Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein

Hanna Segal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429915192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A most lucid and comprehensive introduction to Kleinian theories from one of the leading contemporary Kleinian analysts, including new chapters on her early work and on technique. This is a reprint of a revised and enlarged edition, where the author has added important new chapters on Melanie Klein's early work and on technique, as well as a complete chronological list of her publications.

CHAPTER ONE

MELANIE KLEIN’S EARLY WORK

ONE COULD DIVIDE Melanie Klein’s contributions to psychoanalytical theory and technique broadly into three distinct phases.

The first phase starts with her paper “On the Development of the Child” and culminates in the publication of The Psycho-Analysis of Children in 1932. During this phase she laid the foundations of child analysis and traced the Oedipus complex and the super-ego to early developmental roots.

The second phase led to the formulation of the concept of the depressive position and the manic defence mechanisms, described mainly in her paper “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of the Manic Depressive States” (1934) and “Mourning and its Relation to Manic Depressive States” (1940).

The third phase was concerned with the earliest stage, which she called the paranoid-schizoid position, mainly formulated in her paper “Notes on some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946) and in her book Envy and Gratitude (1957).

There is a significant change in her theoretical outlook, from the time of her formulation of the concept of positions in 1934. Up till that time she followed Freud and Abraham in describing her findings in terms of libidinal stages and the structural theory of the ego, super-ego and id. From 1934 onwards, however, she formulated her findings primarily in terms of her own structural concept of positions. The concept of “position” does not conflict with the concept of the ego, super-ego and id, but it purports to define the actual structure of the super-ego and the ego, and the character of their relationship in terms of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.

I want to devote this chapter to Melanie Klein’s work before 1934, to show how it evolved from the classical Freudian theory, at what points it began to differ from it, and how the early ideas foreshadowed the later formulations.

When Melanie Klein started analysing children in the 1920s she threw new light on the early development of the child. As is often the case in scientific development, new discoveries follow the use of a new tool, whilst they in turn can lead to the refinement of the tool. In the case of child analysis the new tool was the play technique. Taking her cue from Freud’s (1920) observations of the child’s play with the reel, Melanie Klein saw that the child’s play could represent symbolically his anxieties and phantasies. Since small children cannot be asked to free-associate, she treated their play in the playroom in the same way as she treated their verbal expressions, i.e. as a symbolic expression of their unconscious conflicts.

This approach gave her a road into the child’s unconscious: following closely the transference and the anxieties, as in the analysis of adults, she was able to discover the rich world of the child’s unconscious phantasy and object-relations.

Her observations in the playroom gave direct confirmation from child material of Freud’s theories of infantile sexuality. However, phenomena could also be observed which were not expected.

The Oedipus complex was thought to start at about three or four years of age, but she observed children of

displaying oedipal phantasies and anxieties which clearly already had a history. Furthermore, pregenital as well as genital trends seemed to be involved in those phantasies and to play an important rôle in oedipal anxieties. In the Oedipus complex of older children, those pregenital trends also seemed to play an important rôle and to contribute significantly to oedipal anxieties. The super-ego appeared much earlier than would have been expected from classical theory, and it seemed to have very savage characteristics—oral, urethral and anal. Thus for instance, Erna’s* maternal super-ego, the “Fisherwoman” and the “Rubber Woman,” exhibited the same anal and oral traits as characterized Erna’s own sexual phantasies. Rita,* aged

, in her pavor nocturnus felt threatened by a mother and father who would bite off her genital and destroy her babies. The fear of these parental imagos paralysed her play and activities. Similarly severe super-egos were exhibited by other patients.

Following the child’s symbolization and repetition, in the transference, of earlier object relationships and anxieties, she was led to see that the child’s object relationships extend far into the past, right back to a relationship to part-objects, such as the breast and the penis, preceding the relationship to the parents as whole people. She also found that the anxiety stirred by these earliest object relationships may have a lasting influence on the later ones and the form of the Oedipus complex. Those early object relationships were characterized by the importance of phantasy. Not surprisingly, the younger the child the more he was under the sway of omnipotent phantasies, and she was able to follow the complex interplay between the child’s unconscious phantasies and his real experience and the gradual way in which the child developed a more realistic relation to his external objects. The conflict between aggression and libido, well known from the analysis of adults, proved to be all the more intense in the early stages of development, and she noticed that the anxiety (in keeping with Freud’s later theory of anxiety) is due more to the operation of aggression than that of libido, and that it is primarily against aggression and anxiety that defences were erected. Among those defences denial, splitting, projection and introjection appeared to be active before repression was organized. Melanie Klein saw that little children, under the spur of anxiety, were constantly trying to split their objects and their feelings and trying to retain good feelings and introject good objects, whilst expelling bad objects and projecting bad feelings. Following the fate of the child’s object relations and the constant interplay between reality and phantasy, splitting, projection and introjection, she was led to see how the child builds inside himself a complex internal world. The super-ego of course was known as an internal phantasy object; but in seeing how it is gradually built up in the child’s internal world, Melanie Klein saw that what was known of the super-ego in the genital stages was but a last stage of a complex development. It could also be seen that not only does the ego have relations of different kinds with its internal objects but that the internal objects themselves are perceived by the child as having relations with one another. Thus, for instance, the child’s phantasies about parental sexuality, when the parental couple is introjected, become an important part of the structure of the internal world.

Her work with children and adults, presented in a number of papers as well as in The Psycho-Analysis of Children, led her to a formulation of the earliest stages of the Oedipus complex and the super-ego in terms of early object relationships, with an emphasis on anxieties, defences and object relations, part as well as whole.

In the oral-sadistic phase, the child attacks his mother’s breast and incorporates it as both destroyed and destructive—“a bad persecuting internal breast.” This in Melanie Klein’s view is the earliest root of the persecuting and sadistic aspect of the super-ego. Parallel with this introjection, in situations of love and gratification the infant introjects an ideal loved and loving breast which becomes the root of the ego-ideal aspect of the super-ego.

Soon, and partially under the impact of the frustration and anxiety in the breast relationship, the child’s desires and phantasies extend to the whole of his mother’s body. The mother’s body is phantasied as containing all riches including new babies and the father’s penis. Since this turning to the mother’s body happens at the time when early feelings and phantasies predominate, the infant’s first dawning perception of the parental intercourse is of an oral nature and the mother is conceived of as incorporating the father’s penis in intercourse. Thus one of the riches of mother’s body is this incorporated penis.

The child turns to his mother’s body all his libidinal desires but, because of frustration, envy and hatred, also all his destructiveness. These desires also involve objects phantasied inside mother’s body, and in relation to them the infant also has greedy libidinal desires and phantasies of scooping them out and devouring them or, because of his hatred and envy, aggressive phantasies of biting, tearing and destroying—as in Erna’s phantasy of making “eye salad” of the contents of her mother’s body.

Soon, to the oral sadism is added urethral sadism, with phantasies of drowning, cutting and burning, and anal sadism which in the early anal phase is of a predominantly explosive kind and in the later anal phase becomes more secret and poisonous. These attacks on mother’s body lead to phantasies of its being a terrifying place full of destroyed and vengeful objects, amongst which father’s penis acquires a particular importance.

It is in connection with her understanding of the child’s relation to the mother’s body that Melanie Klein elucidated the importance of phantasy and unconscious anxiety in the child’s relation to the external world and the rôle of symbol-formation in the child’s development. When at the height of oral ambivalence, the child penetrates in his phantasy and attacks the mother’s body and its contents, her body becomes an object of anxiety, which forces the child to displace his interest from her body to the world around him. Thus through symbolization his interest in his mother’s body begins to extend to the whole world around him. A certain amount of anxiety is a necessary spur to this development. If the anxiety is excessive, however, the whole process of symbol-formation comes to a stop. In her paper “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930), Melanie Klein describes a psychotic child, Dick, in whom symbol-formation was severely impeded, as a result of which he failed to endow the world around him with any interest whatsoever. In his case, analysis revealed that his attack on his mother’s body led to such severe anxiety that he denied all interest in her and could not therefore symbolize this interest in other objects or relations. Melanie Klein’s description of Dick’s phantasy of penetration of his mother’s body, accompanied by projection and identification, foreshadows her later formulations of the mechanism of projective identification. She was also the first to notice that in the psychotic process it is the nature of symbol-formation itself which is affected. This aspect of her work had a fundamental influence on later research into the nature of psychotic states.

As the child becomes more aware of the separate identities of his parents and sees them increasingly as a couple engaged in intercourse rather than as a mother incorporating father, the child’s desires, and, when in anger and jealousy, his attacks, extend to the parental couple. These attacks are of two kinds: the infant may phantasy himself attacking the parents directly, or he projects his aggression and in his phantasy makes the parents attack one another, giving rise to the experience of the primal scene as a sadistic and terrifying event. Thus the parental couple, like the mother’s body, becomes an object of fear.

The child’s fear at the height of these phantasies may be twofold: it is both the fear of his external parents and the fear of his internal ones, since first the mother, and then both parents, are introjected, giving rise to terrifying punitive internal imagos. It was in connection with those phantasies that Melanie Klein first drew attention to the importance both of splitting and the interplay of introjection and projection, which she observed as very active mental mechanisms in small children. Faced with the anxiety aroused by the terrifying internal figures, the child tries to split his image of the good parents and his own good and loving feelings from the image of the bad parents and his own destructiveness.

The more sadistic are his phantasies towards the parents, and the more terrifying therefore the imagos of them, the more he feels compelled to keep these feelings away from his good parents and the more he tries to introject again those good external parents. Introjection of bad figures however cannot be avoided. Thus in the early stages of development the infant would introject both the good and the bad breasts, penises, mother’s body and parental couple. He tries to deal with the bad introjects which become equated with faeces by anal mechanisms of control and ejection.

In Melanie Klein’s view the super-ego not only precedes the Oedipus complex but promotes its development. The anxiety produced by the internalized bad figures makes the child seek all the more desperately libidinal contact with his parents as external objects. There is a desire to possess the mother’s body not only for libidinal and aggressive purposes but also out of anxiety to seek reassurance in her real person against the terrifying internal figure. There is also the wish to make restitution and reparation to the real mother in real intercourse for damage done in phantasy. Similarly, with father, the real father and his penis are a reassurance against the terrifying internal introjected penis and father. As a libidinal object, his good penis is sought as a reassurance against the bad internal penis and as a rival the real father is far less terrifying than the internal, distorted representation. Thus the pressure of the anxieties produced by internal objects drives the child towards an oedipal relation to the real parents. At the same time, anxieties of the oral and early anal sadistic stage prompt the child towards abandoning this position for the genital one, which is less sadistic.

Melanie Klein’s investigations into the early stages of the Oedipus complex led her to differ in certain important respects from Freud’s formulations about female sexuality and the importance of the phallic stage in particular. In her view, the little girl, turning away from the breast to her mother’s body, just like the little boy, has phantasies of scooping out and possessing herself of all its contents, particularly of the father’s penis inside mother and her babies. Like the little boy, since her phantasies are very ambivalent, the contents of mother’s body, including the penis, can be felt as very good or very bad, but under the impact of early frustration and envy she turns more and more to her father’s penis, first of all inside her mother’s body, then as an external attribute of father’s, in an oral incorporative way. Melanie Klein observed that, in the little girl, there is an early awareness of her vagina and the passive oral attitude becomes transferred from the mouth to the vagina, paving the way to a genital oedipal position. In this early attitude to her mother there are elements of both heterosexual and homosexual development. The early mother super-ego may be too terrifying for the little girl to face rivalry with mother, and thus it contributes to homosexuality. Similarly, if her father’s penis becomes too bad an object, it may lead to fear of sexual relations with it. Under the impact of guilt and fear, restitutive phantasies in relation to her mother’s body may also become a strong determinant of homosexuality. On the other hand, the early desire to take mother’s place and possess her riches, the turning to father’s penis as an object of desire, restitution, and reparation in relation to the internal mother, and the wish to provide this internal mother with a good penis and babies, all contribute to the heterosexual development.

In relation to the boy’s Oedipus complex there was also a certain change of emphasis. The early relation to mother’s breast and phantasies about her body in Melanie Klein’s view play a significant rôle in the development of the boy’s Oedipus complex as well as in the girl’s. The early turning away from the breast to the penis happens as in the little girl, laying the foundations for the boy’s feminine position; and very early on the little boy, like the little girl, has a struggle between this feminine position in which he turns away from mother to a good paternal penis, and his masculine position in which he wishes to identify with father and desires his mother. The anxieties stirred by his internal objects lead him increasingly to turn his sexual wishes towards his real external mother.

It is not easy to assess what was Melanie Klein’s central contribution to psycho-analytical theory and practice at that stage. Her findings about early object relations have certainly thrown a new light on sexuality, both male and female, revealing in both sexes an early awareness of the vagina and the importance of the phantasies in relation to mother’s body and its contents. Female sexuality appeared as something in its own right rather than a castrated version of male sexuality, and the boy’s feminine position acquired greater importance. She had explored the history of the Oedipus complex and brought out the importance of pregenital stages and part-object relations in the development of both the Oedipus complex and the super-ego. The rôle of aggression underwent a certain revaluation: she described in detail the early conflict between the life and the death instincts, and the anxieties and defences to which it gives rise. The study of the introjected objects threw light, in far greater detail than had been possible before, on the inner structure of the super-ego and the ego.

In her early work she does not conceptually distinguish between anxiety and g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Melanie Klein’s Early Work
• 2 Phantasy
• 3 The Paranoid-Schizoid Position
• 4 Envy
• 5 The Psychopathology of the Paranoid-Schizoid Position
• 6 The Depressive Position
• 7 Manic Defences
• 8 Reparation
• 9 The Early Stages of the Oedipus Complex
• 10 Postscript on Technique
• Glossary
• Bibliography of Melanie Klein
• Some Significant Discussions of Melanie Klein’s work
• Index