The Klein-Winnicott Dialectic

Transformative New Metapsychology and Interactive Clinical Theory

Susan Kavaler-Adler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367101503
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921193
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Klein-Winnicott Dialectic: Transformative New Metapsychology and Interactive Clinical Theory brings together the theories of Melanie Klein and Donald W. Winnicott, two giants and geniuses of the British school of object relations clinical and developmental theory and psychoanalytic technique. In this book, The author attempts to integrate the theories of Klein and Winnicott, rather than polarising them, as has been done often in the past. This book takes the best of Klein and Winnicott for use by clinicians on an everyday basis, without having the disputes between their followers interfere with the full and rich platter of theoretical offerings they each of them provided.In addition, this book looks at the biographies of Klein and Winnicott, to show how their theories were inspired by their contrasting lives and contrasting parenting and developmental dynamics. By examining their theories in relation to their biographies, one can see why their dialectical theoretical focuses emerged, highly contrasted in their major emphasis, and yet highly complementary when applied together to clinical work.

CHAPTER ONE


Melanie Klein, like Moses on the way to the Promised Land: a case of pathological mourning

The Bible records Moses as having led the Israelites through the desert for forty years. Moses is reported as having spoken to G-d on Mt. Sinai, and as having vented his retaliatory rage at his people, on the night when he encountered their sin (in the episode with the golden calf). The Bible also reports how Moses paid dearly for his retaliatory rage. Moses’ own precious vision for the Jewish people would never be completely his. According to the Bible and its myth, Moses would spend the time of a generation in the desert. He would watch the children of his flock grow to adulthood. Only in old age would Moses view the holy land that he himself could never enter, due to the impulsive rage attack upon others. Consequently, Moses’ vision was both his greatest gift and his greatest curse, for Moses could foresee what he himself could not participate in. He would stay behind, while the second generation of Israelites, the children of those he had parted the Red Sea for and had entered the desert with, entered the land of Israel.

I believe that one of the greatest ironies in the history of psychoanalytic theory is its biographical analogy to this biblical account and myth. It is the story and legend of Melanie Klein, who, I believe, similar to Moses, foresaw the vivid outlines of a promised land, a psychic land, which she herself could not enter or could enter only to a minor degree. It is the land of the fruits and honey born through the journey of the depressive position, a journey that entails an in-depth developmental mourning process. Klein was the first psychoanalytic theorist to believe in the necessity to mourn in order for psychic development to continue throughout life. She believed in mourning as a critical clinical and developmental process, and a way of processing all object losses, not just those related to bereavement. Wherever there is a psychic gain, wherever there is a choice in life, there is a psychic loss as well. Klein began to envision this as she spoke of the early loss of weaning from the breast (Klein, 1975). We speak today of the loss of the concrete object in favour of the gain of the symbolic internal object in the process of developmental separation–individuation.

Klein (1975) revealed her new thinking about mourning in her classic paper, “Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states”, published in 1940. Yet, my reading of Grosskurth’s (1986) scholarly biography on this woman–theorist has given me the impression that Klein was psychically arrested in a pathological mourning state (stemming from her early pre-oedipal childhood), which prevented her from going beyond the initial stages of her own mourning process.

I propose that like many of the women writers and artists whom I have studied and written about (Kavaler-Adler, 1993a), Klein could not succeed in reversing her own blocked mourning process. She, like many highly creative women, attempted to face her internal life on her own, despite her brief periods of psychoanalytic treatment with Sandor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham when she was in her thirties. By the time Melanie Klein discovered the critical significance of mourning, she was a leading figure in the British Psychoanalytic Society in London. She conducted many training analyses for up and coming analysts such as Susan Isaacs, Paula Heimann, Wilfred Bion, Joan Riviere, and John Bowlby. She supervised, taught seminars, and treated adults in psychoanalysis, and children—from the perspective of her original form of play therapy. According to Grosskurth’s (1986) biographical studies, Klein faced negative transference rage in her treatment with Abraham, and might have begun a necessary grieving process at that time as well. Apparently, she was capable of being conscious of aggression with Abraham that she never encountered with the more idealised Ferenczi, with whom she had entered psychoanalytic treatment when she was young and just divorcing her husband. Yet, it seems that after her two early psychoanalytic experiences, Klein never paused to return to analysis for herself. This appears to be true despite her belief that countertransference was something an analyst returned to treatment to face. In fact, she never viewed countertransference as something conscious that could be used in treatment, as Heimann (1950), her own analysand, began to suggest.

Nevertheless, Klein was forced to pause and reflect on the overwhelming necessity to face the rage and hunger behind her grief at the point when her elder son, Hans, died in an accident in the mountains when he was an adult. She not only paused, but, during this time, she developed a whole theory of the developmental necessity to mourn, which she then related to her earlier phenomenological theory on the paranoid–schizoid and the depressive positions. She was the first to speak about unconscious aggression as a block to feeling loss, and, thus, as a block to feeling grief, regret, renewed longing, and the refined symbolic memories of a lost primal love.

With all this, however, Klein could only go so far in her own personal mourning process. Based on Klein’s (1975) description of her own mourning process (see Case of Miss A in “Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states”), and on the biographical research of Grosskurth (1986), I concluded that Klein’s tenacious clinging to the metapsychology of her own version of the “death instinct” can be seen as a symptom of her own arrest in a state of pathological mourning. Although in my earlier works I have cited contributions by Segal (1964, 1986) and other biographers of Klein, in this study I have drawn particularly on Klein’s biographical research done by Grosskurth (1986), because she is the only biographer of Klein who had access to the letters of Klein’s mother, Libussa Reizes. I will try to demonstrate why Klein clung to her “death instinct” metapsychology. I believe that she needed that in order to psychically cling to her mother. The subject of the death instinct was one Klein touched on, relinquished to some degree, and then returned to. I believe that her resistance to giving it up is, in itself, a diagnostic sign of Klein’s poignant and evocative pathological mourning state. Grosskurth (1986) helps her readers imagine the maternal and fraternal relationships that contributed to this state of mind in Klein.

The death of the narcissistic mother

Relying on the letters of Klein’s mother, Libussa, Grosskurth (1986) portrays a vivid view of her mother. Grosskurth’s view might be one that Klein herself needed to deny, in loyalty to her mother, and it generated a great deal of controversy among Klein’s followers. However, Grosskurth’s view is based on historical and biographical data, which had never before been available. Her view also seems to have an internal consistency, particularly when one combines knowledge of the narcissistic character with the research data and some rather astute biographer’s interpretations.

As Grosskurth (1986) points out, when, in 1937, Klein writes “Love, guilt and reparation”, she speaks of coming to terms with the hate, rage, guilt, love, and reparative needs for forgiveness that each individual feels in relation to their most primal parent, their mother. In this paper, Klein discusses the difficult and, ultimately, meaningful psychological work necessary to come to terms with psychic truth within one’s own internal world, and within developmental process of self and psychic integration (in the depressive position) (Klein, 1975). Nevertheless, Grosskurth must ask, in allegiance to biographical truth, to what degree did Klein do this work in relation to her own mother, and in relation to the massive impact her mother had on Klein’s internal world? Asking the question opens a can of worms, for here lies the great contradiction in Kleinian theory and Klein’s own personal thoughts. Klein’s conscious report of her mother is one too beautiful to reflect the woman whom Grosskurth (1986) discovered in the mother’s letters to her daughter. Grosskurth, therefore, declares that Klein held an idealised view of a daughter in relation to her mother. The term idealisation takes on quite a valence when it is put in the context of this daughter’s own ground-breaking psychoanalytic theory. Whenever Klein herself spoke of idealisation, she spoke of its defensive function; she spoke of it as of psychic mechanism employed unconsciously to ward off rage towards a love object that arouses (unbeknown to the conscious mind) the deepest paranoid terrors.

Grosskurth (1986) tells us that Klein cried in secret when she discovered that her mother had cancer. This is the mother who had been living with her not only in childhood, but also throughout Klein’s entire life. This is the mother who took over her household, even though Melanie was married and had three children of her own, the mother who suggested that Melanie leave home for lengthy periods to visit health spas, to soothe her “overwrought nerves”. Libussa most certainly would have rejected the notion that her daughter’s “nerves” could have arisen from an internalised anger she herself had caused. And what would Libussa have said if anyone had suggested that Melanie’s anger was proportionate to that of a repressed childhood rage arising from the unspoken despair of a young woman who unconsciously believed that she would never find any form of fulfilment? Could Libussa Reizes ever have understood that the tension in her daughter, which she had called “nerves”, was actually a symptomatic reaction to Melanie’s lack of conscious concern and grieving for her own potential competence? Could Libussa ever have grasped that by religiously and narcissistically imposing a regime of pampered invalidism, she effectively opposed her daughter’s potential competence, which was nearly cut off all together? Or ever acknowledged how convenient it felt to have Melanie take an extended leave, while she herself remained in Melanie’s home to dominate her daughter’s husband and children?

Melanie periodically returned home from the health spas. She even separated from her mother for some time, through the strength of her friendship with her female friend, Klara. She might even have begun to fight back against her martyred, efficient, and guilt-provoking mother when allied with Klara. Nevertheless, prior to any psychoanalytic treatment, Klein seemed to believe that she could not survive without her mother. From Grosskurth’s (1986) biographical report, Klein seems to have experienced her mother’s death, when it came, as a trauma, not just as a loss. I would suggest that the loss was so traumatic because Klein had never adequately separated from her mother in childhood, had never had tolerable degrees of loss in a separation process with an emotionally available mother. Klein seems to have reacted to the trauma of her mother’s death with an idealising defence, denying who her mother had truly been to her. According to Grosskurth (1986), Klein never stood up to her mother, a woman who had competed with Melanie for her brother’s affections and, later, positioned herself between Klein and her husband. Denial brings its own form of obsession, and it seems that for Klein the artful ways of the construction of her mother’s memorial (in her own mind) were attempts at creating psychoanalytic theory. Through her psychoanalytic writings, Klein found a powerful vehicle for the articulation of her prolonged attachment to her mother. It could be that Klein constructed a mother in her mind in the intellectualised form of theoretical beliefs, which she would never decisively deconstruct, especially since her brief psychoanalytic experiences did not allow her any kind of full mourning and grieving process.

Klein eulogised her mother in her writings by reporting a scene at her mother’s deathbed, a scene that Grosskurth (1986) finds hard to accept as factual. Melanie asks for her mother’s forgiveness. Her mother replies that Melanie has at least as much to forgive her for as to be forgiven for. Klein writes of her mother’s benign generosity at this time. She reports her mother’s resignation to her approaching death, to have spoken well of all, with not a criticism in sight. No wonder Grosskurth harbours doubts about the veracity of this report. The report could have been symptomatic of Klein’s unconscious guilt about repressed rage and accusation towards her mother, for Libussa’s nature (as shown in her letters) was the one prone to hostile criticism and an attitude of contempt (Grosskurth, 1986). Did Libussa relinquish such an attitude during the last days of her life, or was her daughter exaggerating so as to preserve her mother’s image? Ironically, Grosskurth (1986) reports that Klein avoided all her feelings towards her mother at the time she wrote this death scene, as she was turning abruptly, with a manic twist, away from her depressive concerns. She turned towards the condemnations of her older sister, Emilie, whom Melanie had always envied for receiving her father’s affections, while such affections were denied to her. Emilie seems to have served as the displacement figure for all the split-off rage and aggression Melanie felt towards her mother, which helped her maintain her defensive idealisation of her mother.

Consequently, when writing of her mother’s benign tranquillity as she lay dying, Klein simultaneously berated her sister’s way of handling the situation, and maintained that her mother’s attitude of benign regard for Emilie was superior to that of her sister. Klein assumed that her mother had considerable reason to resent her sister Emilie. Ironically, however, it was Libussa who had been totally unfair to Emilie in the past, actually condemning Emilie, based on rumours her husband was spreading about her. According to Grosskurth (1986), Klein could not acknowledge any of this. In her eyes, her mother wore the white hat, and her sister the black. Melanie certainly did not move beyond the splitting of paranoid position here. If Grosskurth is correct, Klein twisted the truth in these late life accounts, just as Libussa had done so often in her letters: for example, when Libussa sought financial support from Arthur Klein, Melanie’s husband.

The roots and dynamics of pathological mourning

Pathological mourning is preserved by the compulsion to idealise. However, it begins with an overwhelming or traumatic object loss. Also, it can be preserved and exacerbated by the continual assaults of narcissistic injury. The children of narcissistic parents feel such narcissistic injury most predominantly. In Klein’s life, we can see patterns of defensive idealisation stemming from long before her mother’s death. From these later patterns, we could speculate about disruptions at the critical developmental stage of separation–individuation (as defined by Mahler, 1967, 1971, 1979), in Klein’s early pre-oedipal–toddler life, and related to her mother’s ongoing attacks on Melanie’s libidinal development.

What would Klein’s mother have been like during the critical separation–individuation phases of development, as described by both Mahler (1979) and Masterson (1976, 1981, 1985, 2000)? Given Gross-kurth’s (1986) description of Klein’s mother, taken from Libussa’s own letters, I suspect that Libussa would have failed to facilitate Klein’s early development in much the same way that most parents with narcissistic character disorder fail in that task. How available would Libussa have been for emotional refuelling once her toddler daughter, in her practising stage, set off on her own to find a world outside her mother? It is questionable. Would Melanie’s mother, being busy running a shop in her home, have held her daughter when she returned to “home base”? In terms of the distinction between emotional holding and mere physical holding, as described by Winnicott (1986), did Libussa provide Melanie with an emotional holding and connection? Grosskurth (1986) states that Klein did hug her third child, Eric, who was not as dominated by his grandmother’s usurpation of the mothering role as his older siblings, Melitta and Hans. But, even in relation to Eric, Klein acted more as a psychotherapist rather than a mother (Grosskurth, 1986). Would this kind of mothering by Melanie Klein not reveal the nature of her own mother’s mothering with her?

When Melanie “checked back” to her mother during the practising period, or came over to her for refuelling, was Libussa responsive to her in terms of her daughter’s central emotional needs, or was she only present in a perfunctory, merely physical way? Was Libussa more preoccupied with her own narcissistic concerns (possibly experiencing Melanie as abandoning her when she left her mother’s orbit) and seeing Melanie as no longer a cuddly baby who wished primarily to be held and touched? Emotional abandonment during Libussa’s own pre-oedipal toddler years would have left a profound mark on her capacity to be an adequate mother during this time. If Libussa was emotionally preoccupied somewhere else, would separation not begin to entail a primal loss for her daughter, Melanie? If so, such loss could significantly stamp Klein’s later theories, particularly her theories concerning the traumatic pain of weaning (Klein, 1975). In fact, Klein speaks of separation–individuation in mere physical and instinctual terms, with the primal mother as the breast to be weaned from. In her writings, Klein focuses mainly on the primary act of weaning rather than the primal holding mother’s capacity for symbiosis, or on the mother who could flexibly transform into a mother of separation as her infant turns into a toddler.

How could Klein’s mother’s emotional shortcomings during the practising period be exacerbated during the critical stages of rapprochement, when “communicative matching” of the mother with the toddler’s developmental initiative is required (see Masterson, 1976, 1981, 1985)? How could someone like Libussa Reizes, who might have had her own narcissistic character disorder, have been able to connect with her daughter’s rapprochement stage requirements? At rapprochement, the toddler experiences an internal developmental shift in his/her needs, from a practising stage thrust and desire to explore the world beyond the mother (often experienced as a “love affair with the world” — see Greenacre, 1957, p. 57; Mahler, 1971, p. 410) to a slightly disillusioned grandiosity, in which the need for the mother is once more powerfully felt. However, at rapprochement, the need is not experienced as a primal urge to emotionally merge with the mother and become one with her (as in the early infant holding and symbiotic periods), but as an urge to reconnect with mother as a separate being. During this period, the child wants to share his/her newfound and newly won experiences in the outer world (beyond mother’s body and beyond the exclusive mother–infant orbit) with his/her mummy. This child brings to mummy things to show and share. He/she tells mummy things about his/her experience in this new stage of verbal expression, about what happened “out there”. However, there can be a “rapprochement crisis” if mummy is not there to share with the child (Masterson, 1976, 1981, 1985, 2000). If this happens, the toddler feels the rapprochement as a damned-if-she-does-and-damned-if-she-doesn’t dilemma between the developmental need to separate and the resurgent emotional need for mother’s responsiveness. The toddler is sensitive to his/her mother’s pathological compulsion to have her child return to a cuddly symbiotic state with him/her (as with the borderline mother), or her mother’s don’t-bother-me rejection (as with the narcissistic mother). The child would then be compelled to identify with the mother’s pathological or unavailable behaviour as a defence.

It is appropriate here to look into other examples of mothering that failed at the early stages of child’s development. For example, in a biography of Virginia Woolf, Bond (1989) records Woolf’s return to her mother at rapprochement only to find her mother totally preoccupied with her younger brother, Adrian. Bond (1989) thus illustrates how Woolf’s mother failed to give her daughter the attention and emotional contact, as well as the mirroring and attunement, that Woolf craved and developmentally required. Bond (1989) traces the outlines of Woolf’s pathology and mental illness from this critical developmental point, describing the critical trauma of developmental loss at this vitally important separation time, during which Woolf was robbed of a secure sense of self. She was only thirteen when she suffered the death of her mother. This radically compounded the earlier separation trauma, exacerbating a loss that could not be borne and subsequently led to psychotic symptoms. Compounding this situation, Woolf suffered sexual abuse from her two half-brothers. De Salvo (1989), another Woolf biographer, describes the devastating imprint of this sexual abuse. Suicide attempts beginning after her mother’s death and continuing until her successful suicidal act at the age of fifty-three marked the decline generated from the disrupted mothering during Woolf’s separation stage. Given the suicidal impulse stemming from such a failing, it is possible that if Woolf had been a psychoanalyst, she might have also adhered (like Klein) to a belief in a “death instinct”. Woolf’s writing certainly exhibits the demon-lover theme (see Kavaler-Adler, 1996), a literary symptom frequently found in women writers, encased in a closed internal psychic symptom of pathological mourning rooted in the failures experienced in the separation stage. The demon-lover theme in the creative work of many of the women artists I have studied can be seen as a personified view of what Klein might have at first meant by the “death instinct”. The death instinct can be the psychic pull of a split-off and eroticised aggressive component of the self (the undifferentiated mother-self) that is configured and enacted in the form of a split-off aggressive part of the psy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Introduction: A developmental theory of psychological health based on the Klein–Winnicott dialectic and related object relations thinking
• Dedication
• Chapter One Melanie Klein, like Moses on the way to the Promised Land: a case of pathological mourning
• Chapter Two Melanie Klein’s creative writing revealing themes in her life and theorising
• Chapter Three The phenomenological theory stands on its own: death instinct as demon lover
• Chapter Four Explicating and utilising the phenomenological theory
• Chapter Five Developmental evolution within the theory of Melanie Klein
• Chapter Six Developmental evolution within the works of Donald W. Winnicott: psychic and transitional space
• Chapter Seven Dynamics of transitional space: pathological foreclosure vs. expansion in clinical treatment
• Chapter Eight Winnicott’s contribution to the understanding of mirroring as a developmental process: the Klein–Winnicott dialectic within
• Chapter Nine Narcissistic mirroring as perversion of developmental mourning
• Chapter Ten Loneliness in dialectic with solitude
• Conclusion
• References
• Index