Reading Klein

Margaret Rustin, Michael Rustin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415452946
• eBook ISBN: 9781134832743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología clínica

Reading Klein provides an introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest psychoanalysts, known in particular for her contribution in developing child analysis and for her vivid depiction of the inner world. This book makes Melanie Klein's works highly accessible, providing both substantial extracts from her writings, and commentaries by the authors exploring their significance.

Each chapter corresponds to a major field of Klein's work outlining its development over almost 40 years. The first part is concerned with her theoretical and clinical contributions. It shows Klein to be a sensitive clinician deeply concerned for her patients, and with a remarkable capacity to understand their unconscious anxieties and to revise our understanding of the mind. The second part sets out the contribution of her ideas to morality, to aesthetics and to the understanding of society, introducing writing by her associates as well as herself.

The book provides a lucid account of Klein's published writing, presented by two distinguished writers who know her work well and have made creative use of it in their own clinical and extra-clinical writing. Its aim is to show how substantial her contribution to psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice was, and how indispensable it remains to understanding the field of psychoanalysis.

Reading Klein will be a highly valuable resource for students, trainees in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic practitioners and all who are interested in Melanie Klein and her legacy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Melanie Klein had become widely recognised as one of Freud’s most original and important psychoanalytic successors. Her initial contribution grew from her early work with children in emotional difficulty, some of them very young and seriously disturbed, and her writings document her gradual discovery of a method of analysing children through providing a setting for the child to express him- or herself in play activities. Working as a child analyst gave her access to the nature of the child’s developing mind and led her to revise crucial aspects of psychoanalytic theory. She became convinced that the infant related actively to the maternal figure from birth onwards, though initially perceiving the mother in fragmentary ways rather than as a complete person. These partial experiences of mother were rooted in the many different aspects of early bodily care. This was a challenge to the belief that babies begin life in a state which is prior to relating to the world outside themselves – the psychoanalytic theory of a period of primary narcissism. Klein also found evidence in her work with very young children of a much earlier form of the superego – the judging function of the mind – than that described by Freud and linked by him to the resolution of the Oedipal preoccupations of the child aged around 5. She described vividly the ferocity of this early form of conscience by which a child could be tormented, suffering severe anxiety and guilt. Linked with this was her recognition of early precursors of the classical Oedipus complex. She was profoundly aware of the bodily roots of psychoanalytic theory, including Freud’s important discoveries about the sexual nature of young children.

Her openness to learning about the more primitive building blocks of the mind entailed facing the implications of the small child’s capacity for hatred as well as seeing the passionate nature of his love. This meant that her ideas shocked many of her contemporaries and, indeed, her picture of the inner world of baby and young child still has a capacity to stun her readers at first sight.

In her later work, she built on her extraordinary achievements as the first analyst of young children to revise the psychoanalytic understanding of mental development. Her focus on anxieties in her clinical practice led her to describe two constellations of anxieties and defences within the mind. The first of these, developmentally, she named the paranoid-schizoid position (choosing the term position to denote the overarching and lasting significance of this structure in mental life) and the later one, the depressive position. While paranoid-schizoid states centre on anxieties about the self, fears for its survival and well-being, in depressive states the individual is also concerned about the fate of the people towards whom his emotions are directed, and particularly about the primary family figures whom he fears are damaged by his hostile feelings. The formation of the personality, Klein believed, depended on the outcome of the continuous interchange between the individual and his primary objects – ‘objects’ being used in psychoanalytic theory to mean the significant others of the individual’s emotional world. This interchange involved ongoing projection – pushing parts of one’s own experience into another – and introjection – the taking in of emotional experience from others. Klein’s concrete way of understanding projective processes, something she understood very profoundly from her clinical experience with young children, led to her proposing the concept of projective identification which has become important in contemporary psychoanalysis.

Other significant contributions to theory included her work on mourning and depression, on manic states, on the importance of the desire to understand and on envy and gratitude as powerful features of human relationships.

As will be evident in our account of Klein’s developing understanding of the mind, she not only made significant analytic discoveries across a lifetime of clinical work, but she also revised some of her earlier formulations in the light of further experience. Perhaps of special importance in this respect is her later strongly held view that love was an essential part of the infant’s relation to mother from the start. Readers of her early papers are often taken aback by her detailed description of the ferocity of early infantile phantasy, but when this depiction of hatred and sadism is set clearly alongside the infant’s passionate love and longing for mother, the overall picture of the emotional life of the baby reads very differently. Narrative of a Child Analysis, her day-by-day account of one child’s analysis in the early days of the war, is a moving example of how balanced was her work with her patients. Her capacity for theoretical revision comes out particularly clearly in the early and later papers on the Oedipus complex.

This book aims to present Klein’s ideas through extensive selected quotations from her major writings, with commentary and some brief indication of the direction in which her ideas have led other psychoanalytic thinkers. We hope this will encourage readers to explore her remarkable work more fully, and we include some suggestions for further reading at the end, including important scholarly publications which draw on the Klein archive held at the Wellcome Library. Klein’s writing has often been described as quite difficult, and it is of course important to keep in mind that much of the English edition is translated from her original German, but our re-reading of her work in preparing this book evoked very great admiration.

We have organised the material in two parts, one looking roughly chronologically at her developing clinical and theoretical perspective, and the other examining the relevance of her ideas for a psychoanalytically informed understanding of ethics, aesthetics, and social and political matters. This second part underlines our belief in the very wide implications of Klein’s understanding of the mind, going much beyond the practice of child and adult psychoanalysis in the consulting room.

Brief biographical note

Melanie Klein was born in 1882, the daughter of Moriz Reizes, a doctor from an orthodox Jewish family who chose medicine instead of rabbinical studies, and Libussa Deutsch, a much younger woman from a liberal Jewish family. After their marriage in 1875 they moved to Vienna. Melanie was the youngest of their four children. She was particularly attached to Sidonie, the sister a little older than her, and deeply distressed by Sidonie’s early death. Her older brother, Emanuel, also died when she was still a young woman. These painful early losses are likely to have played a part in her profound interest in the nature of mourning and in her awareness of the importance of siblings in psychic life (Sherwin-White, 2014).

Klein loved learning and school and was ambitious for education, and her parents supported this. However, her plan to study medicine at Vienna University had to be set aside when she became engaged and later married Arthur Klein in 1903.

The marriage was not a happy one but Klein and Arthur had two children in quick succession, Melitta and Hans, and a third, Erich, some years later. Klein struggled with serious episodes of depression in these years. In 1910 the family moved to Budapest and Klein found solace in the lively culture of the society there after the years of living in less congenial small towns. She began there an analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, the foremost psychoanalyst in the Hungarian Society, and this provided both personal help to her and an opportunity to begin professional work in analysing children with his encouragement. In 1919 she separated from her husband and two years later she moved to Berlin with the children. In Budapest she had already become a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society and in Berlin she found a very flourishing psychoanalytic community. She entered an analysis with Karl Abraham in 1925, sadly prematurely terminated at his death after less than a year. During the years in Berlin she involved herself in extensive clinical work with children (Frank, 2009). From this time onwards she wrote many psychoanalytic papers.

In 1926 she moved to London, at the invitation of Ernest Jones and colleagues, following a visit in which her lectures had greatly impressed members of the British Psychoanalytical Society. The early years in London were a time of great intellectual creativity. However, the professional home provided by the British Society changed its character with the arrival of many analysts coming as refugees from Vienna, following the rise of Nazism. The serious disagreements between Klein and Anna Freud, which had already surfaced in the 1920s when their very different approaches to child analysis became a matter of public debate, now threatened to disrupt the world of psychoanalysis in Britain. The Viennese group saw Klein’s revision to theory as attacks on Freudian orthodoxy. This was very painful to Klein, who always saw herself as building on Freud’s psychoanalytic foundations and extending these in ways that were true to the spirit of psychoanalytic inquiry.

The institutional difficulties in the British Psychoanalytic Society were resolved through a political compromise following the scientific discussions recorded in The Freud–Klein Controversies 1941–45 (King and Steiner, 1991). The intense intellectual efforts of Klein and her close group of analytic allies at this time proved to be the spur to a fresh period of theoretical creativity. In the post-war years she published several very important papers and her writing continued up to her death in 1960.

Part 1

Chapter 2

Klein’s early work

Children’s upbringing, education and child analysis

Klein’s first paper, read to the Hungarian Psycho-analytical Society in 1919, was entitled ‘The development of a child’. The theme of development is therefore signalled at the outset of her career as at the heart of her interest and her approach to psychoanalysis. It is obvious that this is profoundly linked to her personal and family circumstances at that time. She had begun an analysis with Ferenczi in the context of unhappiness in her marriage and an as-yet uncharted professional path for herself. She had three children, with whose individual personalities and development she was intensely involved. Living with and thinking about them seems to have been a huge stimulus to detailed observation and reflection on their day-to-day preoccupations, their thoughts and the whole direction and shape of their mental lives. Her analysis no doubt opened her up to all sorts of questions about her own life as a child and the way in which she had arrived at this juncture in her life. Ferenczi’s encouragement of her interest in children’s minds and the possibilities for psychoanalytic investigation and intervention with young children must have drawn on his awareness of her unusual capacities for combining tender interest and rigorous enquiry in her relationships with children. The wider historical context possibly played a part too: just as the later story of post-1945 child psychoanalysis in Britain was deeply influenced by the post-war hopes of a better world and the particular emphasis on improved education and health for children (the 1944 Education Act and the launch of the National Health Service in 1948), so perhaps the concern with understanding early development, which Ferenczi embraced with enthusiasm, and which Klein found again with Abraham when she moved to Berlin in 1921, had its roots not only in the evolution of psychoanalysis but also in the intellectual response to the horrors of the First World War.

Here is the Introduction to this first paper, which signals a challenge to the conventions of the time with respect to children’s upbringing, tackles headlong the idea of childhood innocence and links the necessity for opening up the acknowledgement of children’s sexual interests (as Freud had done for Little Hans) with the lifting of childhood anxieties and the freeing of intellectual development:

The idea of enlightening children in sexual matters is steadily gaining ground. The instruction introduced in many places by the schools aims at protecting children during the age of puberty from the increasing dangers of ignorance, and it is from this point of view that the idea has won most sympathy and support. The knowledge obtained by psycho-analysis, however, indicates the necessity, if not of ‘enlightening’, at least of bringing up children from the tenderest years in such a fashion as will render any special enlightenment unnecessary, since it points to the completest, most natural enlightenment compatible with the rate of development of the child. The irrefutable conclusions to be drawn from psycho-analytic experience demand that children shall, whenever possible, be protected from any over-strong repression, and thus from illness or a disadvantageous development of character. Alongside the certainly wise intention of countering actual and visible dangers with information, therefore, analysis aims at avoiding dangers that are equally actual, even if not visible (because not recognized as such), but which are much commoner, deeper, and therefore call much more urgently for observation. The results of psycho-analysis, which always in every individual case leads back to repressions of childish sexuality as the causes of subsequent illness, or of the more or less operative morbific elements or inhibitions present even in every normal mentality, indicate clearly the path to be followed. We can spare the child unnecessary repression by freeing – and first and foremost in ourselves – the whole wide sphere of sexuality from the dense veils of secrecy, falsehood and danger spun by a hypocritical civilization upon an affective and uninformed foundation. We shall let the child acquire as much sexual information as the growth of its desire for knowledge requires, thus depriving sexuality at once of its mystery and of a great part of its danger. This ensures that wishes, thoughts and feelings shall not – as happened to us – be partly repressed and partly, in so far as repression fails, endured under a burden of false shame and nervous suffering. In averting this repression, this burden of superfluous suffering, moreover, we are laying the foundations for health, mental balance and the favourable development of character. This incalculably valuable result, however, is not the only advantage we can expect for the individual and for the evolution of humanity from an upbringing founded upon unqualified frankness. It has another and not less significant consequence – a decisive influence upon the development of the intellectual powers.

(‘The development of a child’, 1921; pp. 1–2)

It is of great interest that Klein’s attention to children’s intellectual development began in this earliest publication, and is also taken further in the next papers she wrote. This distinctive focus on the capacity for thinking and understanding has remained characteristic of the style of work of many of the analysts who represent later developments of her ideas (e.g. Bion, Money-Kyrle, O’Shaughnessy, Britton). Likierman (2001) suggests that Klein’s approach represents a bringing together of Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality and sexual curiosity of children with Ferenczi’s interest in the transition from omnipotent to reality-based thinking.

The child she wrote about in her first paper she called Fritz, but he is known in fact to be her own son Erich. In the early days of psychoanalysis the practice of analysts analysing their own children was quite widespread, most famously in the case of Freud and his daughter Anna, and in this paper it does of course make it possible for her to draw on an extraordinary mix of observations. We learn of Fritz’s overall ‘slow’ development, and the late onset of his asking the sort of challenging questions young children do pose to their parents: about birth, death, time, God and so on. He comes vividly alive as a child in Klein’s descriptions. She focuses on the time when Fritz seems to wake up to a great many things he wants to get to the bottom of: why do grown-ups tell stories to cover up true facts? What is the role of father? What goes on inside mother’s body? How are things made and how do things work? What is the difference between boys and girls? She describes the growth of Fritz’s reality sense in contrast to the omnipotence of wishes.

Klein’s emphasis is on what gets locked up in repression, and the problem of false authority.

Pedagogic and psychological perspectives

New vistas open before me when I compare my observations of this child’s greatly enhanced mental powers under the influence of his newly acquired knowledge with previous observations and experiences in cases of more or less unfavourable development. Honesty towards children, frank answering of all their questions, and the inner freedom which this brings about, influence mental development profoundly and beneficially. This safeguards thought from the tendency to repression which is the chief danger affecting it, i.e. from the withdrawal of instinctual energy with which goes a part of sublimation, and from the accompanying repression of ideational associations connected with the repressed complexes, whereby the sequence of thought is destroyed.

(‘The development of a child’, 1921; pp. 18–19)

She goes on to discuss the idea of analysing children under the age of six, which would be new territory, as Hug-Hellmuth (1921), the first child analyst, had suggested that analysis was only adapted to children above this age, in other words to children entering the latency period following the intense Oedipal period Freud had described as located between three and five years, going to school, and being able to speak about their thoughts. But first she lays out her view of parental responsibilities in the light of psychoanalytic knowledge:

I shall now, however, bring forward the question of what we learn from the analyses of adults and children that we could apply in regard to the mind of children under six, since 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 subsequent illnesses but also for the permanent formation of character and of intellectual development?

The first and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Publications By Melanie Klein
• Bibliography
• Index