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.
