Abstract
Two-person psychologies, on the other hand, tend to stress aspects of integrity in the baby from the beginning and to consider the baby’s capacity for rudimentary integrative functioning on both perceptual and psychological levels. The developmental focus, then, is not on separation and individuation, but on object-relating and connectedness. In the Melanie Kleinian view, reality and phantasy are not counterposed, nor are instinct and desire seen as coming in opposition to reality. Rather, phantasy is in itself a form of psychic reality; in the same way, external reality is not objective or absolute, but only one form of reality. The child, then, does not move naturally from an undifferentiated matrix with the mother to a separate and individuated autonomous self any more than the mother serves merely as an object from which to separate, rather than a subject with whom to engage.