as unacceptable character traits may be assigned to just one member while good qualities are attributed to other family members (ibid, p.128).
The latency stage of personality development dissipates when puberty heralds the wide- ranging physiological and emotional changes which mark the next stage of adolescence, which spans the ages of ten or eleven to about fifteen and was characterised initially by Freud (1905) as a regression to the infancy stage in which the activity of sexual drives is integrated into intimate and loving aspects of early relationships. Klein and other object relationists, however, view adolescence as the stage in an individual’s life in which the whole personality is restructured as latency attitudes and modes of functioning dissipate. While the latency stage is conceptualised in terms of relatively uniform modes of behaviour and attitudes towards learning, adolescence is understood to be a variable experience that is shaped by the quality of early maternal containment, the degree of stability achieved in the latency years and the intensity of fresh internal and external anxiety determinants.
As adolescence is played out over a five to six-year period, an individual is agitated by the re-emergence of her sexual drives and emotions linked to the Oedipal complex and is therefore subjected to violent oscillations between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In the early years, as she begins to lose her latency modes of functioning and begins to mentally separate herself from her parents on both conscious and unconscious levels, her ego becomes less stable and her attitudes towards the social and political organisations supported by parents are liable to fluctuate markedly as she alternates between feeling that she knows more than her parents and that she is worthless (Coren, 1997, p.16). The frequent materialisation of the paranoid-schizoid state of mind compels a young adolescent to ‘act out’ a reworking of herself by identifying with a succession of
new ideas while exploring new ways of socialising with ever-shifting groups of peers. At certain times she may find psychic refuge in forms of denial in which external reality is invested with romance and linked to the idealisation of internal heroic figures. At other times she may be so overcome by the operations of splitting and projection that she begins to perceive the targets of her projections as the originators of the projected material, so that ‘I hate him’ becomes ‘he hates me’. This emergence of the reaction formation defence mechanism does not defend the adolescent against anxiety determinants but it provides her with a target for attack and an opportunity to ‘escape’, and thereby may impart a false sense of control (Cramer, 1991).
As the adolescent gradually becomes more independent, she will engage in a series of negative and counter identifications with the purpose of ‘finding’ herself. Subsequently, in a process which is analogous to the formation of the superego, she will introject new external authority figures who will form the basis of her ego-ideal, the component in the ego which will henceforth serves as the ethical reference point for the ego’s evaluation of its real achievements (Laplanche and Pontilis, 1973). But this process of introjection induces a new source of depressive anxiety which compels the adolescent to enter into a mourning process for the impending physical separation from her parents. Ultimately, the adolescent may retreat into a state of “explanatory uncertainty” (Waddell, 1998, p.147) and endeavour to become ‘mindless’ through experimentation with alcohol and drugs if the intermittent manifestations of splitting, the feelings of loss and guilt engendered by depressive anxiety, the pressures of high stakes exams, and the anger and disappointment instigated by the changing nature of relationships with the opposite sex prove to be too much for her ego defence system.
Towards the end of adolescence, as she is unconsciously struggling to finalise the construction of her ego-ideal, the adolescent may display an exaggerated level of optimism that possesses a ‘Pollyannish’ quality, which more usually functions as a signal of her hopeful, highly personalised interpretation of her life’s events rather than as an outright denial of reality (Cramer, 1991). Maturity only begins to be established incrementally as an adolescent becomes able to overcome the compulsive manifestations of splitting and projection by retrieving her projections and rendering them bearable so that she is able to re-introject them successfully: it is at that point that she is able to engage with her own emotional experiences, learn from them and extricate herself from her roving explorations of various friendship groups and social affiliations.
In technical terms, an individual is understood to have become an adult upon the consolidation of her ego ideal. However, Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysts recognise that an individual never reaches a static point or phase in personality development. Even as the operation of other defence mechanisms develop into entrenched character traits, it is always possible for the occurrence of anxiety-inducing life events to instigate oscillations between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions which may precipitate abrupt regressions to earlier stages of personality development.