A developmental stage in the first year allows the infant to begin to integrate his objects, which become mixed and take on both good and bad aspects. Particularly when the objects that attract ambivalent emotions are internalized, it creates a deeply troubling internal world, dominated by various forms of guilt feelings, sadness and reparative attempts to deal with them. (Melanie Klein, 1935).

Melanie Klein derived her notion of internal objects from the work that Abraham and Freud had done on the internalization of objects through oral incorporation in melancholia (Freud, 1917 [1915], Abraham, 1924). Abraham described symptoms which vividly expressed the movement of "loved objects" into and out of the body.

Klein (1935, 1940) viewed aggression from the earliest stages as producing a particularly problematic internal object. Freud described the internalization of the loved one as a response to its loss, when there was a...