Melanie Klein Research Paper

Born in Vienna on March 30, 1882, Melanie Reizes Klein moved to Budapest in 1910, where she began to read Freud. She entered analysis and analytic training under Freud’s colleague Sandor Ferenczi (on Klein’s biography, see Grosskurth 1986, and Segal 1979). She moved to Berlin in 1921, joining the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and entering analysis with Karl Abraham. Her first formal work as a child analyst began in Berlin. At the invitation of Ernest Jones, Klein visited London in 1925 to lecture on child analysis, and she subsequently moved to England in 1926. Until her death in London on September 22, 1960, she was an active clinician, a leading and innovative child analyst, and a prolific writer who had many followers and colleagues.

Understanding Melanie Klein’s life requires an understanding of the history of psychoanalysis. Klein had no direct contact with Freud, but was trained and supported by Ferenczi, Abraham, and Jones, the leaders of the main psychoanalytic centers outside of Vienna and Freud’s most important colleagues. These several centers allowed more possibility for independence of thought and action than Vienna itself. While Klein was pioneering the practice and theory of child analysis in Berlin and London in the 1920s, Anna Freud was engaged in a parallel project, based on somewhat different understandings and methods, in Vienna. After Freud developed cancer in 1923, he came to depend almost entirely on his daughter as both professional heiress and personal companion and caretaker. Klein’s theory, technique, and stature as a child analyst directly challenged Anna Freud’s primacy in this same arena, and Freud was drawn to support his daughter. Thus, even as Klein considered herself the true theoretical heir to Freud, her work from the outset was strongly contested by Anna Freud and her father.

As a result of the Anschluss of March, 1938, in which Hitler, with the approval of many Austrians, seized and incorporated Austria into Nazi Germany, the Freuds moved to London, thereby setting the stage for a confrontation and theoretical and/organizational sharpening of differences. Freud died in 1939, but the followers of Anna Freud and those of Melanie Klein in London spent the latter war years in ‘Controversial Discussions’ (King and Steiner 1991), with an ‘Independent’ Group holding a middle ground and developing its own theories. Debate posed Klein’s espousal of Freud’s late instinct theory, with its focus on aggression, her theories of early infant development, her advocacy of the analysis of very young children, and her insistence that the analysis of children (and adults) should begin immediately from interpretation of unconscious fantasy, against Anna Freud’s focus on ego defenses and ego functions, her following of the traditional structural and libidinal phase theories, and her advocacy of analyzing from the most surface layer of defense rather than from the deepest layer of unconscious fantasy. The result of the ‘Controversial Discussions’ was a settling in of a Kleinian Group, led by Klein until her death and still an active force in British psychoanalysis (Spillius 1988 includes writings on theory and technique by Klein’s students and later colleagues).

Since the 1940s, no psychoanalytic center has developed without grappling with Klein. Kleinians continue to be central to British psychoanalysis, and Kleinian thinking has shaped psychoanalysis throughout Latin America. Kleinian ideas were initially anathema in the USA, where emigre analysts were closely allied with Anna Freud, but since the 1980s, Kleinian thinking has become widely influential. In Europe too, psychoanalytic theory grapples with, accepts, or challenges Klein.

Kleinian theory is a complex, intertwined whole resting on several foundations (see Klein 1975). This account focuses on Kleinian theory rather than on Klein’s founding contributions to child analysis and psychoanalytic clinical technique. As a psychoanalyst, Klein like Freud begins from the discovery and investigation of the dynamic unconscious, the postulate that conscious thinking only expresses a small fraction of what goes on in the human mind. The beginning datum of Kleinian theory is the psychic reality, or internal reality, of what Klein called ‘unconscious fantasy.’ The dynamic unconscious consists of repressed or split off fantasies that have a powerful effect in shaping conscious life, feeling, and behavior. Unconscious fantasy operates from the very beginning of life and consists of affect-laden stories or proto-stories about the self, the body, and one’s relation to others. These stories are not linguistic or narrative, but are forms of implicit knowing and being that portray in direct, unmediated, affectively charged ways, a mental picture of an inner world of self and others. Klein described how this internal reality is created and its constituent effects on all bodily experience, interpersonal relations, and social and cultural experience (for an extended reading of Klein along these lines, see Chodorow 1999b). It is an ‘object-relations theory,’ picturing the self, or ego, in relation to others, or objects. Klein’s method of play analysis and work with very young children led her to a ‘developmental theory’ based on changes in prevalent unconscious fantasies. The management of anxiety about ‘aggression’ in self and others is a central goal of most unconscious fantasy.

Although Freud discussed the ego’s relations to its objects and the effects of the object upon the ego—for instance, in his claim that the ego contains a history of object choices—Klein is considered the original objectrelations theorist. For Klein, the ego is object-related from birth, all drives are directed towards objects rather than toward gratification and release, and all psychological life revolves around internal pictures of the ego in relation to its objects. Objects are both external—actual people like mother, father, or analyst with whom the self-interacts—and internal, parts of the outside world that are unconsciously experienced as within the self. Objects in this ‘internal world’ may be ‘part-objects’—an aspect of another, a body part of another, like the mother’s breast or a fantasy of her inside organs—or ‘whole objects’—others in all their different aspects. Psychic life especially consists in the building of an internal world through what the ego does psychologically with objects, using such mechanisms as ‘splitting,’ ‘projection,’ and ‘introjection.’ Through these processes, internal and external realities are continuously recreated in relation to one another. Whereas for Freud, repression of unacceptable thoughts and feelings is the key defense, for Klein, splitting, introjection, and projection are the central defenses. Klein’s developmental account revolves around the uses of these defensive processes. In the ‘paranoid-schizoid position,’ the self and the earliest internal objects—initially the mother’s breast, and throughout life, objects that represent the breast—are psychically experienced as either all good or all bad. The ego’s goals are to keep bad and good parts of the self and object separate. The ego attempts to preserve its own goodness by keeping good, or loved, objects within, and ejecting and rejecting bad, or hated, objects. ‘Projective identification’ then leads the ego to feel that the object, now containing bad parts of the self, is persecutory. To control the now persecutory objects, they may be reintrojected, in turn bringing hatred back into the self, which projects badness back into the object. And so on. Split-off good feelings and parts of the self may also be defensively projected into the object, so that the self can feel protected and loved. ‘Persecutory anxiety’—the fear of being attacked by bad objects or of annihilation of the self—is the dominant anxiety of the paranoid-schizoid position and leads to the spiral of splitting, projection, and introjection that characterize it. The paranoidschizoid position is paranoid because of the fear of attack it contains and schizoid because it is based on separating different aspects of the self and the other.

When the child reaches the ‘depressive position,’ he or she recognizes people as whole objects and painfully realizes that an attack on the bad object is also an attack on the good one, since they are one and the same. Guilt arises, along with the desire to make ‘reparation.’ Reparation is one root of creativity throughout life as well as of the desire to parent and take care of others. ‘Depressive anxiety’—the fear that one will damage the good object—is the characteristic anxiety of the depressive position. Unlike Freud’s libidinal stage theory, Klein’s theory of positions is not a stage theory in which the achievement of the depressive position involves the giving up of the paranoid-schizoid. All people who have reached the depressive position continue throughout life to move between the two positions.

A complex inner world of self and objects constitutes unconscious fantasy and is the basis of ‘transference.’ For Klein, transference is not just the putting of early feelings about a parent onto the analyst but a total way of being in the world. Although it is mainly investigated in analysis, transference gives meaning to and animates all experience. It functions as an internal prism through which the world is perceived, becomes subjectively meaningful, and is an object of action. Klein, and especially later Kleinians, also show how forms of thinking themselves transferentially express psychic structure and psychic fantasy, for example, whether a patient can make connections among thoughts, can keep anxiety-laden ideas in mind or must split them off and evacuate them, can keep ideas whole or must destroy or fragment them, can take in ideas from the analyst, can symbolize generatively, and other similar processes.

For Klein, the most anxiety-laden and intolerable unconscious fantasies concern aggression. Klein holds to the later Freudian dual-drive theory, rejected by many analysts, of the life and death instincts. The death instinct constitutes a threat of annihilation or fragmentation from within, creating basic existential anxiety from the beginning of life. The basic wish of the psyche is to get rid of this threat, leading to the projection that creates the first bad object. Persecutory anxiety thus arises originally as a direct response to the internal threat of destruction from within and thereafter also in response to the aggression that has been through projective identification put into objects. The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions are both organized largely in response to anxieties generated by these fears of annihilation, aggression, and hatred that emerge from self and object.

A major manifestation of the death instinct is found in envy, which Klein describes as the most toxic emotion. Klein discovered the importance of envy in patients’ attempts to destroy and dismantle the help offered by the analyst. Envy originates in the perception that the other possesses and enjoys something good and desirable—originally imaged as the creativity, fullness, and bounty of the maternal breast. The envious impulse is to spoil or destroy that goodness. Envy is felt especially virulently against those who appear not to be envious, those who can enjoy creativity and happiness in others. The envious cannot feel gratitude or serenity, and in fact envy is perhaps the least tolerable of emotions, because its goal is to destroy or spoil not that which is bad, but that which is good. Envy is manifested in attempts to destroy the offerings of parents, of teachers, of analysts, of any whom seem contented and happy. In literature, Iago represents envy in its purest form.

Although she did not explore these implications herself, Klein’s work has profound implications for social science (see e.g., Chodorow 1999b). Klein’s account of unconscious fantasy and transference challenges the sociological assumption that the material or structural reality of politics, society, and culture come first and create or determine human life. By documenting how people create the subjective meaning of the world from within, through the dynamics of unconscious fantasy, and how perception, action, and thought result from a transferential shaping that has real effects, Kleinian theory demonstrates that action in the external world is not only taken through the conscious, rational assessment of options, nor is it determined through structural or material constraints. Action is as much a result of an internal, psychologically created picture as of society or culture, and meanings are as much created psychodynamically through affectively-charged fantasy as they are culturally presented.

Splitting, projection, and introjection are psychological mechanisms that characterize many social processes. Many of the major political events, crises, and controversies of our time can only be fully understood if the operation of rage, splitting, projection, and introjection is taken into account (see Chodorow 1998). For example, political and cultural demonization of the enemy is psychologically based on projection and introjection, in which all good resides in the nation, the ethnos, the group, or the political party, and all bad resides in those who are not part of this group. Splitting bad from good, and containing all good within the self while putting all bad into the other, underpins all virulent racism, nationalism, ethnic conflict, and attempts at ethnic cleansing or genocide. Splitting may also be used to ward off elements in the self that are threatening because they are too attractive. Thus, misogyny and homophobia express splitting, projection, and denial, in this case of misogynist and homophobic men’s feminine identifications or desires for other men— attractions and desires that are too anxiety-laden to be contained within the self. Finally, Klein describes the great envy of women’s creative insides and the psychic threat of images of the mother who contains everything good and powerful—babies, milk, the father’s penis, and the ability to give and take life. Such images of maternal power and the mother’s body help to explain the psychological intensity of abortion politics and perhaps the extreme violence of a few antiabortion activists (for a brief overview of Kleinian theory in relation to gender, see Chodorow 1999a).

Kleinian theory is therefore a basis both of a theory of psychoanalytic treatment and a description of how the human mind develops and operates. It describes how people create themselves and give the world subjective meaning. It explains motivations for action and perception. It is thus an essential component of all investigations of society, politics, and culture.

Bibliography:

1. Chodorow N J 1998 The enemy outside: Thoughts on the psychodynamics of extreme violence with special attention to men and masculinity. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 3(1): 25–38
2. Chodorow N J 1999a From subjectivity in general to subjective gender in particular. Introductory essay to Melanie Klein’s mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. In: Bassin D (ed.) Female Sexuality: Contemporary Engagements. Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ
3. Chodorow N J 1999b The Power of Feelings. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
4. Chodorow N J 2000 Psychoanalysis and women psychoanalysts. In: de Mijolla-Mellor S (ed.) Women in the History of Psychoanalysis. Karnac Books, London
5. Grosskurth P 1986 Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work. Knopf, New York
6. King P, Steiner R (eds.) 1991 The Freud–Klein Controversies, 1941–45. Routledge, London and New York
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8. Segal H 1979 Klein. William Collins Sons and Co., Glasgow, UK
9. Spillius E B (ed.) 1988 Melanie Klein Today: Developments in Theory and Practice. Routledge, London and New York, Vols. 1 and 2