The Anatomy of Regret

From Death Instinct to Reparation and Symbolization through Vivid Clinical Cases

Susan Kavaler-Adler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429920073
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Anatomy of Regret has a highly clinical focus, with cases that illustrate how critical psychic change can emerge from the mourning of the grief of "psychic regret". This book highlights the developmental achievement of owning the guilt of aggression, and of tolerating insight into the losses one had produced. The author uses the term "psychic regret" to capture the essence of the process of facing regret consciously. This is in contrast to the split-off and persecutory dynamics of unconscious guilt. Unconscious guilt exposes itself through visceral and cognitive impingements, which are related to internal world enactments, and it relies on unconscious avoidance of the pain and loss involved in facing psychic regret. The author's theory of "developmental mourning" is illustrated in this book through in-depth lively clinical processes (cases and vignettes).

Chapter One
Developmental transformation of aggression within mourning

Psychoanalytic theories on aggression in the developmental mourning process

Sigmund Freud, in his classic 1917 paper, "Mourning and melancholia", wrote of the adhesive tie of the self to this object in terms of the libido sticking adhesively to its lost object. This pertained to his picture of the normal mourning process, as opposed to the pathologically arrested mourning that he described in the psychologically paralysed "melancholic". It was only in the case of the melancholic that Freud (1917e) addressed the issue of aggression. He did so in relation to the defensive use of aggression within the melancholic, who was arrested in his need to mourn due to the psychological block created by defensive aggression. For the melancholic, according to Freud (1917e), the aggression which he related to drive and instinct was unconsciously felt as hatred towards the lost others. In Freud's "melancholic", the lost love object was thought to be irrevocably lost, as in death, not symbolically lost as in psychological separation and its developmental evolutions. Freud brilliantly deduced that the melancholic continually attacks himself with self-recriminations, while defensively turning his hatred towards the lost other against himself (masochistically). This defensive self-attack observed by Freud can be seen by those of us who have worked extensively with resistances to mourning in the clinical situation as the key resistive block to any normal mourning and letting-go process. This contrasts highly with the normal mourner observed by Freud, who was capable of tolerating the painful and slow work of mourning, consequently gradually letting go of the adhesive libido tie to the lost other.

What is so striking here is that, in the case of Freud's (1917e) mourner, aggression was not seen by Freud as being phenomenologically present in the psychological dynamics of mourning. It is only in the case of blocked and pathological mourning, as seen in Freud's melancholic, that Freud addressed aggression as a significant psychological factor, and it was seen as impeding the mourning, not as being part of its progression and process. Thus, in "Mourning and melancholia", Freud made no distinctions between internally enacted aggression and symbolic experiences of aggression represented in the internal world. Freud seemed to have believed that the normal mourner suffered only from loss as manifested in a painful letting-go process. He metaphorically pictures someone with an adhesive bandage sticking mightily to the skin, hurting with each pull of the adhesive bandage being torn from it. Attachment of the libido to the object made the process of separating from it, forced by an irrevocable loss (generally through death), painful. But Freud saw no role for aggressive impulse or instinct in the process. Neither did he see aggressive conflicts such as the one spied in the melancholic (where guilt towards the lost other turned into hatred against the self) as having a course towards a normal mourning process. Freud (1917e) never brought up a question about the object being hateful (or "bad") in reality, as Fairbairn (1952) did. In relation to mourning, Freud viewed aggression as a blockage, and not as any form of facilitation or stepping stone in a normal mourning process. In spite of this, however, it is so fascinating that it is in the same paper, "Mourning and melancholia" (1917e), that Freud viewed mourning as a profound psychological phenomena, as he introduced his first thoughts on object relations theory, which do lead the way to seeing aggression in developmental terms, not just in "drive" terms. This basic mourning becomes an aspect of life lived within the psychological internalisation of an external object. This results in an internal world that transcends the phenomenology of impulse and instinct. When Freud declares that "the shadow of the object fell upon the ego" (1917e, p. 248), he speaks the language of today within his Victorian world's dialectic. Essentially, he is saying that the shadow of the parents' (first, the mother's) personality falls upon the "self". From these words, everything follows in object relations theory in its developmental dimensions. Freud was, and stands today, as our first object relations theorist because of this line in "Mourning and melancholia", even though he turned his back on his own meaning, and began to concentrate his theoretical focus on the concept of drive once more. Yet, with this one line, Freud linked mourning with basic psychological connection, which we know at first from birth into the arms of our mothers. It is Melanie Klein who begins to heal the rift seen in Freud's descriptions, the rift between mourning and aggression, and between loss and aggression. If Freud had not written "Mourning and melancholia" in 1917, Melanie Klein might never have written "Mourning and its relation to manic depressive states" in 1940. Melanie Klein follows Freud, and yet subsumes him in some significant aspects that apply to our understanding of human development today and, in particular, to an object relations understanding of that human development.

Melanie Klein

When Melanie Klein wrote her classic paper on "Mourning and its relation to manic depressive states" in 1940, she faced the phenomenon of aggression within mourning head-on, and she did so not only from the perspective of a theorist and analyst, but also from the perspective of a patient. Klein's case example in that paper of "Mrs A" was actually about herself, a woman who had just lost her oldest adult male son to death, probably in a skiing accident (although there have been speculative rumours about suicide, possibly instigated by Klein's angry daughter, Melitta). In "Mourning and its relation to manic depressive states", Klein speaks of Mrs A's incapacity to mourn after she first hears of her son's death. Yet, probably distinct from the melancholic in Freud's (1917e) paper, Klein's Mrs A undergoes a critical transformation, which pivots around the recovery of unconscious aggression for conscious life, through the avenue of psychic fantasy. The avenue of psychic fantasy allows protosymbolic impulse/instinct to convert into symbolic cognitive understanding through imagery associated with affect. As the unconscious aggression becomes conscious, it becomes part of a normal mourning process, which extends, through Klein, to a critical clinical and developmental process.

Melanie Klein as Mrs A

Let's enter into the story of Mrs A to understand this. When Melanie Klein (1940) begins the tale of Mrs A, she has just been struck with a transition shock that numbs her. She has just heard of her adult son's death, the death of Hans. She is in intense psychic pain, and can find no relief in tears, since the shock seems to have mobilised her defences to repress and seal herself off from contact with her inner self. The shock of the news of her son's death has also disrupted her contact and connection with others. Klein speaks of her withdrawing from friends and colleagues into a cocoon of literal and psychological isolation. In this isolation, she cannot feel the sadness or the feelings of grief that need to come from an internal core self-connection. In addition, Melanie Klein's normal facility to dream is arrested. She speaks of the "theatre" of her "internal world's" life as being forcibly and compulsively closed for her, despite her conscious need to read her dreams, which she seems to have done regularly prior to the traumatising news of her loss. Once shocked by the news of her son's death, Melanie Klein (as "Mrs A") avoids going outside, even to a restaurant. In fact, the trauma causes her to feel dizzy and threatened in the outside world, which now signifies danger and a lack of protection to her. When once venturing out, she experiences the ceiling coming down towards her, as if it were to eclipse her with its homicidal threat, despite its actual inert nature. At home again, with tears that "bring no relief", she suffers the psychological pressure of her need to mourn and her inability to grieve. Finally, her defences start to yield to this pressure, and her dream life resurfaces from its latent casbah, opening its manifest imagery, not in terms of Freud's disguises, but in terms of the symbolic imagery that brings meaning from the unconscious and its internal world of self and other relations to the conscious mind.

Being on her own, psychologically, after her analytic experiences with Sandor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein faces her own internal world squarely. She begins a critical mourning process, which becomes symbolic for humanity's ubiquitous psychodynamics. She discovers, through focusing on free association in her mind, as a good Freudian would do, that she is back in a childhood scene, where a schoolmate of her brother is hostile and contemptuous towards her brother and mother. Following Freud's (1920g) theories of instinctual aim being displaced from one object to another, Melanie Klein derives her own theory of psychological displacement through experiencing the characters of her internal world through her dreams. In Melanie Klein's (1940) mourning process, feelings and affects (not just instinctual impulses) are displaced from one subject to another subject, from one object to another, and from one subject to an object, or vice versa. She follows her own developing theory of an internal world to discover here the historical figures in her dreams, which are linked to her and her loss of her son in the present. Her own defensive aggression is transferred from herself in the past to the external objects of the historical context in her dream, excusing her and leaving her to be an empathic voyeur, where, in psychological reality, according to Klein herself, she harbours her hostile aggression towards the figures of her present and past life, who now reside in her internal world, symbolised in her dream. Klein's free association process, within her selfanalysis, leads her to deduce that the dream of a hostile little boy who is being cold and contemptuous to her brother and mother, with herself looking on innocently and feeling compassion for her mother and brother, is actually a displacement of her own hostile impulse and attitude from herself to the little boy stranger. Klein points to her own avoidance of aggression as she looks at her own creation of a dream in which the little boy and his mother, outsiders to her family, are seen as the aggressors, rather than herself or her brother and mother. Klein, however, as a character and as a theorist, knows that her primary family and her primary mother are unconsciously re-enacted in her dreams in relation to the deepest layers of her own psyche's aggression. Klein was capable of spotting her own existential guilt within her portrayed innocence. Through her awareness of this, she rescues the split-off aggression that paralysed and incapacitated her, fully owning it within her conscious mind. She realises that, indeed, she is not truly an innocent bystander who is compassionate while the stranger is contemptuous. Instead, she is the owner of the contempt towards both her mother and brother. This contempt is defensively programmed by the unconscious part of her ego, to defend her against feeling and awareness of her envy towards her mother and her brother, a theme she develops later in her 1957 work, Envy and Gratitude. (In all of this, Klein does not cite the contempt directed towards her by her mother and brother, a story told vividly by one of her biographers, Phyllis Grosskurth, in 1986. For Klein, to focus on this contempt, its internalisation and identification within her internal world, would be to move towards a developmental view, which she was not inclined to do, although some later Kleinians have explored this terrain, a terrain I am expanding in this book.)

How did this help Klein as Mrs A to mourn? Klein saw her contempt displaced into her brother's childhood male classmate. She then began to connect the links between the internal objects of her past and present, and how this affected her current dilemma of loss and her organic need to grieve and mourn. She surmised that the contempt she displaced on to the other in the dream was not only a defensive contempt directed at her brother and mother in her childhood, but was also a contempt she harboured defensively towards her son, who, on an unconscious level, was linked (in terms of internal-world-object-relations-linkage) to her son; her son as an adult. Klein's deceased son came to represent to Klein her childhood brother and her primal mother. Melanie Klein's emotional hunger joined all three of them, her son, her brother, and her mother, as objects of psychic and emotional need. Her aggressive rivalry with them also joined all three. Her aggressive rivalry (and envy) created conflict with Klein's need and desire for all of them. Because of contempt that was symptomatic of an envious rivalry with her son, Klein could not mourn his loss, because, like Freud's melancholic, her unconscious hate was blocking her mourning. My clinical experience of over thirty-five years shows that in order to grieve and mourn, one must have more love than hate. There is no surrender to the core self-affect of grief sadness without this. Too much aggression that manifests as hate towards another will block this surrender, as happened with Melanie Klein. Klein's discovery of her hidden contempt towards her son began to open the doorway to conscious ownership of the aggression that had been split off and repressed into an unconscious frozen state.

Another dream of Mrs A in Klein's (1940) paper further reveals Mrs A's split-off, repressed aggression, and, even more directly, brings home the connection between Klein's aggression expressed in the attitude of contempt and her attachment to her lost son. It was a dream that Klein (as Mrs A) had which showed her to be in a psychic state of triumph, contempt, and control towards her son, who was represented in her dream as an internal object. This defensive and aggressive trilogy spoke to Klein from her dream, and would become the symbolic imagery of her theory of manic defence. Melanie Klein (1975) (as Mrs A) dreamed of lording it over her son, of triumphing over him by the very fact that she continued to live, at the exact time when he checked out and submitted to death. In her dream, Klein defensively controlled her internal affect life, so that she actually inhibited her own affect in all vulnerable and loving dimensions. She became, in her dream, the queen of dancing on her son's grave.

As her own analyst, Klein (1975) (and, thus, Mrs A) faced her mania directly. She wanted to decipher her own defensive drama, to find the psychic truth that her unconscious harboured as it created its displaced images in the symbolic area of her internal world, an arena that defied her more visceral state of numbness and shock. Melanie Klein was able to use her psychological vision, looking at her denial and at her wishes to triumph over her own contempt, as she made historical links between her internal world and her brother and mother. She was able to own her hostility. She found her psychological agency there by transforming unconscious hostile aggression into symbolic and conscious aggression. She found her childhood rage (initially at her mother) that had hardened into the defensive attitude of contempt. In feeling the actual affect of primal rage, she opened the doors to her surrender to grief.

Klein (1975) (as Mrs A) was able to cry tears of grief after her discovery of her unconscious aggression, following her own dream analysis. These tears, unlike the earlier ones, can bring relief. I interpret this in relation to the new tears being genuine tears of grief sadness that evolved from an authentic connection to her core self. It seems that this surrender is of a different quality from Freud's mourner, who painfully pulls off the adhesive bandage of libido from the lost object. This grief is about object relations. It speaks of selfconnection, through connection with the love for one's internal world primal and libidinal secondary objects. Grief is based on love, and mourning is the overall process that culminates in this grief. But mourning also is a process that encompasses the affectively alive internal object relations, which are stepping-stones to the love within grief. Part of this affectively alive object-related experience is the vitality of conscious aggression. Unlike Freud's (1917e) melancholic, Klein's (1940) Mrs A was able to travel a psychological path from aggression to grief, which outlined the contours of her overall mourning process. Freud's melancholic stayed locked in despair, as evidenced by a self-attack that served defensively to contain the hate and hostility towards the lost object of attachment. Klein's Mrs A consciously owned her aggressive impulses as a hate towards an envied and needed object. Her conscious ownership of her own aggression brought self-agency through unblocking the core connection to the self. This self-agency allowed for surrender to the internal self, and, thus, to grief related to loss of the loved one (Kavaler-Adler, 2007). Freud's (1917e) melancholic could not surrender. He/she was forced to oppose his/her organic self, and, thus, to be perpetually imprisoned in an internal solipsistic sadomasochism. Freud's hypothesised mourner, in contrast to his melancholic, did not even emerge as a character. The entire process of mourning is, thus, left abstract as a metaphor of an adhesive libido painfully being ripped away from its deceased object of attachment. Consequently, Freud does not encounter the whole question of how aggression can be part and parcel of a normal mourning process, as opposed to being an obstacle placed in the way of mourning that results in the pathological mourning state of the melancholic. Freud would have needed Melanie Klein's theory of development from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive positions to go further (Klein, 1940).

From paranoid to depressive positions

Klein's phenomenology of the paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions is a developmental as well as a clinical theory. It is, however, too limited a developmental theory, as strictly defined by Klein's writings, and post-Kleinian clinician-theorists are attempting to significantly expand its developmental usefulness (Alexander, 1997; Ogden, 1986). To extend the developmental aspects of Klein's phenomenological psychic states, which are dynamic in their dialectic of regressive and progressive psychic motions, her metapsychology must be, at least in part, eschewed. The concept of primal trauma, similar to Michael Balint's (1979) "basic fault", must be accepted as a foundation for pathology, as opposed to the notion of pure psychic conflict that is exclusively related to instinctual impulse.

For Klein, movements from the paranoid–schizoid state of mind to that of the depressive position state of mind are both fundamental to a primary developmental growth in self-integration, and are also a continuing psychic transition in one's way of thinking that occurs throughout one's lifetime. We never totally leave the paranoidschizoid position behind. We never totally relinquish the repression process and its varying modes that are more refined and sophisticated forms of primal splitting and disavowal.

Yet, there is a fundamental shift in a self and world perspective that occurs in each of us in our primary years of development, as long as primal trauma does not disrupt this developmentally natural change of perspective. This shift in psychic perspective becomes a progressive realignment of our emotional world blueprint, as it affects our interpretation of our experience in the external world. In the depressive position, we are able to tolerate all psychic parts of the self, both loving and hating parts, so that an ambivalent state of good-enough love for the other as a whole, with good and bad parts, can be tolerated. Prior to the depressive position, the disowning of one's hate for a loved object places one in the dilemma of cutting off from any desired and needed object at the point of anger and disappointment. Wandering from one person to another, following each disappointment in pure love, and in the idealised perfection of the other, results in a fragmentation of experience that leaves us to exist in the world in a fragmented self-state. Without primary sustained relationships in one's life, nothing is sustained.

Klein (1932) spoke of the six-month infant travelling psychically from the paranoid–schizoid position to the depressive position. She seemed to be assigning the change to the six-month period in relation to her concept of weaning from breastfeeding (and breast holding), as the primal era of separation. Today, with infant research, particularly the work of Margaret Mahler and Anni Bergman, we know that eighteen months to thirty-six months (the era of practising and rapprochement) is a critical era of separation, although the infant seems to have certain distinct and interactive self-states, even in the first few months of life, as Stern's (1985) work has informed us.

Klein (1932) spoke of the newly born infant as an automatic deflector of overwhelming hostile aggression, which she, unfortunately, called "death instinct" or "death instinct energy" in her metapsychology. Perhaps Klein's theoretical fantasy of this infant self-state, long before our major infant research, was in part a projection of her own overwhelmed psychic state. Grosskurth (1986), the author of Melanie Klein's biography, described Klein growing up with an extremely aggressive, narcissistic, and envious mother, Libussa, who revealed herself vividly in the letters she wrote to her daughter. It is very possible that all the aggression of her mother imploding in her, as well as her mother's use of Melanie as her own extension (which caused arrested developmental strivings), could have engendered in Melanie Klein the very state of defensive psychology which she imagined in an infant. This is a state of persecution and terror, a state of paranoia, in which one's own aggression is felt as a continuing attack or threat from others outside the self. Klein's infant aligns with an idealised breast mother, to ward off the persecutors. (In my amended view of Klein, the persecutors are experienced in psychic fantasy as the mother of separation, who, unlike the breast mother, is cold, due to her limits or her entrapping resistance to her child's need for autonomy and separateness.) The good, nurturing parts of mummy are preserved in this way, so that the infant can survive, because the infant needs to trust this god-like creature, the mother, who is the one and only one on whom life depends. To protect the mother as a good object, the child must view the mother as ideal. All frustrations from mother, from one's own body, and from the world would be experienced by the infant as caused by mother. Such pain-inducing experience is split off and experienced as the persecutory attacks of a bad mother. This "bad" mother must be defended against by an alliance with the good mother, who, in fantasy, is perfect o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION Conscious regret promoting psychic change within developmental mourning: a developmental view of the depressive position
• Dedication
• CHAPTER ONE Developmental transformation of aggression within mourning
• CHAPTER TWO Conscious regret in clinical treatment engendering a critical turn towards love and creativity healing a schizoid woman and her family: the case of Sharon
• CHAPTER THREE From crime to regret: an affect-level view of psychic transformation and the capacity to love
• CHAPTER FOUR Tolerable and intolerable regret: clinical transformation of the intolerable into the tolerable
• CHAPTER FIVE Facing the ghost of failures in mothering. Regret evolving into love and play: the case of Anastasia, Part I
• CHAPTER SIX The interaction of negative transference and the mourning of regrets in psychic transformation: the case of Anastasia, Part II
• CHAPTER SEVEN The grief of regret motivating commitment to marriage in a woman: Sarah's extramarital affair
• CHAPTER EIGHT The grief of regret allowing commitment in marriage in the man: the case of Oscar
• Conclusion
• REFERENCES
• INDEX