Other Banalities

Melanie Klein Revisited

Jon Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135448851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Melanie Klein is one of the few analysts whose body of work has inspired sociologists, philosophers, religious scholars, literary critics and political theorists, all attracted to the cross-fertilisation of her ideas. Other Banalities represents a long over-due exploration of her legacy, including contributions from acclaimed interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners.

The contributors situate Klein within the history of the psychoanalytic movement, investigate her key theoretical and clinical advances, and look at how her thought has informed contemporary perspectives in the behavioural sciences and humanities. Topics covered range from Klein's major psychological theories to clinical pathology, child development, philosophy, sociology, politics, religion, ethics and aesthetics.

This volume reflects the auspicious future for Kleinian revivalism and demonstrates the broad relevance of Kleinian thought. It will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Chapter 1

Who wants to be a scientist?

The historical and psychoanalytic context at the start of Klein’s career: circa 1918–1921

R.D. Hinshelwood

The aim of this chapter is to try to reconstruct the points of interest in the development of psychoanalysis around the time when Melanie Klein became an analyst. She was in analysis with Ferenczi on and off during the First World War, and began to take a professional interest in using psychoanalysis herself around 1918. Her first paper was given in 1919 to the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society and the second in 1921 to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. I shall therefore be looking at the development of Freud’s ideas around 1918–1921, a time of radically new departures for him, and following the defection of Jung. Not surprisingly at this time, the psychoanalytic movement suffered a considerable tension between new ideas and constraining conformity. This climate of suspicion and the actual issues under discussion were, I shall argue, important factors influencing Klein’s initiation into her own career as a psychoanalyst.

The First World War was immediately followed by a time of social and political turmoil, and this included the psychoanalytic movement. Freud signalled new developments in 1917 at the IPA Congress in Budapest (Freud 1918), the first occasion when Melanie Klein would have seen Freud. His paper was inspirational for the future of psychoanalysis, which had done well in the war, as it was accepted by the military on both sides as having the only coherent theoretical and practical approach to war neurosis (PTSD as we now know it). However, all was not well within psychoanalysis. The dispute with Jung had ruptured Freud’s alliance with him in 1913 and though Jung was still President of the IPA in 1918, he was soon replaced.

Following the war, women’s suffrage developed rapidly, and women were looking for ways to advance themselves socially. The older professions remained conservative, but the newer professions, including psychoanalysis, welcomed women as recruits.

Melanie Klein suffered from bouts of depression after the birth of all her children. The last one, after the birth of Erich in 1914, led her to seek treatment. It is not clear how she found Ferenczi. Peters (1985) noted that Klein’s husband Arthur Klein worked shortly before the war at a paper factory where Ferenczi’s brother also worked, but we do not know if this was the route her initial contact with Ferenczi took. It is clear that Ferenczi encouraged Klein to take a psychoanalytic interest in children, which she did, at first observing her own children. She developed her form of child analysis with Abraham’s encouragement after she arrived in Berlin, in 1921.

What was happening in psychoanalysis at that time?

I shall review a number of issues that seem to me to have been important for Klein as she began to read, probably Freud being her main source of understanding, whilst also guided by Ferenczi (Likierman 2000) and after 1921 by Abraham in Berlin. The issues most pertinent seem to be the understanding of child development, the economic model, the place of object relations and subjectivity in a deterministic science, love and tenderness, and finally the nature of aggression. These topics formed a backdrop to her early formation as a psychoanalyst.

Child development

In his Three Essays on Sexuality (Freud 1905b), Freud turned from symptom relief, to developmental psychology and the understanding of fixation points in the course of the development of the libido in childhood. His ideas drew on his work with adults. To check his ideas he was interested in a direct understanding of children. So, in 1905, he called for people in his acquaintance to observe children in close detail. Little Hans was the most productive of the results. Max Graf engaged his son in ‘conversations’, reported to Freud who told Graf what interpretations to make to the 5-year-old boy. The Little Hans ‘case’ was published in 1909. Ferenczi (1913; English translation 1916) eventually contributed a formal paper on his ‘Little Chanticleer’, which replicated the Little Hans case. In turn, he encouraged Melanie Klein in this direction, and she made her first observations on her own children around 1918. It must have been natural for Klein to refer to Freud’s work. From Little Hans she picked up the inhibition he had in understanding the Oedipal issues underlying his phobia.

Klein in her earliest work followed the same lines. She started with the observation that children’s phantasies have a compulsive and repetitive quality. They had particular difficulty in facing the question of origins – origins of siblings and babies (Klein 1921, 1923). When she answered children’s questions about brothers and sisters and so forth with frank answers, she found them inhibited in listening to the answers. They repeated their questions despite having received answers based on reality (instead of explanations based on the mystifying children’s myths that were usually used in the culture at the time). Intellectual comprehension of the explanations was clearly blocked. The compulsiveness, the inhibition of questions, and the restriction of intellectual activity seemed to be connected with states of tension, or anxiety, in the children. This led Klein to believe that the Oedipus complex was at play. She extended her understanding to intellectual development at school, and the problems a child might have for instance in putting letters together as they learned to write – the combining of letters representing the coupling of the parents. Therefore intellectual development was beset at all turns by primitive emotional anxieties deriving from the Oedipus complex.

In those early years, her observations of children already had distinguishing features. First of all, she emphasised intellectual development and inhibition. The second feature of her work was the central focus she gave to anxiety, which she always thought was the emotional cause of inhibition. She elaborated her own theory of anxiety on the basis of this clinical work and observation, and became increasingly confident that children’s anxiety arose from their anxieties about their own aggression. Only in hindsight did she elaborate metapsychological explanations.

Her earliest work was largely observation. It is believed her subjects were her own children (Grosskurth 1986), just as Graf had had similar conversations with his son. It was not until later, when she was in Berlin and under Karl Abraham’s tutelage, that she really turned her mind to consider how one might apply a truly psychoanalytic technique to treating children who suffered from neurosis. Klein was approaching the problem in the way that Hermine Hug-Hellmuth had done. Hug-Hellmuth, a Viennese analyst, had considered the use of psychoanalysis with children. She believed that it was best as a form of psychoanalytically oriented upbringing, rather than a specific treatment (Hug-Hellmuth 1921). Hug-Hellmuth’s experience, like Graf’s, was largely with a child of her own – in fact, she was the adopted mother of her sister’s illegitimate child.

This approach strongly influenced August Aichhorn (1925) when he established an institution for delinquent boys in Vienna and thought in terms of a psychoanalytically informed education. Anna Freud, too, when she became interested in understanding children psychoanalytically a little after Klein, some time around 1922, based her view on her experience as a teacher. Consequently, she at first thought of the psychoanalyst as a cross between a parent and a moral educator.

Klein moved beyond Hug-Hellmuth who decided that analytic interventions were impossible before the age of 6. Her observations of Fritz (probably her son Erich), reported in 1919, were made when he was 4½ years and onwards. She criticised Hug-Hellmuth’s hesitancy before the age of 6:

it is well known that analyses of the neuroses reveal traumata and sources of injury in events, impressions or developments that occurred at a very early age, that is before the sixth year. What does this information yield for prophylaxis? What can we do just at the age that analysis has taught us is so exceedingly important not only for illness but also for the permanent formation of character and of intellectual development.

(Klein 1921, pp. 15–16)

A little later, in 1924, Hug-Hellmuth was murdered by the son she had subjected to a psychoanalytic upbringing. This set going a good deal of hesitation about the advisability of psychoanalytic interventions in children. Klein’s response was to reinforce her view that psychoanalysis should be restricted to a formal treatment setting and not used as an adjunct or even contaminant in upbringing by parents, or in education by teachers. By this time she had already worked out a formal treatment setting. She called it the play technique. Play is for children what free association is for adults. The analysis of resistance, as psychoanalysis largely was then, became the analysis of the inhibition in children’s play.

The economic model

Significant as psychoanalytic child development was for Klein’s development, probably in the long run it was the ambiguity in Freud’s scientific approach which influenced her own professional development. A great deal has been written about Freud as a scientist (Popper 1954, Sulloway 1979, Clark 1980, Grunbaum 1984, Webster 1995, Forrester 1997). He was avowedly a nineteenth-century natural scientist, and had been committed to a natural science explanation of psychology for twenty-five years – since his ‘Project’ in 1895. His economic theory consisted of quasi-quantifiable explanations of the location and flow of mental energy, and these were his credentials for claiming a scientific, objective natural-science-like theory. Freud had always proceeded as a scientist. However, from early on, he was meeting actual patients who were intent on being regarded as subjective human beings engaging in relationships. Scientific determinism, and Freud’s version of that, ‘psychic determinism’, sit poorly with the imploring neediness of suffering people. Mental energy and mental suffering can only clumsily be equated.

So, Freud’s scientific mission was in fact distinct from his practice. Freud’s research methods evolved from his training as a neurophysiologist with Helmholtz and Brucke. He used the ‘law of conservation of energy’ to derive the hypothetical notion of psychic energy. He tried to work in the same way as a physicist might deal with electrical currents in experiments in a laboratory. He saw the role of the analyst as controlling the play of psychic forces. Freud continued with this view as late as 1913, the analyst’s role being to handle these forces almost like a military general. We can see him emphasising a meta-level here. The analyst’s primary focus was on the play of forces in the mind, and less on the actual meaning in the suffering. Once revealed to consciousness, those meanings would no longer be problematic. If the play of forces between conscious and unconscious were readjusted then the mental content (whatever it was in each individual) could flow and function normally again. For Freud, the analyst could stand above the meaning of the suffering, as a surgeon poised to operate. The anguish of the meanings tended to be a matter for the patient to work through.

This tension between scientific determinism, and listening to the suffering of another human being, caused further distress sometimes. A crisis over this tension occurred early on, with the Dora case in late 1900 (Freud 1905a). At that time, Freud was publishing his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and in Dora’s analysis he had focused on her two dreams. He intended it as an exemplary analysis to supplement the Interpretation of Dreams, one useful for demonstrating his new science of psychoanalysis (Jones 1953). His role was to act as the manager (or even manipulator) of the forces in Dora which resisted and concealed the meanings in the dreams.

However, Dora posed a challenge to this. For her the analyst was not just a distant observing researcher enquiring dispassionately into the play of forces in her mind. The message Dora gave Freud was, ‘This is personal; this is personal between you and me.’ Belatedly, long after the analysis had been interrupted, Freud realised that there was something about him that reminded Dora of some specific other person; in fact, a certain Herr K. The story was nasty. Herr K was a friend of Dora’s father, who in turn was having an affair with Frau K. In order to appease Herr K, Dora’s father was willing to collude in the seduction of Dora by Herr K. In fact, Dora refused the seduction. It would seem that Dora felt the analysis was a version of this same outrageous seduction. She felt that she was given to Freud in the same outrageous way her father offered her to Herr K. The story is so nasty, and the part allotted to Freud, as seducer, so outrageous that it may be understandable that for Freud it took a long time for the penny to drop – from Dora’s point of view he really was an outrageous seducer.

For Dora this very specific meaning identified Freud as a repeat occurrence of her previous trauma. It became directly experienced in the here-and-now of Freud’s experimenting. His single-minded pursuit of the dreams to the exclusion of her experiences felt to Dora like the sexual needs of her father and Herr K excluding her own experience. Freud eventually realised, too late of course, that he represented this previous (sexual) exploitation by Herr K. It is not surprising that she rejected analysis exactly as she had fled from Herr K. Perhaps it is not too surprising that Freud was slow to recognise these unconscious undercurrents that expressed themselves directly within the analytic relationship. However much this could be interpreted in terms of the economy of psychic energy discharged in dreams, it was the personal relational experience which really counted at the crucial moment.

Of course Freud learned from this. He, as the analyst, was not simply the commander of the ‘good’ forces. He was a significant representative of the forces that made Dora resist as well. He was confronted with ‘negative transference’, and the full versatility of repetition in the analytic relationship. This case was extremely significant in the historical development of psychoanalysis. Its implications took a long time to take full effect, but by the time Klein came to psychoanalysis, relational repetition was a powerful force to be reckoned with (Freud 1914). The difficulty that Dora’s affront to Freud caused for his theories based on psychic energy and psychic topography was that Dora’s experience in analysis enacted a human narrative with Freud. Human narrative does not easily conform to natural science. He never really did reconcile his two explanatory conceptions of the person – the natural science of energy, topography and dynamics, or experiential, narrative empathy. As his practice continued he was increasingly pushed towards recognising the subjectivity of his discipline, and the core feature in his practice became the transference – that is to say the dramatic representation of relations with others. His ‘metapsychology’ was an attempt to rise above the conceptual conflict by separating the levels of explanation. One level was the patient’s experiences of relations and of others (objects), and the other level that of the scientific analyst interpreting those experiences in abstract terms.

However, the trend towards Freud’s experiential narrative goal, which has gained force over the years, cannot so easily be confined to a separate level of abstraction. Klein’s work implicitly demonstrated that. There is an important sense in which from the beginning she allowed her children to speak for themselves. For instance, Rita (aged 2¾ years) needed her toy elephant as a boundary keeper at night-time, to express for her the super-ego function of protecting the parents who excluded her, from ‘doing something to them or taking something away from them’ (Klein 1923, p. 6). Later, when she was embarking on theory building herself, patients’ phantasies became metapsychological theory, for instance the fear of aggression towards the loved object became the depressive position arising from the confluence of opposing instincts. The disjunction between patients’ phanta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Who wants to be a scientist? The historical and psychoanalytic context at the start of Klein’s career: circa 1918–1921
• 2 Klein on human nature
• 3 Destruction and madness
• 4 Projective identification
• 5 Precious illusions: re-constructing realities
• 6 Klein’s theory of the positions revisited
• 7 Hegel on projective identification: implications for Klein, Bion, and beyond
• 8 Childhood play as tragic drama
• 9 Attachment, metaphor and the relationality of meaning
• 10 Kleinian theory is natural law theory
• Index