Melanie Klein was a highly creative and original Viennese Jewish psychoanalyst who discovered
the work of Freud at the age of 32 and devoted her life to enriching and nuancing it in intriguing
and valuable ways.
Born in 1882, Klein was held back by her father from her desire to become a doctor and had
been pushed by her family into a loveless marriage with a coarse, unpleasant man with
whom she had nothing in common. She was bored, sexually frustrated and mentally unwell.
Psychoanalysis saved her. She left her husband, read everything she could, attended lectures,
and started publishing papers of her own.
She soon departed from Freud in an area that most other analysts had overlooked: the analysis
of children.
Freud had been sceptical that children could ever be analysed properly, their minds being
in his view too unformed to allow for a perspective on the unconscious.
But Klein now argued that an analyst could get a useable view into a child’s inner
world through studying how they played with toys. She therefore equipped her consulting
room with small horses, figurines and locomotives and established herself as a child psychoanalyst,
first in Berlin and then in London, where she settled in 1926 and remained for the rest
of her life. In her work with children, Klein wanted to
understand how human beings evolve from the primitive pleasure-seeking impulses of early
infancy to the more mature adaptations of later life – and in particular, she wanted
to know what might go wrong on this journey, giving rise to the neurotic adaptations of
adults.
In her 1932 book The Psychoanalysis of Children she described the difficulty of the young
infant’s situation.
Weak, utterly at the mercy of adults, unable to grasp what is happening, the infant cannot
– in Klein’s description – grasp that people around it are in fact people, with
their own alternative reality and independent points of view.
In the early weeks, the mother is not even ‘a mother’ to her child, she is – to
come to the crux of the issue – just a pair of breasts which appear and disappear with
unpredictable and painful randomness.
In relation to this mother, all the infant experiences are moments of intense pain and
then equally intense pleasure. When the breast is there and the milk flows, a primordial
calm and satisfaction descends upon the infant: it is suffused with feelings of well-being,
gratitude and tenderness (feelings that will, in adulthood, be strongly associated with
being in love, a moment where breasts continue to play a notable role for many). But when
the breast is for whatever reason it is missing, the infant feels starving, enraged, terrified
and vengeful.
This, thought Klein, leads the infant to adopt a primitive defence mechanism against what
would otherwise be intolerable anxiety. It ‘splits’ the mother into two very different
breasts: a ‘good breast’ and a ‘bad breast’.
The bad breast is hated with a passion; the infant wants to bite, wound and destroy this
object of unholy frustration. But the good breast is revered with an equally thorough
though more benign intensity.
With time, in healthy development, this ‘split’ heals. The child will gradually perceive that
there is in truth no entirely good and no entirely bad breast, both belong to a mother
who is a perplexing mixture of the positive and the negative: a source of pleasure and
frustration, joy and suffering.
The child discovers a key idea in Kleinian psychoanalysis: the concept of
AMBIVALENCE
To be able to feel ambivalent about someone is, for Kleinians, an enormous psychological
achievement and the first marker on the path to genuine maturity.
But it isn’t inevitable or assured. Only slowly can a healthy child grasp the crucial
distinction between intention and effect, between what a mother may have wanted for
it and what the child might have felt at her hands nevertheless.
These complicated psychological reactions belong a phase that Klein called
THE DEPRESSIVE POSITION
a moment of soberness and melancholy when the growing child takes on board (unconsciously)
the idea that reality is more complicated and less morally neat than it had ever previously
imagined: the mother (or other people generally) cannot be neatly blamed for every setback;
almost nothing is totally pure or totally evil, things are a perplexing, thought-provoking
mixture of the good and bad…
This is hard to take and – for Klein – explains the serious faraway look that may sometime
enter the eyes of children during daydreams. These small beings look oddly wise and grave
at such moments; they are, somewhere deep inside, cottoning on to the moral ambiguity
of the real adult world.
Unfortunately, in Klein’s analysis, not everyone makes it to the depressive position,
some get stuck in a mode of primitive splitting she termed
THE PARANOID-SCHIZOID POSITION
For many years, even into adulthood, these unfortunate people will find themselves unable
to tolerate the slightest ambivalence: keen to preserve their sense of their own innocence,
they must either hate or love. They must seek scapegoats or idealise. In relationships,
they tend to fall violently in love and then – at the inevitable moment when a lover
in some way disappoints them – switch abruptly and become incapable of feeling anything anymore.
These unfortunates are likely to move from candidate to candidate, always seeking a vision
of complete satisfaction, which is repeatedly violated by an unwitting error on the lover’s
part.
We don’t have to believe in the literal truth of Klein’s theory to see that it has
value for us as an unusual but useful representation of what it means to be a proper grown-up.
The impulse to reduce people
into what they can do for us (give us milk, make us money, keep us happy), rather than
what they are in and of themselves (a multifaceted being), this can be painfully observed in emotional
life generally.
With Melanie Klein’s help, we learn that coming to terms with the ambivalent complex nature of all
relationships belongs to the business of growing up (a task we’re never quite done with)
– and is likely to leave us a little sad, if not for a time quite simply depressed.