The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott

Comparisons and Dialogues

Jan Abram, R.D. Hinshelwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429883088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott seeks to introduce the distinctive psychoanalytic basic principles of both Klein and Winnicott, to compare and contrast the way in which their concepts evolved, and to show how their different approaches contribute to distinctive psychoanalytic paradigms. The aim is twofold – to introduce and to prompt research.

The book consists of five main parts each with two chapters, one each by Abram and Hinshelwood that describes the views of Klein and of Winnicott on 5 chosen issues:

• Basic principles
• Early psychic development
• The role of the external object
• The psychoanalytic concept of psychic pain
• Conclusions on divergences and convergences

Each of the 5 parts will conclude with a dialogue between the authors on the topic of the chapter.

The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott will appeal to who are being introduced to psychoanalytic ideas and especially to both these two schools of British Object Relations.

PART I

BASIC PRINCIPLES

Chapters 1 and 2 present brief introductions to the origins of both Klein’s and Winnicott’s theories: Klein independently from Winnicott, and Winnicott in discourse with both Freud and Klein. The chapters outline individually our protagonists’ main conceptual advances and illustrate how they differed from each other in their interpretations of Freud.

CHAPTER ONE

Melanie Klein

R. D. Hinshelwood

KEY CONCEPTS Child analysis; unconscious phantasy; anxiety; object relations; deeper layers; depressive position; paranoid-schizoid position

Melanie Klein’s first analyst, Sandor Ferenczi, in Budapest, probably encouraged her to make observations of children – specifically her own. This was a relatively common occurrence after Freud published his case of Little Hans in 1909 (Freud, 1909b). Klein became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1919 on the basis of a paper in which she reported observations of school-age children, their curiosity, and their problems with enquiring (this paper formed part of her 1921 publication, “The Development of a Child”). In 1921, she moved to Berlin, where she began to develop a specific therapeutic technique with children.

Klein’s terminology

The period after the First World War was one concerned with establishing classical psychoanalysis and, at the same time, contending with the dissent of Carl Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, and Alfred Adler (see Jones, 1955). It was therefore important for Klein constantly to clear her name, as it were, and to establish her completely orthodox credentials. This she did by using the language of psychoanalysts of the time, often giving her own slant on the meaning, which contributes to making Klein’s writing difficult to read. It obscures much of the originality of the ideas she developed (about the dating of the Oedipus complex, the origins of the superego, the existence of transference in children, and the use of analytic technique with children). This is to be noted that in her understanding of “instinct”; without an education in medical science – or in any science – Klein did not use the term “instinct” in the precise sense that Freud and most psychoanalysts used it. She did not see it as comprised of a biological energy that is the stuff of motivation. Nowhere in her writings does she discuss anything like the economic model. So, although she repudiated the economics of psychic energy, she never explicitly stated that, and this leaves it difficult for us, as readers, to recognise how her focus on anxiety disregards the economics of psychic energy.

Developing a form of child analysis

Supported in Berlin by Karl Abraham (who, in 1924, became her second analyst), Klein worked out a method of analysis for children that was strictly based on adult psychoanalysis. She argued that if the adult method required the patient to freely associate thoughts in his or her mind, then the equivalent in children is free play. She then proceeded to ask: what happens next in an adult analysis? And she replied to herself that the patient at times resists the invitation to freely associate; so, she thought, the equivalent in children is an inhibition in their play. At the time, in the early 1920s, the technique of adult analysis was evolving into what was called resistance analysis, the resistance demonstrating when the ego activates vates some defensive manoeuvre. What does the adult analyst then do when resistance intrudes? The analyst makes an interpretation of the now unconscious content that has been repressed. So, therefore, Klein thought it was obvious that the child analyst should do the same: interpret (see Klein, 1932).

Her work therefore commenced with the enquiry into the effects of interpreting the problems of the inhibition of play. What she found was absolutely clear-cut to her: again and again she reported how, in the aftermath of an interpretation of unconscious content, inhibitions in play were reduced and more spontaneous play emerged.

What was the unconscious content she interpreted? Her approach seems to have been that play is not necessarily lighthearted and fun, but that it contains the core conflicts that lead to repression. She therefore observed the narrative of the play as if it were the kind of thing that Freud had called unconscious phantasy: “There exist unconscious phantasies (or day-dreams) just as there exist conscious creations of the same kind which everybody knows from his own experience” (Freud, 1901b, p. 266). Such unconscious phantasies are narratives influential in the developing minds of children, as well as adults. The phantasy of the Oedipus complex is about the relationships with the two primary objects, mother and father, involving murder and incest. Freud rightly noted that most children had not actually witnessed or been involved in murder and incest, and if the oedipal configuration and complex is, in general, valid, it occurs in the child’s mind and not in the real family (not usually, of course, in real families). Thus, Freud thought that the child, with its endowment of this huge brain, engaged in various story-telling activities to make sense of what happens to it, thereby making sense of peculiar sensations and states of arousal that the older child, or adolescent, can only much later recognise as sexual. Such imagined stories are not necessarily conscious, and the unconscious ones are, of course, more compelling as they cannot be assessed for their real value or be told to others for reassurance.

Klein’s interest focused on how the children actually played out their narratives in front of her very eyes with the toys she provided in the playroom. Though she did not say so, it is quite possible that she thought this very visible narrative with toys might even be more transparent than the free-association method with adults. Even if she did not think so, she did believe she had a good method of accessing these unconscious phantasies at the formative periods when the child was developing them.

So, in 1921, she began to develop a play technique for children with, she felt, the encouragement of Karl Abraham. Though Melanie Klein was not a research scientist, it seems likely that she did think she had developed a very serviceable method for investigating the earlier phases of childhood – one that, she thought, was better than the traditional psychoanalytic method of extrapolating back from adult analyses. Freud’s Wolf Man case published in 1918, when Klein was just beginning to think of a career as a psychoanalyst, must have been an important case in point. The patient, in his twenties, brought a dream from the age of 4. Freud claimed a “genetic continuity” between the meaning of the dream when analysed twenty years later, and the meaning the dream must have had when it was dreamt in childhood (Freud, 1918b). Klein surely thought that a method that analysed at the age of 4 years was at least as good as Freud’s “post-hoc” method, twenty years later.

Instincts or relationships

Like many aspects of research, a new method of investigation throws up new kinds of data. Play often expressed much anxiety, and Klein felt that many of the children she saw were quite tortured by their anxieties. In fact, in her unpublished autobiography (available online: see Klein, 1959), she says that she found herself constantly focusing on anxiety – she never discussed the drives and instincts. It was the children’s immediate, perhaps heart-wrenching pain she felt asked to see and connect with that drew her attention. Their play conveyed awful scenes and outcomes, as if the child were pointing the adult’s attention to these desperate narratives. Indeed, she thought the children were trying to indicate these anxieties to their adults. And so she formulated the view that – unconsciously at least – the child was intentionally communicating through play. It was Freud’s peculiar unconscious-to-unconscious communication, as he expressed it (1912e), and the adult’s responsibility was to pick it up. The child, she thought, was as ready as any adult to try to comprehend the contents of the unconscious, the conflicts within it, and the anxieties arising from the conflicts. This constantly pointed Klein towards the point of maximum anxiety; the concept of instinct in the classical view as the motivating force was replaced by the motivating urge to reduce anxiety.

The child’s play with toys presented to Klein the relationships with and between important persons and issues in his or her life. It is not surprising that Klein tended to formulate her understanding in terms of the object relations – the relations between persons – as she watched the children manipulate objects (toys) representing the important persons. This new emphasis on the state and fate of the object contrasted with the conventional focus at the time on the distribution and flow of instinctual energy.

Klein did, therefore, put forward theoretical changes, and more adventurous ones as time went on. Most important for understanding the contrasts with Freud and Winnicott is that she thought the ego from the beginning distinguished itself from the world around (from the environment).

The deeper layers

Klein investigated what she called the deeper (or “psychotic”) layers of the mind and the unconscious, involving specific anxieties and defences. From 1929, at least, Klein was working with a few schizoid and schizophrenic patients, both children and adults. And this set her research in the direction Abraham had been investigating prior to his death in 1925. By analysing the pregenital phases of early development in adult manic-depressives, Abraham was led to emphasise the importance of object relations, and in particular the incorporation and evacuation of the objects that are emotionally important. To the end of her life, Klein continued to pursue Abraham’s work, so that early development prior to the genital phase became Klein’s speciality.

She made many specific discoveries, but one overarching general one: following Abraham, she asserted that there were specific mental processes that were “different from” the mechanisms described by Freud and the Viennese and classical psychoanalysts. She had to distinguish the deeper mechanisms from those classical defences such as repression, undoing, and reaction formation as described by Anna Freud (1936). Klein’s contribution was identifying two subcategories: the classical ones, just listed, and the more primitive ones from the pregenital phases – projection and introjection, and, eventually, splitting and forms of identification (Klein, 1946). These are two separate classes of mental process; she was not just adding to the classical list. She called these processes the primitive mechanisms and assigned them to the “deeper layers” of mental functioning, by which she meant that they were characteristic of the earliest moments of psychic development and remained active deep in the unconscious.

Klein argued that the primitive mechanisms, in the deeper layers, were the very earliest methods of dealing with anxiety. Early anxiety is different from that in classical psychoanalysis, where the problem is the oedipal conflict. Beneath that, and underlying it, are other anxieties; they are about survival or annihilation, about the formation or disintegration of the ego and of its objects. In this deep layer, there appeared to be two fundamental anxieties: an anxiety about the fate of the object, and an anxiety about the survival of the self. These she called the “depressive position” and the “paranoid-schizoid position”, respectively (see chapter 5), with each anxiety being dealt with by a specific selection of the primitive defence mechanisms.

Clinical approach

Klein evolved her approach at a time when psychoanalysis in general attempted to interpret the unconscious distortions that a patient made in his or her interpretation of others – that is, the apperception. Freud (1911b) realised the importance of the reality principle and named it, and he evolved the practice of working through the unreality of the distortions (apperception) in relation to the analyst’s take on the reality of the others in the patient’s world. Klein’s appropriation of this was, first of all, to accept the validity of this method and, second, gradually to emphasise that the work is in the here-and-now. The reality that is most in play at the time that the analyst can challenge the patient’s distortions is the reality in the session and the distortions the patient makes of the analyst – the transference neurosis, as Freud called it. An often forgotten British psychoanalyst expressed this here-and-now approach as: “only such forces as exist at a certain time can have effects at that time” (Ezriel, 1956. p. 35). But perhaps the clearest and most eloquent expression of this approach adopted by Klein was the paper by James Strachey (Winnicott’s analyst) in 1934, which was republished in 1969.

Klein’s emphasis on the therapeutic benefit of reality-testing has, of course, been highly adapted by development after she died and by Bion’s work in developing the idea of container-contained as a basic principle of clinical work. This evolved from the here-and-now emphasis of the 1930s, by emphasising the analyst as the actual external object for the patient, who performs a particular internal function for the patient – the function of giving meaning to the patient’s experiences. External objects are not the important thing – it is their meaning. So Bion gave a Kantian formulation of the external world.

Strictly speaking, the later development is not part of the comparison between Klein and Winnicott that we are focusing on, but containment needs to be acknowledged here as it runs so parallel to Winnicott’s own development of his clinical approach.

* * *

In this chapter I have briefly covered the major basic principles of Klein’s approach:

» the invention of child analysis in conformity with adult practice;

» unconscious phantasies;

» the logic of genetic continuity;

» focusing on the experience of anxiety rather than the economics of psychic energy;

» playing with toys as a significant pointer to the emphasis on object-relations;

» the ego boundary is from birth;

» the deeper (“psychotic”) layers of the unconscious;

» the greater importance of pregenital over genital layers;

» the Oedipus complex in part-object terms;

» the two fundamental positions (paranoid-schizoid and depressive) of anxiety, defence, and object-relations.

CHAPTER TWO

Donald Winnicott

Jan Abram

Key ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About The Authors
• Preface
• Biographical Notes and Chronologies
• Introduction
• Part I: Basic principles
• Part II: Early psychic development
• Part III: The role of the external object
• Part IV: The psychoanalytic concept of psychic pain
• Part V: Practice and theory
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Afterword
• References
• Index