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Adrienne Kennedy's characters speak obsessively of their own births as well as the births - which are so often the deaths - of their children. Their monologues focus on rape and incest, miscarriage and child murders. Such preoccupations psychologically paralyze the characters, fixing them at - and regressing them to - a primitive stage in development which Melanie Klein, a psychologist of the British object relations school, calls the "paranoid-schizoid position," an infant stage1 which normally precedes integration. According to Klein, the life instinct and the death instinct, which are both present in the infant from birth, create a polarity of anxieties that the infant deals with through splitting and projective identification; that is, the infant learns to split external objects into representations of good and evil, projecting hopes and fears away from the subject and onto the object. In later phases, the infant learns to unify such splits and to deal with whole objects. Kennedy's characters, however, rarely reach this point of integration: they never progress beyond the paranoid-schizoid position. These characters remain prisoners of object relations, their worlds disordered by irrational, irrevocable splits.
The infantile ego, in terms of Klein's description, deflects the death instinct outward to an external object, the persecutory object, which "is felt to be bad and threatening to the ego, giving rise to a feeling of persecution."2 At the same time, it projects the libido, or life instinct, outward, thereby creating an ideal object:
The infant's aim is to try to acquire, to keep inside and to identify with the ideal object, seen as life-giving and protective, and to keep out the bad object and those parts of the self which contain the death instinct. The leading anxiety in the paranoid-schizoid position is that the persecutory object or objects will get inside the ego and overwhelm and annihilate both the ideal object and the self.3 Klein, according to Hanna Segal, calls this stage the paranoid-schizoid position because the infant's fears demonstrate a paranoia which is characterized by splitting. Kennedy's characters, likewise, attempt to order their anxieties by splitting and projecting them onto persecutory and ideal objects.
Funnyhouse of a Negro, Kennedy's first-published and most famous play, vividly reflects Klein's theories of object relations. The cast of characters includes "Negro-Sarah"...