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Young [[children ]] are frequently afflicted by paroxysms of anger and [[fear]]. Underlying these panics and night terrors is a vicious circle, an [[unconscious ]] [[fantasy]], involving fear of, and attacks upon, a malign "bad" [[object]].

The term is first used in Melanie [[Klein ]] (1932), however the descriptions of [[aggression ]] and [[paranoia ]] go back to her earliest writings, but notably Klein (1927b, 1928, 1929a and b).

Klein found that children's [[symptoms ]] were often based in an extreme [[anxiety ]] [[about ]] the [[child]]'s own desired aggression towards important and loved [[people]]. This [[conflict ]] represents the [[infant]]'s version of the [[super-ego ]] conflict described by [[Freud]]. As the symptoms that Klein [[analyzed ]] had arisen in infancy—before the age of one—she assumed the super-ego arose at that early age.

Klein described these "anxiety-situations" as she called [[them]], following Freud (1926), and found that she could analyze them with her "[[technique ]] of early [[analysis]]." It appeared that the aggression the child exhibited towards the object that frustrated it, gave rise to a [[belief ]] that the object would retaliate, with equal [[violence ]] towards the child (Klein, 1927b, 1929a, 1930, 1932). This fear arising from the child's own aggression often resulted in even greater attacks, in fantasy, on the feared object in [[order ]] to finally dispose of it. That increase in aggression then led to an increased fear that the now [[dead ]] object would rise from the dead, and retaliate with even greater force. These crescendos of aggression led to children having paroxysms of fear, such as pavor nocturnus, [[panic ]] attacks, or [[other ]] symptoms.

At first Klein called this [[state ]] of aggression and retaliation the "[[paranoid ]] [[position]]." However, the term did not survive her introduction of the depressive position (Klein, 1935). Later, the [[nature ]] of this kind of [[experience ]] became clearer as she described the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1946).

Freud's view of paranoia was that it hid an underlying [[homosexuality]], such that an underlying [[love ]] turned to [[hate ]] (Freud, 1911). This contrasts with the [[Kleinian ]] "anxiety-[[situation]]" that hate overwhelms love. In Rosenfeld's view, homosexuality covers an underlying unconscious paranoia (Rosenfeld, Herbert,1949).

With the introduction of the [[theory ]] of the depressive position, it was [[understood ]] that the crises of [[terror ]] in children (Isaacs, Susan,1939) and [[adults ]] (Heimann, Paula, 1942) were about [[internal ]] [[objects]]. Later, descriptions of the paranoid-schizoid position presented these internal states of [[persecution ]] in more thorough detail.