associated with them. Oedipal phantasies gave rise to fear of primitive persecutory figures -- maternal, paternal, or as a combined figure often at the very centre of phobias -nightmares and night fears. Those phantasy figures exhibited sadistic oral, urethral and anal features, as well as castration threats, due to the projections of infantile sexuality and sadism, and in keeping with the stage of the child's own psychosexual development. She described the figure of combined sexual parents as an important factor in psychotic anxieties. This phantasy figure is partly a denial of the parental intercourse, combining the two into one monstrous figure, and also a projection of the child's hostility to that intercourse, making it into a particularly threatening figure.

Klein considered that the Oedipus complex starts in the first year of life and is fundamentally affected by the child's relation to the breast. It is the frustration at the breast, and crucially the weaning, that makes the infant turn to the father's penis and become aware of the triangular situation. In her early work she considered that phase as the phase of maximum sadism and, considering that it is the frustration at the breast which initiates the oedipal situation, she also thought that the beginnings of the Oedipus complex are under the aegis of hatred more than of desire and love. Throughout her work with children -- as described in The Psychoanalysis of Children ( 1932) and various papers on child and adult analysis -- she developed and expanded her views on the Oedipus complex. In 1928 she wrote a paper specifically on the subject, 'Early stages of the Oedipus conflict' ( Klein, 1928).

By the time she had formulated the concept of the depressive position, her views on the Oedipus complex had altered in certain important respects. She established the interrelation between the Oedipus complex and the depressive position. The relation to the mother as a whole person,

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