Melanie Klein was an Austrian born Jew and a life-long emigrant in Britain born in She started her practice as a psychoanalyst in Budapest and

Transcription

1 Melanie Klein was an Austrian born Jew and a life-long emigrant in Britain born in She started her practice as a psychoanalyst in Budapest and remained strongly influenced by Sandor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham. Not having received much support and acclaim for her work with children, she moved from Berlin to London after an invitation from Ernest Jones in 1926 where she continued working until her death in After 1938 Klein came under attack from the Continental scholars who were coming to Britain, among them Freud himself and his daughter Anna. As a result British Psychoanalytical Society split into three parts: the Kleinians, the Anna Freudians and others, a division which to some extent remains until today. Klein was involved in many tragic events in her life including the death of her son, of her brother and sister, her divorce, the controversial discussion with the Society, and her conflict with daughter Melitta Schimideberg with whom she was not reconciled until her death. The present essay is part of the collection of Melanie Klein s essays Envy and Gratitude and other works and is entitled On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt (1948). As a scholar and psychoanalyst Klein is now as one of the co-founders of the object-relational theory: a psychodynamic theory that defends that people relate to others and situations based on their experience in childhood. Certain Objects/ images are engraved in the unconscious from a very early age and these serve as measure to predict behavior in people s relationships and interactions. The Objects are initially seen as partial and when the idea of good and bad is reconciled in an infant s mind, he or she manages to grasp more sophisticated concept such as totality, ambiguity, temporal continuity and so on and so forth. The process of reconciling the partial objects involves the struggle between the life and death instinct, fantasies of envy, greed and hate in very young children. Melanie Klein has always traced her theories to Freud who has remained until now an inescapable reference for scholars in psychoanalysis and other fields. Asked about her attitude towards Freud s teachings she responded: Aren t we all Freudians? I m a Freudian, not Anna Freudian (making an allusion to her conflict with Freud s daughter and psychoanalyst Ann Freud). What concerns the origins of anxiety, Freud put forward the idea that anxiety arises from a direct transformation of libido. Freud said that: The whole matter can be clarified, I think, if we commit ourselves to the definite statement that as a result of repression the intended course of the excitatory

2 process in the id does not occur at all; the ego succeeds in inhibiting or deflecting it. If this is so the problem of transformation of affect under repression disappears. The problem of how anxiety arises in connection with repression may be no simple one; but we may legitimately hold firmly the idea that the ego is the actual seat of anxiety and give up earlier view that the cathectic energy of the repressed impulse is automatically turned into anxiety. To Freud anxiety is caused by the child missing someone who is loved or longed for: If a mother is absent or has withdrawn her love from her child, it is no longer sure of the satisfaction of its needs and is perhaps exposed to the most distressing feelings of tension. Two conclusions can be drawn from Freud s musings: 1. Anxiety appears in young children as a result of unsatisfied libidinal cravings 2. It is triggered by the feeling of danger and mother s absenteeism. 3. Guilt appears as a result of frustration and aggression Psychoanalysts such as Klein and earlier Abraham pointed to the fact that guilt and anxiety may be earlier products of our psycho-sexual development. In the stage of narcissism with a cannibalistic sexual aim the first evidence of an instinctual inhibition appears in the shape of a morbid anxiety. The process of overcoming the cannibalistic impulses is intimately associated with a sense of guilt which comes into the foreground as a typical inhibitory phenomenon belonging to the third (earlier anal-sadistic) stage. In her analysis of infantile-anxiety situations, Melanie Klein came to give utmost importance to sadistic impulses and phantasies which reach their climax in the earliest stages of infantile development. Psycho-sexual development was, according to Klein, based on the processes of projection and introjections that created good and bad objects towards which an infant would display much aggression: a process that again would bring about feelings of guilt. It was accompanied by the sense of the child s own destructiveness. Anxiety in children was a confirmation of the extent to which the fear of death exists in the unconscious. One of the first anxiety-situations presents a child afraid of being devoured by the totem animal (father) which is an undisguised expression of the fear of

3 total annihilation of the self. The fear of being devoured by the father results from the infant s own impulses to devour its objects. An early super ego is formed by the devouring and devoured objects (bad breast) as well as the good objects (good breast). The fear of being annihilated includes the anxiety lest the internal good breast be destroyed, for this object is felt to be indispensable for the preservation of life. Primary anxiety and the fear of death are, according to Klein, part of the early Super-ego. In short, through projection the frustrating and threatening bad external breast becomes the representative of the death instinct and through introjection it reinforces internal anxieties; furthermore because of the fluctuation between projection and introjection internal dangers need to be deflected into the external world. This interaction exists in some measure throughout life. There also exists a gratifying good breast which reinforces the power of the life instinct. The good internalized breast and the bad devouring breast form the core of the super-ego in its good and bad aspects; they are the representatives within the ego of the struggle between the life and death instincts. Paranoid disturbances in adulthood are a result of anxieties experienced in the first months of life, originating in the infant s relationship towards the good and the bad breast. They result from the unresolved paranoid-schizoid positions (a set of psychic states that correspond to a given phase of development, here birth to 6 months and manifest themselves throughout one s life.) Paranoid corresponds to anxieties against bad objects from outside and inside, as well as already mentioned fear of death or annihilation. The anxieties are enclosed in the imagery of a bad breast, its devouring powers along with the infant s desire to devour as well. Schizoid refers to the process of splitting and projection, a defense mechanism that distinguishes between the bad and the good breast. During the paranoid-schizoid position, that is, during the first three to four months of life, splitting processes, involving the splitting of the first object (the breast) as well as the feelings towards it, are at their height. Hatred and persecutory anxiety become attached to the frustrating (bad) breast, and love and reassurance to the gratifying (good) breast. (34) A measure of synthesis between love and hatred in relation to partobjects comes about, which according to my present view gives rise to the

4 depressive anxiety, guilt and the desire to make reparation to the injured love object (35) Later in the depressive position the infant is able to bring together the bad and the good objects terminating the belief in the idealized object. Should the process be well resolved the period of mourning of the loss is not too long and when repeated in adulthood it lasts for short periods of time not giving rise to an endemic depression. In adulthood, it may be said that, the extent to which we have the capacity to limit mourning and not let it transform itself into a prolonged depression has its origins in how well we resolved our depressive position in childhood. The deeper the depression in adulthood, the more idealized and imaginary the reason for it and the greater the feelings of aggression and auto-annihilation. My further work on the paranoid-schizoid position, which precedes the depressive position, has led me to the conclusion that though in the first stage the destructive impulses and persecutory anxiety predominate, depressive anxiety and guilt already play some part in the infant s earliest object-relation, i.e. in his relation to his mothers breast In the depressive position, Depressive anxiety, guilt and the reparative urge are often experienced simultaneously (36) These are only possible if love for the object surmounts hatred, this being an essential condition for the subject s capacity to synthesize the contrasting aspects of the object. If love is insufficient in amount the depressive anxiety may be transformed into a persecutory anxiety about an imaginary loss. The conceptual distinction between depressive anxiety, guilt and reparation on the one hand, and persecutory anxiety and the defences against it. Throw light on many problems connected with the study of human emotions and behavior. The healthier situation is that of a depressive anxiety because such implies guilt and reparative tendencies towards the object which is loved more that despised even in its ambiguous totality. This anxiety corresponds to what Sigmund Freud named the objective anxiety against a realistic danger. The former persecutory anxiety is a neurotic anxiety about an unknown, unrealistic danger, often an instinctual demand. Both anxieties are experienced to some extent by infants and later adults in their relationships towards loved objects. Objective, depressive anxiety is threatened by the loss of love as a real danger (first when the mother is absent, and steadily learning that even though she

5 may be temporarily absent her love is constant), neurotic anxiety is threatened by an imaginary loss, and the infant/person s own desire to annihilate the loved object. The interaction between the two anxieties remains active throughout human life. In psychoanalytical practice it is first the objective anxiety that needs to be addressed to relieve the impact of other anxieties and make the patient see the danger situation in its natural size: should the danger be overestimated by the patient, after seeing its true dimensions, the anxiety should diminish; should the objective anxiety be underestimated this may lead to a denial of the situation and an inappropriate behavior. In case of children: The relative stability of children in spite of war-time dangers was not determined so much by manic defences as by a more successful modification of early persecutory and depressive anxieties, resulting in a greater feeling of security regarding both the inner and the external world, and in a good relationship with their parents. From a clinical point of view we know that if a patient is cured of his positions the onset of depression can be even more profound. This finds its correlatives in the stories of war, where those who survived found themselves in need of acquiring a new object of anxiety and horror, Anxiety implies negative feelings of aggression (evolving to sadism) and should be countered by reparative tendencies, which is an expression of the life instinct, An optimum in the interaction between libido and aggression implies that the anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct. Post-traumatic patients often suffer from a negative therapeutical reaction and are unable to confront themselves with reality. Thus a lack of anxiety triggers anxiety. In case of women, here women writers, authors coming from countries where womanhood was for a long time a source of trauma may continue to invest and create negative patterns in their fiction. In cultural studies, people may fluctuate from a negative object of interpellation towards another one,

6 One of the examples of psychoanalysis and literature or art lays in the work of a British psychoanalyst (of Polish origin) Hanna Segal Poznanska. Her famous essay on Joseph Conrad entitled Joseph Conrad and the mid-life crisis concentrates of the profound depression Conrad felt at 37 years of age that was later on purged through the symbols of sea, water battle ships a struggle in his work. Following Melanie Klein, art was one of the means of re-symbolizing the world, re-building the world in the face of destruction; a means used by other writers such as Marcel Proust: So much death, so much death, the only way to bring it back to life is through writing, or painters, such as Pablo Picasso and his Guernica after the Spanish civil war, or the cycle inspired by Velazquez Las Meninas Because object-relation theory defend an interiorization of the external objects it may be important to trace the narratives of the body, descriptions of bodily states and corporeal imagery (in my case in women s literature) to gain a more complete image of the world and how it is perceived by women in given social, political and national contexts.