Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan

A Dialogue

Mari Ruti, Amy Allen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501378324
• eBook ISBN: 9781501352270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Psychology

Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan explores convergences and divergences in the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, with a special focus on the implications of their work for critical theory, broadly construed. The book is co-authored in the form of a dialogue between Amy Allen, a prominent representative of Frankfurt School critical theory with expertise on Klein, and Mari Ruti, a leading Lacanian critical theorist. Klein and Lacan are among the two most important and influential psychoanalytic theorists after Freud. Their work has profound implications for how we understand subjectivity, intersubjectivity, autonomy, agency, desire, affect, trauma, history, and the potential for individual and social change. Allen and Ruti offer distinctive interpretations of Klein and Lacan that not only bring out their complexities but also highlight productive points of convergence where most psychoanalytic and critical theorists see irreconcilable differences. The book is organized around key themes that cut across and through the work of Klein and Lacan, culminating in an assessment of the implications of their theories for thinking about politics.

1

Subjectivity

MR: We agreed to start our conversations about Klein and Lacan with basic accounts of their versions of how the subject becomes a subject, how the human being becomes a human being. Because I’ve been more influenced by Lacan, my grasp of the Kleinian story is less precise than it could be. I would appreciate it if you could explain themes such as the body in bits and pieces, splitting, gradual ego integration, the paranoid-schizoid position, the depressive position, and so on.

AA: The core of Klein’s understanding of subject formation consists of her account of the two positions: the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions. Perhaps the first thing to note about her theory is the language of positions itself. The term position is an alternative to concepts such as stages or phases of development, which means that the positions aren’t stages that one passes through and leaves behind. Rather, they persist throughout life, and individuals can and do oscillate between them, particularly in times of stress. In other words, the term position refers to what Hanna Segal describes as a configuration of object relations, anxieties, and defenses that characterize the individual’s entire lifespan.¹ Klein also mentions in several places that the two positions can blend into one another, so that there can be depressive anxieties in the paranoid-schizoid position, and vice versa, which implies that the distinction between them is really more conceptual or analytical than substantive.

Another point to make about the language of positions is that each of the positions is, for Klein, linked to a specific modality of psychological disturbance: the paranoid-schizoid position is connected to psychotic states or anxieties whereas the depressive position is connected to neurotic states or anxieties.² And that’s interesting because in this sense Klein could be seen as offering an account of what Joel Whitebook, following Hans Loewald, calls the psychotic core of the psyche.³ The idea is that there’s an archaic core of the psyche that persists in all of us that’s psychotic in character and that we might learn something about subjectivity by investigating this psychotic core. For Whitebook, the core is psychotic because the infant initially exists in a state of fusion or merger with its mother or other primary caregiver, so that there’s no differentiation between self and object, and therefore no coherent or unified self. For reasons that we’ll discuss later, I don’t believe that Klein accepts this story about primordial fusion. But she does maintain that the core of the psyche is psychotic in the sense that in the paranoid-schizoid position one experiences one’s objects and also one’s self as unintegrated, incoherent, and split, and that, for her, is what psychosis means. This isn’t to say that all children are psychotic, but it does explain why Klein claims that “every child will periodically exhibit psychotic phenomena.”⁴

Two more specific ideas are important for understanding Klein’s theory of positions. The first has to do with the primacy of aggression, or the death drive. Klein believes that the death drive is in operation from the beginning of life, and that the infant perceives this drive as a threat to its existence. In this respect, Klein took herself to be developing the ideas about the duality of the life and death drives explored in Freud’s late work. She once said that she regarded Freud’s late drive theory to be “a tremendous advance in the understanding of the mind.”⁵ But she also thinks that Freud didn’t give enough weight to aggression and that he never sufficiently integrated his account of aggression into his overall theory, and that’s something she’s trying to do.

Unlike Freud, who didn’t believe that there could be any content to the fear of death because we don’t ever experience anything analogous to it, Klein held that there is from the very beginning of life an unconscious fear of death. This idea follows directly from her conviction that all drives have psychological correlates, which means that if there’s a death drive operative from the get-go, it must have a psychological analogue. This psychological analogue, for Klein, is the fear of annihilation.⁶ Klein believes that this points to a fundamental and ineliminable conflict between the life and death drives that, in turn, is the initial cause of anxiety. Moreover, since the conflict between the life and death drives is ineradicable, so too is anxiety. This is why anxiety is absolutely central to Klein’s conception of the subject. For her, the primary job of the early ego—and for her there’s a rudimentary, incoherent, and unintegrated ego in place from the beginning of life—is to try to master anxiety. In addition, mastering anxiety is, for Klein, the main psychological task of the adult as well, as well as the goal of psychoanalysis.

The second key idea to understanding the Kleinian positions is her conception of the object. For Klein, object relations are in place from the onset of life. The first object is the mother, specifically her breast. This way of talking obviously raises important worries about whether or not Klein endorses biological essentialism—a topic I know we’ll discuss later. For now I want to emphasize that what’s interesting about Klein’s claim that object relations are present from the beginning of life is that it appears to entail a rejection not only of Freud’s initial conception of primary narcissism—which supposed that the infant was initially in a state of self-sufficiency and only later came to relate to others—but also of his later conception of primary fusion with the mother (which, as I just mentioned, Whitebook accepts).⁷ I know that we’ll return to this theme as well. At this point, I merely want to say that Klein’s rejection of the idea of primary fusion goes hand in hand with her claim that there exists a rudimentary ego from the beginning. Simply put, the infant can’t be in a state of undifferentiated fusion, union, or merger because there’s already an elementary ego in place that’s relating to an object. So, for example, Klein says that “there is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process which does not involve objects, external or internal; in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life.”⁸

With all of this as background, we can turn to the paranoid-schizoid position, which is the starting point for subject formation for Klein. In this position, as a result of the internal operation of the death drive, the infant finds itself in a state of extreme anxiety. Klein calls this type of anxiety “persecutory anxiety,” which consists of the fear of the annihilation of the ego that I alluded to a moment ago.⁹ The early ego attempts to master this anxiety in two ways. First, it directs its aggression outward toward the primary object, which is the breast, for example by biting the breast, which Klein interprets as a matter of acting out a phantasy of devouring the breast. Second, it projects its aggression onto its primary object, which it then experiences as a persecutory entity with the power to annihilate it: it’s now the object rather than the infant itself that becomes the site of aggression. Although this second strategy may seem counterintuitive, it helps the infant to master the anxiety caused by the death drive by getting rid of or expelling the badness and danger it feels inside itself by projecting it onto an external object. This has the effect of externalizing the internal operation of the death drive, and therefore of putting some distance between the death drive and the ego.

However, this projection also requires, for Klein, a splitting of the breast in order to protect the good breast, which is the object to which the infant is libidinally attached. Klein doesn’t particularly stress this point—she puts more emphasis on the primacy of aggression—but aggression has to come together, even at the very beginning, with love or libidinal attachment because otherwise the primary object wouldn’t be an object at all. As she puts it, “The power of love … is there in the baby as well as the destructive forces, and finds its first fundamental expression in the baby’s attachment to his mother’s breast.”¹⁰ Thus, the infant is in a complicated and highly ambivalent situation. Its projection of the persecutory anxiety caused by the fear of annihilation—caused in turn by the operation of the death drive—onto the breast necessitates the splitting of the breast into good and bad parts. This activity of splitting is central to the paranoid-schizoid position. In the wake of this splitting, the good breast becomes the one that nourishes and loves the ego, gratifying its wishes for fulfillment, while the bad breast is the one that hates, attacks, and attempts to destroy it.

But the story is even more complicated than this because there are complex dynamics of projection and introjection involving both the good and the bad breast. As I mentioned, the infant projects its aggression onto the primary object, creating the bad breast, but it also projects its love and libidinal impulses outward, thereby creating the phantasy of the good or gratifying breast. At the same time, the infant introjects the good breast, which enables it to defend itself against its anxiety. In this way, the good breast becomes its internal protector, and comes to form the core of the developing ego, the entity around which the ego “expands and develops.”¹¹ Yet the infant also introjects the bad breast, which then heightens its sense of danger and anxiety, because now the persecutory object is both outside and inside the ego. This means that the split object that’s characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position goes hand in hand with a split inside the ego. The result of this splitting is that the ego is disintegrated or incoherent—or, as Klein puts it, “in bits.”¹²

The depressive position, which follows the paranoid-schizoid position, and which counters some of the extreme splitting of the latter, is, for Klein, in some sense a developmental achievement because it’s marked by a greater integration of both the ego and of the primary object—though we’ll have to talk more about what integration means for her because the matter is more complicated than one might assume. Also, as I’ve already stressed, Klein doesn’t believe that it’s ever entirely possible to transcend the paranoid-schizoid position, that it’s part of the adult’s psychic constitution as well. But for our present purposes, let me just say that the key moment in the transition from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position occurs when the mother is recognized as a whole object. At one point, Klein dates this transition to the moment when the infant first recognizes its mother, which happens early—at four or five months of age—and it would be interesting to contrast this claim with Lacan’s account of the mirror stage, because for Klein this isn’t just about recognizing the other but also about self-recognition: the infant’s recognition of its mother as a whole object enables it to recognize itself as a coherent ego.

When the infant is able to recognize the mother as a whole object, it realizes that the object that it has been destroying in its phantasies is the same object that it also loves and depends on. This realization leads to what Klein calls depressive anxiety. Whereas persecutory anxiety results from the fear of the ego’s annihilation, depressive anxiety is caused by the fear of the loss of the loved object, a fear that results from the way in which the ego has managed its persecutory anxiety by directing its aggression toward this very object. Consequently, Klein’s depressive position is closely bound up with guilt, the fear of loss, mourning, and ultimately the drive for reparation, which is the urge to repair the damage that was done, whether in reality or in phantasy, to the object.

Many readers of Klein stop here, with her account of the depressive position as the hallmark of psychological maturity. But Klein actually talks a lot, particularly in her early work, about working through or overcoming the depressive position, which implies that for her there’s something beyond the depressive position.¹³ However, as far as I can tell, she never describes this beyond very precisely, nor does she ever give it a name or describe it as a new, third position. As a result, it’s unclear what exactly it means for her to work through the depressive position.¹⁴ But the way I’ve come to understand it is that it’s basically an extension or a deepening of the basic features of the depressive position rather than something radically distinct from it. Working through the depressive position seems to involve moving from the initial experience of depressive anxiety to a greater tolerance of ambivalence, a more secure establishment of the whole object, and an increasing capacity for reparation.

All of this is to say that, for Klein, subject formation, if it goes well, enables the working through of the depressive position, which in turn involves both the secure internalization of the good object and the tolerance of the fundamental ambivalence of one’s relationship to the object—that is, the acceptance of the fact that the loved object and the hated object are one and the same. One result of this process is that, as much as possible, one’s relationship to one’s internal objects corresponds more accurately to the actually existing external objects—parents or other primary caregivers—that are the basis for one’s internalized introjections.¹⁵ Klein’s point in this context is that the superego is frequently much more cruel and aggressive than the parental figures on which it’s based,¹⁶ and that this disconnect between the excessively sadistic internalized objects and the actual objects on which they are based is also something to be worked through in the depressive position, with the aim of bringing one’s internal and external objects more closely into alignment.

MR: That was extremely helpful. I’m intrigued by the idea that, for Klein, there might be something “beyond” the depressive position—even if this simply means that there must be a continuous working through of this position—because, you’re right, critics usually stop at this position, as if reaching it meant that the task of becoming a viable subject had been accomplished. My hunch is that if there’s a beyond of the depressive position, it might have something to do with creativity because working through is always a matter of creativity. And what you said about the capacity to tolerate anxiety and ambivalence also seems relevant to the idea that the depressive position might need to be continuously worked through.

Beyond this specific point, my initial impression is that so much of what you said about Klein makes sense from a Lacanian perspective that these two thinkers might not be as antithetical to each other as critics tend to presume. The notion of the psychotic core of the psyche seems extremely Lacanian, as does the primacy of the death drive and aggression, and even the idea that there’s a relationship to the object from the very beginning. This last idea—that there’s a relationship to the object from the onset of life—isn’t something that most Lacanians place emphasis on, but I think that this relationship exists.

I’ll return to this theme later. At this point I want to ask you about the idea that you glean from Klein that in adult subjects there’s the possibility of reverting to the paranoid-schizoid or the depressive position. Does this mean—and here I’m trying to translate your statement into crudely concrete terms—that a person who is depressed, say, when she is thirty-five, is in some ways reliving the depressive position? Is adult depression a repetition of the depressive position?

AA: Yes, I think that’s right. The idea is that any loss that we experience later in life is experienced as a loss only insofar as it reactivates the experience of loss in the depressive position. I also think that Klein’s work poses a very real question about whether and to what extent we ever get out of the depressive position, and even about whether we should want to—which is of course just another way of posing the question of the beyond.

MR: That makes perfect sense. And again, it accords well with Lacan, who argues that every adult loss reactivates the originary loss—the loss of das Ding (the Thing)—experienced during language acquisition, which for Lacan is a significant part of subject formation. The obvious difference is that Klein’s depressive position predates the Lacanian process of being wounded by language (the “loss” of the Thing).

AA: Right. For Klein, it’s only to the extent that an adult loss reactivates a primary loss—which in turn is a function of the fact that the object that we have lost has in some way reactivated some aspect of our relationship to the primary object—that it’s experienced as a loss in the first place and therefore as something that needs to be worked through. I think you could definitely make connections here to Lacan’s account of das Ding.

MR: Yes. You lose das Ding—or more precisely, you fantasize about having lost das Ding—and then every subsequent loss is in some ways a repetition of that primary loss, which means that you’re working through that loss with every additional loss you experience. I would in fact go as far as to say that the Lacanian subject is intrinsically melancholic, because it’s born from a loss that can never be redeemed for the simple reason that it only exists as a retroactive fantasy. This points to the possibility that subjectivity is a matter of constantly working through melancholia, which doesn’t seem very different from positing that being a subject is a matter of a continuous working through of the depressive position.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1. Subjectivity
• 2. Fusion
• 3. Anxiety
• 4. Affect
• 5. Love
• 6. Creativity
• 7. Politics
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint