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 exhi-
bited 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 depres-
sive position. The relation to the mother as a whole person,

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