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Object Relations

The Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions

Think of a day when someone you love let you down badly. For a while, they may have seemed simply bad: selfish, cold, the kind of person who always does this. You might have felt attacked, and your thoughts ran in black and white. Later, perhaps, something shifted. You remembered that they are also kind, that they were tired, that you love them. The anger did not vanish, but now it sat alongside other feelings, and with it came something softer and more painful: sadness, maybe guilt, a wish to make things right.

Melanie Klein gave names to these two ways of experiencing. The first she called the paranoid-schizoid position, the second the depressive position (Klein, 1935, 1946). She chose the word “position” deliberately. These are not stages one passes through and leaves behind, but organizations of anxiety, defense, and relationship that a person moves between throughout life. Everyone lives in both.

Neither name is a diagnosis. “Paranoid” refers to the kind of anxiety (fear of being attacked), “schizoid” to the main defense (splitting), and “depressive” to the pain of recognizing that one can harm someone one loves, not to clinical depression.

The Paranoid-Schizoid Position

In the paranoid-schizoid position, experience is organized by splitting. Good and bad are kept strictly apart: the good object is ideal, the bad object is persecutory, and the self is divided along the same line. Klein thought this arrangement protects the good from being overwhelmed by the bad (Klein, 1946). The central anxiety is persecutory: the fear that something outside will attack, invade, or destroy the self.

The typical defenses belong together: splitting of others and of the self, idealization, denial, omnipotent control, projection, and projective identification (Klein, 1946). Relationships tend to be with part-objects: people valued or feared for a single function rather than known as whole people (see internal objects). Thinking is concrete; a feeling is experienced as a fact. If I feel attacked, I am being attacked.

This position is not simply bad. Splitting is how a mind first sorts overwhelming experience, and in a real emergency, clear lines between safe and dangerous can be useful. Klein also saw idealization as protecting the early capacity to love. The problem arises when the paranoid-schizoid mode becomes the main way of living, or takes over in situations that call for nuance.

The Depressive Position

In the depressive position, the person comes to recognize that the loved and hated object are the same whole person, and that they themselves are a whole person who both loves and hates (Klein, 1935). Integration brings a new kind of anxiety: not fear of being attacked, but depressive anxiety, the fear of having harmed or lost the loved person through one’s own aggression.

Guilt, Mourning, and Reparation

Three experiences mark this position. Guilt, as concern for the other rather than fear of punishment. Mourning, because accepting that the ideal object was never real, and that the good person is also limited, involves real loss. Klein argued that every later loss in adult life reactivates the depressive position and is worked through along the same lines (Klein, 1940). And reparation, the wish and effort to repair the damage done, in fact or in fantasy. Reparation is what makes guilt bearable and turns it toward love, creativity and care (Klein, 1940; Segal, 1964). The capacity for concern, as Winnicott called a closely related achievement, depends on it (Winnicott, 1965).

Manic Defenses

Because depressive pain is real, people defend against it too. Klein described manic defenses, triumph, contempt and control, that deny dependence on and concern for the other (Klein, 1935, 1940). Contempt says, “I never needed you.” Triumph says, “You were nothing.” These defenses explain why someone may swing into elation or dismissiveness right after a loss or a moment of guilt. See also devaluation of others’ image and the hypomanic style.

States, Not Stages

Klein first located the paranoid-schizoid position in the first months of life and the depressive position from around the middle of the first year (Klein, 1935, 1946). But she and her followers insisted that both remain active for life. Integration is never final; under stress, even mature people slip back into splitting, then recover. Hanna Segal’s introduction remains the classic summary of how the positions work throughout life (Segal, 1964).

Bion: Ps↔D

Wilfred Bion made the oscillation explicit with the notation Ps↔D (Bion, 1963). In his view, healthy thinking itself depends on moving back and forth: tolerating a period of confusion and fragmentation (Ps) until a pattern, or “selected fact,” brings the pieces into a new coherent whole (D). The move toward Ps is not only regression; it is how a mind opens up to new experience. Ronald Britton later suggested that each new integration eventually becomes a defense against further learning, so that the cycle repeats at higher levels (Britton, 1998).

Ogden: The Autistic-Contiguous Position

Thomas Ogden proposed a third, more primitive mode, the autistic-contiguous position, organized around sensory experience: rhythm, surface, edges, the feel of skin and warmth. Its anxiety is a dread of dissolving or leaking away, and its defenses are sensory, such as rocking, clinging to hard objects, or repetitive habits. Ogden saw all three positions as dimensions of experience that coexist and inform one another, rather than as a ladder (Ogden, 1989). He drew on Esther Bick’s work on the infant’s need for a psychic “skin” (Bick, 1968). See also bodily experience.

Steiner: Psychic Retreats

John Steiner described a third possibility between the two positions: a psychic retreat, a defensive organization in which the person hides from both persecutory and depressive anxiety (Steiner, 1993). The retreat may feel like a fortress, a sanctuary, or a private world. It brings relief, but at the cost of contact with reality and growth. Steiner’s work helps explain why some people seem stuck, neither fully split nor able to mourn, in a stable but limiting arrangement.

Integration as a Marker of Maturity

Across psychodynamic schools, the capacity to hold good and bad in one person, oneself included, is one of the most reliable markers of psychological maturity. Kernberg built his levels of personality organization largely on it: in borderline organization, loving and hating images of self and others remain split; at the neurotic and healthy levels, they are integrated (Kernberg, 1975). Mahler’s object constancy describes the same achievement developmentally (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975). On this site it appears as the capacity for differentiation and integration, and the basic units it integrates are described on the page on dyads.

Integration does not mean feeling mild about everything. It means that intense feelings can coexist: you can be furious at someone and still know you love them, disappointed in yourself without becoming worthless. Integrated people still split sometimes. What marks maturity is how soon and how fully they come back.

Examples

A Fight and Its Aftermath

Jordan, a composite, argues with his partner about money. In the heat of it he is certain she is controlling and has always been; he feels trapped and attacked (paranoid-schizoid). That night he cannot sleep. He remembers how she supported him through a layoff, feels a pang of guilt about what he said, and the next morning makes coffee and apologizes (depressive, with reparation). Nothing about the money question is resolved, but now two whole people can talk about it.

Contempt After Loss

Rina, a composite, is passed over for a role she wanted. Her first words are “It’s a mediocre company anyway, I’m relieved.” Over the following weeks the contempt fades into sadness and a clearer sense of what she actually wanted. The initial dismissiveness was a manic defense against the depressive pain of loss and disappointment.

The Retreat

Leo, a composite, has spent years in a pleasant but closed routine: work, games, a few undemanding friends. He is not unhappy, he says, just unbothered. In Steiner’s terms this may be a psychic retreat: a place that protects him from both the fear of rejection and the grief of what he has missed, while keeping new relationships at bay.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

History

Klein introduced the depressive position in her 1935 paper on manic-depressive states and developed it in her 1940 paper on mourning. In 1946, in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” she described the earlier paranoid-schizoid position, adopting Fairbairn’s term “schizoid” and combining it with her own “paranoid.” Her later work on envy and gratitude deepened the account of what interferes with integration (Klein, 1957). Segal (1964) systematized the theory. Bion (1963) reframed the positions as an ongoing oscillation, Ogden (1989) added the autistic-contiguous position, Steiner (1993) described psychic retreats, and Britton (1998) extended Bion’s cycle. Kernberg (1975) brought the core idea of integrating split images into mainstream North American theories of personality organization.

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