Klein

Hanna Segal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429915444
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) was a pioneer of child analysis whose work with children enabled her to gain insight on the deepest states of the mind and thus to make a fundamental contribution to psychoanalytic theory. A pupil and follower of Freud, she investigated what he called "the dim and shadowy era" of early childhood, developing theories and techniques which, although they remain controversial, have had a profound influence not only on clinical psychoanalysis but also on fields outside it. Her understanding of the paranoid-schizoid mechanisms and of the role of envy extended the range of patients who can be psychoanalyzed, to include those suffering from borderline states between neurosis and psychosis. And her work shed light on the psychological basis of ethics, on theories of thinking, on group relations, and on aesthetics. The author worked with Melanie Klein and is now one of Britain's leading psychoanalysts. She traces the development of Klein's ideas within a biographical framework, describing the importance of her work and portraying her as a woman of great warmth and exceptional insight.

1 Introduction

Melanie Klein was a pupil and a follower of Freud. Through her work, at first mainly with children, she extended the area of knowledge and understanding opened up by Freud and she came to some new formulations which in certain ways developed Freud’s ideas, and in others differed from his. I cannot present her work without reviewing, if only in a bare outline, some of the psychoanalytical ideas on which she based it.

By 1919, when she started her work, psychoanalytical theory had undergone a considerable evolution and Freud’s theory of the psychic development was in some respects complete. There were, however, two new major theoretical formulations to come. The 1920s was one of the turning points in psychoanalytical theory. In 1920, in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’,¹ Freud formulated his theory of the duality of the life and death instincts, and in 1923, in ‘The Ego and the Id’,² he worked out fully the structural theory of the mind in terms of the id, the ego and the superego. Those developments led also to a change in his views on the nature of psychic conflict, anxiety and guilt. Melanie Klein who, in her work with children, became convinced of the importance of innate aggression, was the only major follower of Freud to adopt fully his theory of the death instinct and to work out its clinical implications. She also developed further the structural theory throwing new light on the origin, composition and functioning of the superego. Her approach to anxiety and guilt is more in keeping with Freud’s later formulations than with his earlier ones.

One could say that psychoanalysis starts with Freud’s discovery in his work with hysterical patients that symptoms have meaning. This led to the discovery of unconscious processes, of repression and symbolism. These discoveries are inseparable from one another. In a barest outline one could summarize Freud’s view as follows: the painful or forbidden memory, impulse or phantasy is not allowed into consciousness; it is repressed, but remains dynamic in the person’s unconscious and strives for expression; it finds symbolical expression in the symptom; the symptom is a compromise between the repressed ideas and feelings and the repressing forces. Freud was soon led to see that intrapsychic conflicts and compromise solutions lie not only in the domain of pathology. He discovered that dreams, a universal human phenomenon, have a structure similar to that of neurotic symptoms, and that repression and compromise solutions are part of human nature and development. Starting with a simple application of hypnosis, he gradually developed the psychoanalytic technique of free association and interpretation, which allowed him to study repressed thoughts and feelings, the reasons for their repression and the various mental mechanisms for dealing with them. He found that the material repressed is predominantly of a sexual nature. (In contrast to popular misconception, he never contended that it was exclusively so.) This repressed sexuality is different from what is considered normal (that is, genital and heterosexual). It is bi-sexual, and of a markedly perverse polymorphous kind, including sado-masochistic, oral, anal, urethral, voyeuristic, exhibi-tionistic impulses corresponding to what, in adult sexual activity , would be perversions. This is so even in people who, in their conscious lives, are sexually normal. Freud came to the conclusion that there is not one simple sexual instinct, but that sexuality is a compound of component instincts deriving from various areas of the body and having various aims. In normal adult sexuality the genital instinct and aim predominate. These polymorphous component instincts originate in infancy and childhood. The discovery of infantile sexuality was revolutionary. It is infantile sexuality which gives rise to conflicts and leads to repression and to the other defences which he and his followers discovered later. The symptoms of the neurotic or the symbolism in dreams do not arise simply out of the repression of a contemporary adult conflict. It is the elements of the unconscious infantile sexuality expressed in the current problem which mobilize the infantile conflicts and bring about repression.

In the relatively short period of time between Freud’s discoveries about the nature of hysteria and the radical departures of the early 1920s, Freud, Ferenczi, Abraham, Jones and others made tremendous advances in mapping out the psycho-sexual development of the child and tracing its effects on adult personality. Although it is, of course, impossible in a short introduction to give full weight to the mass of psychoanalytical work and ideas on which Melanie Klein based her work, I shall try to indicate the context in which it evolved and shall return to some of the points already mentioned when examining in greater detail the use she made of those ideas, and particularly the ways in which she developed them or departed from them.

In sorting out the history of the component instincts, Freud established that they originate at different periods of the child’s life. He called the total sexual energy libido, and he described the successive stages of libidinal development. Any instinct, according to him, has a source, an aim and an object. The source is always a part of the body, the erotogenic zone. The aim is the discharge of a sexual tension. The object is an object appropriate for providing this satisfaction. The erotogenic zones are connected with vital functions. Thus, the oral component instinct derives from the vital function of eating, the anal and urethal from de-faecating and urinating and the genital from the reproductive function. The satisfaction of the vital need gives rise to erotic arousal and pleasure which is then sought for its own sake. The infant’s first instinctual vital need is feeding, and thus the oral component instinct is the first to be aroused and the mouth is the first erotogenic zone. Sucking at the mother’s breast is the starting point of the whole sexual life – The unmatched prototype of every later sexual satisfaction, to which phantasy often enough recurs in times of need’.³ The primacy of the oral gives way to that of the anal when the child begins to develop sphincter control. Expelling the stool, retaining it, wishing to be anally penetrated, becomes the centre of the infantile sexual experience. Freud originally considered that the genital stage succeeded directly the anal, but he later added, between the anal and the genital, the phallic stage, occurring between the ages of three and six. At that stage the male child discovers his penis as the seat of tension and pleasure. He sees the phallus as the only sexual organ there is, and having no awareness of the female genital he phantasies his mother as having a penis like himself and his father – as the ‘phallic woman’. Thus in Freud’s description the development of the libido in the child has three phases: the oral, the anal and the phallic. The genital phase, in which the sexes are properly differentiated, does not come into full force until puberty. When Freud speaks of the organization of the libido in these phases, he has in mind not only that a particular component instinct predominates in any given phase, but also that this instinct is associated with appropriate aims and objects. Thus, the aim of the oral instinct is sucking or devouring, the appropriate object being the breast. The anal component instinct aims at expelling or retaining, its appropriate object being the stool. The phallic instinct is to penetrate – the account of the phallic object is more complicated as, according to Freud, there is a long evolution of the object relationship before the appropriate object (the vagina) is discovered. The frustration of these drives gives rise to aggression, which seeks expression in similarly phase-appropriate ways. Thus, oral aggression takes the form of wishing to bite or to devour cannibalistically, anal aggression that of desiring to expel, burn or poison with faeces, phallic aggression that of a desire to cut, penetrate and tear.

It is characteristic of the libido that it is very plastic and can move from aim to aim and from object to object. One organ may be substituted for another and take over its functions. In phantasy, the anus can take the place of the mouth, the penis can replace the breast as an object of oral desires, the stool may substitute for a penis or for a baby, the baby can represent the penis, etc.

Normally the libido progresses from the oral to the anal to the phallic and finally to the genital phase. But unsatisfactory experience may lead to a phenomenon called by Freud fixation. A part of the libido gets fixated at a pre-genital stage and attached to the aims and objects of that phase. When this happens the organization at the genital stage is weak and insecure, and regression to the earlier phase – the point of fixation – easily occurs. This return to an organization belonging to a pre-genital stage is, in Freud’s view, the determining factor of adult neurosis.

Sexual instincts undergo development: gradually the pre-genital instincts are repressed as genitality becomes dominant, but they never quite lose their power. Continuing in the unconscious, they undergo various vicissitudes and give rise to symptoms, sublimation or character traits – orality may express itself in greed or, for instance, in appetite for knowledge. Anality can result in obsessional character traits or, as positive achievements, orderliness and cleanliness. Freud described the oral and anal character and Abraham and Jones added a great deal to his description. When the sexual aim of an instinct is inhibited so that it loses its sexual character, it may give rise to sublimation, a displacement from a sexual to a non-sexual aim. Thus, Freud describes a complex evolution of the sexual instincts preceding the final genital organization.

The object of the sexual desires also undergoes an evolution. In Freud’s view, a proper sexual object does not begin to appear in psychic life until the late anal and phallic phase. The oral instinct first’ has as its object the breast, but then the breast is abandoned as a sexual object, possibly because it is not uninterruptedly available, and the infant becomes auto-erotic. It seeks satisfaction in its own body, in such activities as sucking its fingers or its lips. The instinct finds its satisfaction but appears to have no object. Auto-erotism gradually progresses to narcissism. Although the infant’s or the child’s own body is still the source of satisfaction, in narcissism (as distinct from auto-erotism), its own body is experienced as an object. This may seem to be a distinction without a difference, but psychologically it is not so. Narcissism is a transition between auto-erotism and the relationship with an external object. In phantasy the child can project his own body on to his object, and in that way the object becomes an object of desire – it is cathected. A fixation to narcissism can give rise later in life to a narcissistic object choice. The narcissistic person seeks in his partner a representation of himself and loves himself in his partner.

It is only in the phallic stage that the parents become objects of sexual desire, and this ushers in the Oedipus complex which is, as is well known, a central part of the psychoanalytical theory. The boy begins to desire as a sexual object his mother, the person who has always been the source of his comforts, pleasures and satisfactions. He becomes aware of the sexual relation between his parents, and his desire for his mother leads to violent jealousy of his father which makes him hate him and wish him dead – like Oedipus, he wishes to kill his father in order to possess his mother. These desires conflict with both the fear and the love he has for his father, the predominant fear being that father will castrate him as a punishment for his sexual wishes. Fear of castration, above all, forces the boy to repress his sexuality towards mother and his aggression towards father.

His love for his father in that phase has also a strong sexual component. One of Freud’s discoveries was that of bi-sexuality, the fact that all human beings have masculine and feminine sexual strivings. So in addition to the positive Oedipus complex, the boy also has a negative Oedipus complex: he desires sexually his father and his mother is his rival. He wants to be penetrated and possessed by his father, but since the fulfilment of those desires would lead to emasculation, his homosexual wishes have to be repressed as well. In normal development the repression of homosexual wishes is more complete and permanent than that of heterosexual ones.

The girl also goes through a phallic phase. According to Freud, she has no awareness of the vagina, and her clitoris is the leading erotogenic zone, similar to the penis. The little girl’s Oedipus complex, in his account, diverges in many particulars from that of the boy, and I shall discuss this in more detail when I consider the difference between his views and those of Melanie Klein.

The Oedipus complex is a turning point in the individual’s development. It is in relation to the Oedipus complex that repression sets in, and that, as a defence against Oedipal anxieties, regression occurs to pre-genital phases. All children at this moment go through a transient neurosis – the infantile neurosis – developing, in response to the Oedipal situation, defences which lead to the formation of phobias, obsessions and other symptoms. Adult neurosis is a regression to this infantile neurosis.

It is also as a consequence of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex that the superego is established and the individual’s basic mental structure is largely determined. The child attempts to resolve his ambivalence towards the father by internalizing him and making him a part of himself. The father is set up in intra-psychic reality both as a figure who acts as a conscience and as a figure with which to identify.

In 1923 Freud called this internal figure the superego, but he had described such a figure in the internal world before. In Mourning and Melancholia (1917) he had shown that the self-reproaches of the melancholic are, in fact, mutual reproaches between the self and an internalized father. Furthermore, the melancholic identifies with this internal figure – ‘the shadow of the object fell upon the ego’.⁴ But at that time Freud believed such internalizations and identifications to be the domain of pathology. He later came to the conclusion that this process is part of normal development. The pathology of the melancholic’s inner state lies in the excessive hatred in his ambivalence. The superego, as Freud described it in his later work, has three functions: self-observation and criticism, punishment and setting up ideal goals. That last aspect of the superego is derived from what Freud had earlier described as ‘the ego ideal’. The origin of the ego ideal is narcissistic: ‘What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal.’⁵ In ‘The Ego and the Id’,⁶ Freud considers the ego ideal indistinguishable from the superego, attributing ego ideal functions also to the superego. The narcissistic aim of being loved and approved of by one’s own self becomes merged with the desire to be loved and approved of by the ideal internal parent, the superego. The ego may submit to the superego’s demands, both because of fear of punishment and the need to be loved. Mother, as well as father, enters into the final composition of the superego.

His concepts of the superego and of the duality of life and death instincts enabled Freud to formulate the structural theory of the mind. He describes the mind as consisting of three structures. The id is the instinctual endowment. It functions on the pleasure-pain principle. That is, its only aim is to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. It takes no account of reality and deals with frustration by omnipotent hallucinatory wish-fulfilment. Out of this id, through contact with reality, evolves the ego which mediates between the id and reality; it develops a reality principle. It is, to begin with, an outer crust of the id; it is the perceptual apparatus, and it also controls the motor functions. It painfully learns the reality of frustrations, seeks to assess reality and to find real means of satisfaction. It is also a psychic structure, being the organ of perception of inner states. When the superego is formed the ego has to mediate not only between the id and reality, but also between the id and the superego. The ego has to cope, not only with external, but also with internal reality.

The underlying idea in psychoanalytical thinking is that we have to deal with psychic reality and psychic conflict as well as with the external world, and Freud continually investigated the roots of this inner conflict. At first he believed the sexual instincts to be in conflict with reality and self-preservation: that is, with what he called ego instincts, aimed at self-preservation. But as his work progressed, he found that this hypothesis did not cover clinical facts. In particular, repetition compulsion – the need, characteristic of neurotics, to repeat over and over again painful and traumatic experiences – did not seem explicable in terms of a conflict between the pleasure principle and reality. Sadism and masochism, important components in the neurotic make-up, were also difficult to account for. In 1920, in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle\⁷ he propounded another hypothesis – that of the duality between life and death instincts. The libido, far from being in conflict with the life instinct, is part of it and is its sexual expression. Opposing it is the death instinct, which derives from the biological need of the organism to return to its prior state, ultimately to the inorganic. Its psychical counterpart is a longing for a return to a state of no pain – the nirvana principle. But the organism feels threatened by the death instinct and defleets it outwards. (As Freud had emphasized before, an instinct can change its aim and its direction.) When it is deflected outwards towards an object, the death instinct is converted into aggression: ‘I shall not die, you will.’ Instead of dying, killing. To begin with. Freud himself treated this hypothesis as a biological-philosophical speculation, but as his work developed he saw the manifestation of the death instinct in aggression as of fundamental importance. He originally considered aggression as a self-preservative ego instinct mobilized by frustration, but he became increasingly convinced of the existence of a fundamental innate destructive drive. The deflection of the death instinct, as basic as the life instinct and the libido, could account for the importance of aggression in psychic life. The fundamental conflict, between Eros – life, including sexuality – and Thanatos – self-destruction and destruction – is the deepest source of ambivalence, anxiety and guilt. But although the two basic instincts are in conflict, they also fuse. When in this fusion the death instinct predominates, it gives rise to sadism and masochism; when the life instinct predominates, aggression is at the service of the life forces and becomes ego-syntonic: that is, it is at the service of the ego.

Freud’s definitive description of the id, the ego and the superego takes into account his new instinct theory. The aggression, intolerable to the ego, is made over to the superego – hence its savage character. Originally Freud thought that infantile sexuality gave rise to guilt fee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Early Years
• 3 The Play Technique
• 4 Psychoanalysis of Children
• 5 New Ideas 1919-34
• 6 The British Psychoanalytical Society
• 7 The Depressive Position
• 8 The ‘Controversial Discussions’
• 9 The Paranoid-Schizoid Position
• 10 New Light on the Structural Theory of Mind, Anxiety and Guilt
• 11 Envy and Gratitude
• 12 The Last Years
• 13 Melanie Klein, the Person and Her Work
• References
• Bibliography
• A Complete List of the Writings of Melanie Klein