Paranoid-schizoid position

The paranoid-schizoid position is, in object relations theory, a characteristic state of mind of early infancy, roughly from birth to four or six months of age. In it, the baby perceives objects and itself as divided into good and bad, without yet being able to integrate them into a unified image.

Melanie Klein preferred to speak of positions rather than stages, because a position is a set of psychic functions that appears during the first year of life and can be reactivated at any later moment. For her, early development advances through two positions: the paranoid-schizoid, the more primitive, and the depressive, which follows if the environment and upbringing are sufficiently satisfactory. It is normal to move back and forth between them, although some people remain in the first for much of the time.

The term "paranoid" refers to persecutory anxiety, the fear of an invasive malevolence that the child experiences as coming from outside, though ultimately it derives from the projection of its own death drive. "Schizoid" refers to the central defence mechanism, splitting: the vigilant separation of the good object from the bad one. For Klein, this division is useful at first, because it protects the good from being destroyed by the bad and allows the infant to introject and identify with what gratifies.

Thus, when the mother does not immediately meet a need, her absence is experienced as the presence of a bad object, which is hated and attacked in fantasy and soon feels persecutory. Goodness can also be projected outward, so that the object is idealised. Klein saw in this logic one root of irrational hostility toward groups perceived as different. Current debate centres on how far this construction describes the infant's real development, and how useful it is as a clinical key to idealisation, rigid judgement and defences against ambivalence.