ral hypothesis and the role of instinctual drives. These objects are the developing mind's internalization of what it takes to be the realities of found experience. Initially, the infant internalizes only partial, or split, realities of the whole, e.g., the mother's breast but not the mother, as the focus of life experience, a "good" to be aggressively and sadistically exploited when it is present, or a "bad" to be raged at when it is withdrawn. Gradually, the breast object fuses into, or integrates with, the maternal object in whole. But this sets up a split in the psychic life of the child, based on perception that the mother is both good (source of gratification and love) and bad (source of withholding of gratification or persecution of the psyche), such that "splits in objects precipitate and correspond to splits within the ego" (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. 128).
As Klein formulates subsequent development of the psyche, the maturing ego engages in projective identification with the objects of experience, displacing its feelings of love, aggressiveness, fear, and rage on the object, predicated of gratification and frustration and the experience of love from the object. The problem for the developing psyche is that it turns out that the integrated mother is the object of cruelty and fear and love, setting up a psychic confusion. What the psyche has perceived as being partitioned, or split, turns out to have been a misperception, although this does not prevent the individual from developing hatred of what is "bad" about the mother, or, envy, i.e., hatred of what is "good" about the mother. Thus, as Klein says (1986, p. 47), "the ego cannot really keep its good and bad objects apart." Ideally, the response of the maturing ego will be to resolve the confusion, such that "some of the cruelty of the bad objects and of the id becomes related to the good objects and this then again increases the severity of their demands" (1986, p. 47)...