Reading Klein

The link between Klein’s writing and the concerns of moral philosophy and ethics is a paradoxical one. She scarcely addressed herself explicitly to writings on this subject, other than those occurring within the field of psychoanalysis itself. Unlike Freud, she only rarely referred to or engaged with recognised works or classics of philosophy, literature or other fields of scholarship in her reflections on human nature and its moral propensities. Yet on the other hand, her work is saturated with investigations of human dispositions and states of mind which have a deeply ethical significance. She writes, for example, about greed, jealousy, envy, gratitude, guilt, love, hate and reparation, as central themes of her work – all of these are concepts of obvious moral significance, since they refer to normatively framed ways in which human beings relate to one another, in their thoughts, emotions and actions. The psyche in Klein’s account is organised through its relations to what it experiences as good and bad. Her account of the psychological development of human beings from infancy gives a large significance to the emergence of a moral sense, although she describes this in terms of emotions, dispositions and orientations towards others, and not in the language of philosophical ethics. Klein believed that a capacity for love and concern for others was innate in human beings, although it always co-existed with opposed dispositions to hate and to injure. Her account of the form taken in the earliest stages of life of the impulses to love and hate – their oral and anal dimensions, their passion and infantile ferocity – shocked many readers, as it challenged (as Freud had done) commonly held notions of the essential innocence of infants. The starkness of her descriptions may have contributed to the misleading view of Klein as giving excessive emphasis to the destructive dimensions of human nature, when this is far from the central perspective of her work. Her theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions challenges Freud’s account of the origins and nature of the moral sense. The idea of morality as embodied in the functions of the superego, as a form of internalised coercion or repression, is radically supplemented in Klein’s account by the idea of the normal emergence, in the development of the ‘depressive position’, of concern for the well-being of the object and of desire to make reparation for harms inflicted (in phantasy and reality) upon it. In essence, in Klein’s view, the moral sense arises both from a primitively internalised fear of punishment and retribution, and, in healthy development, from the emergence of a concern for the well-being of others motivated by love, which Klein thought of as the ‘normal’ superego (O’Shaughnessy, 1999).

We shall try to demonstrate in this chapter the relevance of Klein’s psychoanalytical account of human nature and its development, to the broader understanding of ethical issues, especially as these have been formulated by moral philosophers.

Moral philosophies customarily set out views of the principles of conduct which human beings ought to follow, and/or of the goods or virtues to which they should aspire. But such statements of the desirable, the ideal or the obligatory need to pay regard to the facts or realities of human nature as they are understood to be, or they become mere ungrounded prescriptions. It is these realities of human nature which Klein’s work addressed.¹

We will first set out several dimensions of Klein’s thinking which have relevance to questions of morality and goodness:

1 her insistence that human beings are essentially social in their nature, psychologically connected to others and ‘object-related’, from the very beginning of their lives;

2 her idea that the personality is formed, as development takes place, through processes of projective and introjective identification with those persons – especially a child’s parents or parent-substitutes – in close relationships with it (these are referred to as ‘objects’ in psychoanalytic theory, but they are primarily human beings or aspects of them);

3 her view that the principal determinant of the orientation of individuals towards others is the balance of love and hate in their personalities. The balance between these dispositions is shaped by experiences of nurturance and care, as well as by innate aspects of the personality;

4 her contention that the superego, described by Freud as emerging as a response to the Oedipal situation in the third year of life, as the embodiment of the moral sense, in fact emerges earlier than this, in a more primitive form which can undermine rather than support the human capacity for moral relatedness;

5 her account of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and the idea that central to the depressive position is an extended conception of moral capability, based on the wish to make reparation to the other or ‘object’ for the harm imagined or believed to have been inflicted by the self. Ethical impulses – the desire to do good to others (and also to care for the self) – are thus for Klein based not only on rules imposed by the conscience or primitive superego, but also on dispositions to love and restore;

6 finally, the perspective she shared with Freud that behaviour towards others, and towards the self, is substantially shaped by unconscious or ‘internal’ states of mind. It followed from Klein’s view not only that individuals could be made less subject to anxieties and compulsions in their lives through the understanding of unconscious states of mind, but also that such understanding might enhance their dispositions to take account of the needs of others, and behave with greater care and responsibility towards them.

These ideas, developed by Klein throughout her work, are, taken together, a significant contribution to the understanding of moral capabilities. They should be understood as a major contribution to moral philosophy, although only a small number of philosophers have recognised them as such.² We suggest that they are as important as any ideas bearing on ethical issues that were produced in the human sciences during her lifetime.

We shall follow the practice of previous chapters in presenting passages from some key texts in which Klein’s ideas were set out, before describing their significance.

The analysis of very young children has taught me 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. Furthermore, love and hatred, phantasies, anxieties, and defences are also operative from the beginning and are ab initio indivisibly linked with object-relations. This insight showed me many phenomena in a new light.

(‘The origins of transference’, 1952; p. 53)

This idea is the foundation stone not only of Kleinian psychoanalysis, but of psychoanalytic object-relations theory more broadly. Other object-relations theorists like Winnicott accepted this idea of Klein’s (and similar ideas developed contemporaneously by other writers such as Fairbairn, to a degree anticipating her work) but rejected other of her theoretical commitments, notably the idea of primary destructiveness and envy. Although her idea challenged Freud’s original view of the infant’s development, it was consistent with, and indeed developed from, what Freud said in his later work. It was Freud’s discussions in ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917) and ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’ (1921) which began to set out a more complex and meaning-centred idea of the psyche, in contrast to Freud’s earlier, more biological instinct-driven model. In ‘Mourning and melancholia’, the concept of identification with a loved person became central, and this developed into object-relations theory, and into the belief that relatedness was the precondition of psychic well-being. The development of Freud’s own ideas during his lifetime, and the writing of some of his colleagues such as Ferenczi and Abraham, was a precondition of the development of Kleinian ideas. Nevertheless, around the theory of primary narcissism, and the early development of the infant’s mind, the difference between Freud’s and Klein’s view is significant.

What is challenged in Klein’s assertion, and in the psychoanalytic research programme which followed from it, is the presupposition of a relationship to the world dominated by needs and desires for instinctual gratification which had underpinned Freud’s early theory.³ The counterpoint to this view of the self as fundamentally driven by desires of both libidinal and destructive kinds was Freud’s concept of the superego, and its function in inhibiting the recognition and expression of these desires. This idea, that human beings are born as self-gratifying individuals, requiring to be ‘socialised’ and inducted into relationships as they develop, is challenged in the Kleinian view, which instead describes a condition of passionate emotional interdependency from the beginning of life.

This realignment in psychoanalytic theory after Freud without doubt has a significantly gendered aspect. The idea that humans begin their lives in a state of primary interdependency and relatedness (although one which is full of conflict and tension) is made especially meaningful by the experience of giving birth and holding a newborn baby at the breast, which Klein of course had herself known. Mothers’ as well as babies’ mental states become topics of interest to Klein and her successors in the light of this primary experience; for example, the conceptions of the states of ‘reverie’ and ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ which Bion and Winnicott respectively described. Klein’s imaginative insight enabled her to extrapolate from her understanding of the core experience of mothers and infants theoretical conjectures which were radically to change the understanding of human nature.

The exceptional quality of Klein’s insights has been confirmed by subsequent developments not only in psychoanalysis, but in empirical studies of infant development. The first few months of life, once thought of as a blank period so far as mental life is concerned, have been shown to have a remarkable complexity. Infants once thought to be indifferent to the particular identity of the adults who looked after them, with basic needs once believed to be largely for physical care, are now known to be able to recognise their mothers by sound and smell minutes after birth. The organic development of the infant’s brain and its neural system, which continues for two years or so after birth, appears to be responsive to the baby’s emotional well-being, measured by indicators of stress and anxiety. Ethologists have demonstrated many parallels between mammalian and human attachment patterns. Evolutionary biologists have been able to show that a variety of patterns of attachment behaviour in infants – the repertoire of characteristics and behaviours which makes them attractive to their mothers in particular, and to adults in general, their innate suspicion of strangers, their innate rivalry with siblings – was functional for survival in the hunter-gatherer societies in which the human genetic endowment became more or less fixed, and remain as templates of mental life today. Sarah Hrdy’s remarkable book on this topic (Hrdy, 1999) convincingly suggests that mother and baby – even mother and placenta – are in certain circumstances competitors for scarce ‘survival resources’, notably food. Jim Hopkins (2003) has suggested that her account of the early evolution of human dispositions, in the hunter-gatherer conditions within which human beings were formed genetically, explains the conflictful and ambivalent nature of mother–infant mental life which Klein formulated psychoanalytically.⁴ Many of Klein’s conjectures about infant mental life, made in some cases in the 1920s, have been supported by empirical researches conducted many decades later.⁵ A fully relational theory of human development, which connects neurological conditions, states of mind and social interactions, is in process of emerging, as a rival to a variety of one-dimensional theories of atomistic individualism, whether these be based on materialist, organicist, information-processing, or hedonistic building blocks.⁶ Although Melanie Klein’s is only one significant contribution to this evolving multi-disciplinary paradigm shift, her’s was one of the first and most significant. How striking it is that this revolution in the understanding of human nature and its relational basis should have depended on a gendered, female perspective, in a world of science and ideas previously almost wholly dominated by men.

In the following passage, Klein describes how the personality develops through processes of identification, beginning early in life within the constellation of intimate family relationships.

I have already mentioned that the mother is introjected, and that this is a fundamental factor in development. As I see it, object relations start almost at birth. The mother in her good aspects – loving, helping, and feeding the child – is the first good object that the infant makes part of his inner world. His capacity to do so is, I would suggest, up to a point innate. Whether the good object becomes sufficiently part of the self depends to some extent on persecutory anxiety – and accordingly resentment – not being too strong; at the same time a loving attitude on the part of the mother contributes much to the success of this process. If the mother is taken into the child’s inner world as a good and dependable object, an element of strength is added to the ego. For I assume that the ego develops largely round this good object, and the identification with the good characteristics of the mother becomes the basis for further helpful identifications. The identification with the good object shows externally in the young child’s copying the mother’s activities and attitudes; this can be seen in his play and often also in his behaviour towards younger children. A strong identification with the good mother makes it easier for the child to identify also with a good father and later on with other friendly figures. As a result, his inner world comes to contain predominantly good objects and feelings, and these good objects are felt to respond to the infant’s love. All this contributes to a stable personality and makes it possible to extend sympathy and friendly feelings to other people. It is clear that a good relation of the parents to each other and to the child, and a happy home atmosphere, play a vital role in the success of this process.

p.132

(‘Our adult world and its roots in infancy’, 1959; pp. 251–252)

Klein here sets out her idea that the personality is formed from the beginning of life through its identifications with others. In favourable circumstances, identification is with a ‘good object’, experienced as kind and loving. Klein’s view is that the formation, development and conception of the self as capable of loving depend on this early identification. She believes that the infant innately anticipates the presence of an object of this kind available to it. It follows that infants may be able to hold on to whatever their environment offers them of this kind, even in unfavourable circumstances. Her theory of identification does not imply that infants passively mirror the caring environment around them.

According to Klein’s view, individuals first come to know and recognise their own states of mind and feeling through the ways in which these are responded to by those who care for them.⁷ The development of character, in all its forms – everyone knows about the similarities of gesture and expression that one sometimes sees between parents and children – thus parallels the learning of language itself, as an essentially social and interactive process.

Klein goes on to discuss other aspects of this process of identification. First are the feelings of aggression and hate, which remain an element of its identifications, ‘however good are the child’s feelings towards both parents’. Klein ascribes these feelings, following Freud, to the Oedipal rivalries of male and female children with their same-sex parent. Identification will thus have its negative as well as positive aspects – the self will not be formed in an entirely benign and positive way through these processes.

Yet, however good are the child’s feelings towards both parents, aggressiveness and hate also remain operative. One expression of this is the rivalry with the father which results from the boy’s desires towards the mother and all the phantasies linked with them. Such rivalry finds expression in the Oedipus complex, which can be clearly observed in children of three, four, or five years of age. This complex exists, however, very much earlier and is rooted in the baby’s first suspicions of the father taking the mother’s love and attention away from him.

p.133

(‘Our adult world and its roots in infancy’, 1959; p. 252)

Identification, Klein goes on to argue, comes about through processes of projection as well as introjection. Through projecting part of ourselves into the other person, we come to understand that person as similar to ourselves, although if projection is excessive, it can lead to confusion of the self with its object. We see this in extreme states of mind, for example, when an infant projects its rage into its parent, and then feels terrified of its parent as a consequence. Conversely, excessive introjection can lead to the self becoming dominated by its object. Introjection of a ‘bad object’ – for example, an actively abusive or violent parent – can lead to the formation of a personality dominated by identification with the abuser.

We turn now again to projection. By projecting oneself or part of one’s impulses and feelings into another person, an identification with that person is achieved, though it will differ from the identification arising from introjection. For if an object is taken into the self (introjected), the emphasis lies on acquiring some of the characteristics of this object and on being influenced by them. On the other hand, in putting part of oneself into the other person (projecting), the identification is based on attributing to the other person some of one’s own qualities. Projection has many repercussions. We are inclined to attribute to other people – in a sense, to put into them – some of our own emotions and thoughts; and it is obvious that it will depend on how balanced or persecuted we are whether this projection is of a friendly or a hostile nature. By attributing part of our feelings to the other person, we understand their feelings, needs, and satisfactions; in other words, we are putting ourselves into the other person’s shoes. There are people who go so far in this direction that they lose themselves entirely in others and become incapable of objective judgement. At the same time excessive introjection endangers the strength of the ego because it becomes completely dominated by the introjected object. If projection is predominantly hostile, real empathy and understanding of others is impaired. The character of projection is, therefore, of great importance in our relations to other people. If the interplay between introjection and projection is not dominated by hostility or over-dependence, and is well balanced, the inner world is enriched and the relations with the external world are improved.

(‘Our adult world and its roots in infancy’, 1959; pp. 252–253)

Splitting is an unavoidable aspect of the process of early personality formation, but also an absolutely vital early mental achievement. In order to protect its belief in a good object and in its capacity to love it, the infant splits off its hostile feelings, so that the good and bad aspects of its immediate environment (primarily its mother, often referred to by Klein as the breast) are kept apart from one another. Splitting is therefore a means of protecting the self from its destructive states of mind, and is likely to be resorted to as a defence at moments throughout life, especially when the personality is assailed by anxiety and when negative emotions of fear or hatred threaten to overwhelm the self.

p.134

I referred earlier to the tendency of the infantile ego to split impulses and objects, and I regard this as another of the primal activities of the ego. This tendency to split results in part from the fact that the early ego largely lacks coherence. But – here again I have to refer to my own concepts – persecutory anxiety reinforces the need to keep separate the loved object from the dangerous one, and therefore to split love from hate. For the young infant’s self-preservation depends on his trust in a good mother. By splitting the two aspects and clinging to the good one he preserves his belief in a good object and his capacity to love it; and this is an essential condition for keeping alive.

(‘Our adult world and its roots in infancy’, 1959; p. 253)

The outcome of these processes of identification depended, in Klein’s view, on a combination of the balance of love and hate (or indifference) in the caring environment, and to a degree on the innate dispositions – the emotional resilience – of the infant. Both the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ dimensions of experience were crucial to development, in her view, contrary to the view which is sometimes imputed to her.

According to Klein’s view, human individuals develop from the beginning in relationship to others:

I said before that feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother. The power of love – which is the manifestation of the forces which tend to preserve life – is there in the baby as well as the destructive impulses, and finds its first fundamental expression in the baby’s attachment to his mother’s breast, which develops into love for her as a person. My psycho-analytic work has convinced me that when in the baby’s mind the conflicts between love and hate arise, and the fears of losing the loved one become active, a very important step is made in development. These feelings of guilt and distress now enter as a new element into the emotion of love. They become an inherent part of love, and influence it profoundly both in quality and quantity.

(‘Love, guilt and reparation’, 1937; p. 311)

To be genuinely considerate implies that we can put ourselves in the place of other people: we ‘identify’ ourselves with them. Now this capacity for identification with another person is a most important element in human relationships in general, and is also a condition for real and strong feelings of love. We are only able to disregard or to some extent sacrifice our own feelings and desires, and thus for a time to put the other person’s interests and emotions first, if we have the capacity to identify ourselves with the loved person.

p.135

(‘Love, guilt and reparation’, 1937; p. 311)

We can see in these passages the fully ‘social view’ of human nature that Klein’s psychoanalytic thinking implied, and the close connection in her theory between the moral sense and the desire to make reparation. It is striking that this psychoanalyst, so misleadingly thought of as preoccupied with negative emotions and states of mind, in reality had such a passionate commitment to the power of love.

Klein’s thinking extrapolates Winnicott’s memorable aphorism, ‘There is no such thing as a baby . . . one sees a nursing couple’ (Winnicott, 1952, p. 99), as a lifelong condition, such that there can be no such thing as an isolated individual, but only an individual located in a matrix of relationships, both internal and external.

No man is an island,

Entire unto itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent

A part of the main.⁸

The implications of these assertions for moral thinking will be examined further below.

A connection that is often made between moral philosophy and psychoanalysis is through the idea of the superego. Freud had located the idea of the conscience or the moral will, which are central to Kant’s moral philosophy and developed in his writing as a secularised version of biblical moral thinking, in a distinct element or structure of the unconscious mind. Freud’s view explained the origins of the moral sense largely as the internalisation of parental authority, in particular as the unconscious internalisation of the prohibitions and inhibitions of infantile Oedipal desires. This theory explains the unconscious power of guilt as a moral regulator. There is a connection between this moral tradition and the particular indifference or antipathy of the Christian moral tradition to sensual pleasures.

Klein deepens Freud’s investigations into the functions of the superego, and as with other aspects of her revision of Freud’s theory, she sees its functions beginning even earlier in the infant’s life than Freud had proposed. While sharing Freud’s understanding of the superego as the regulator of amoral or anti-social desires, she laid greater emphasis on its persecutory and destructive functions than Freud, but also on the more benign moral sense linked to the possibilities of reparation. Just as Freud had done, but more forcefully, she saw an excessively punitive superego, liable to be dominated by feelings of hatred, as potentially harmful to human flourishing, and even as a cause of, rather than as the remedy for, anti-social and criminal behaviour.

Klein’s psychoanalytic theory places the moral sense – the capacity and disposition to be concerned for the well-being of others – at the centre of her view of the development of the individual. She sees this not in terms primarily of an internalised prohibition – the feeling of ‘thou shalt not’ – as Freud was inclined to do. Rather Klein saw this prohibitive, punishing morality as merely the early and primitive form of moral awareness, which in favourable developmental circumstances becomes to a degree transcended by a concern for the other as of intrinsic value, as an object of love. This is the significance for moral theory of Klein’s crucial distinction between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, which she describes in the following passage:

In my paper ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, I introduced the conception of the infantile depressive position and . . . I said there that the baby experiences depressive feelings which reach a climax just before, during and after weaning. This is the state of mind in the baby which I termed the ‘depressive position’, and I suggested that it is a melancholia in statu nascendi. The object which is being mourned is the mother’s breast and all that the breast and the milk have come to stand for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness and security. All these are felt by the baby to be lost, and lost as a result of his own uncontrollable greedy and destructive phantasies and impulses against his mother’s breasts. Further distress about impending loss (this time of both parents) arises out of the Oedipus situation, which sets in so early and in such close connection with breast frustrations that in its beginnings it is dominated by oral impulses and fears. The circle of loved objects who are attacked in phantasy, and whose loss is therefore feared, widens owing to the child’s ambivalent relations to his brothers and sisters. The aggression against phantasied brothers and sisters, who are attacked inside the mother’s body, also gives rise to feelings of guilt and loss. The sorrow and concern about the feared loss of the ‘good’ objects, that is to say, the depressive position, is, in my experience, the deepest source of the painful conflicts in the Oedipus situation, as well as in the child’s relations to people in general. In normal development these feelings of grief and fears are overcome by various methods . . .

. . . In the process of acquiring knowledge, every new piece of experience has to be fitted into the patterns provided by the psychic reality which prevails at the time; whilst the psychic reality of the child is gradually influenced by every step in his progressive knowledge of external reality. Every such step goes along with his more and more firmly establishing his inner ‘good’ objects, and is used by the ego as a means of overcoming the depressive position.

(‘Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states’, 1940; pp. 344–347)

The starting point of this paper in the experience of mourning indicates the debt that Klein’s theory concept of identification owes to Freud’s ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917), in which he developed his understanding of the way in which the self depended for its sense of well-being on its internalisation of loved objects. Thus arises the partial death which the self has to endure when a loved person dies or is otherwise lost to it.

Klein goes on to describe the complex relationships between internal and external reality which are involved in the development of the personality. Its development involves a continuing interplay between ‘internal psychic reality’ – the infant’s internal world – and external reality – the actual qualities of its parents and others. Klein’s view is that where the child’s primary experiences are pleasurable ones, and its objects in the external world are mainly loving ones, its destructive impulses are likely to be contained, and its tendency to take flight from reality through splitting will be lessened. She puts forward a conception of the development of the mind as potentially capable of integrating the good and bad, the loved and hated aspects of its object, as dual aspects of its reality. As depressive anxiety – about the damage being done in phantasy to its objects – and manic flight from the depressive position⁹ diminish, the capacity for recognition of the real qualities of its objects (emotionally significant persons) and for appreciative and reparative feelings towards them increases.

It becomes clear in this paper how important the idea of self-understanding, and thus of psychological integration, is to Klein’s view of the personality. Emotional and moral development, in her view, depends on the understanding by the self of its different and conflicting desires and beliefs, and on its capacity to reflect on these. We have shown in Chapter 3 how the impulse to understand is seen by Klein as an ‘epistemophilic instinct’, which was later developed more fully in Bion’s writing.

Here is how Klein further elaborates the significance of the depressive position:

When I first introduced my concept of the depressive position . . . I suggested that depressive anxiety and guilt arise with the introjection of the object as a whole. 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 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 mother’s 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 of 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. However, even at this stage such splitting processes are never fully effective; for from the beginning of life the ego tends towards integrating itself and towards synthesizing the different aspects of the object. (This tendency can be regarded as an expression of the life instinct.) There appear to be transitory states of integration even in very young infants – becoming more frequent and lasting as development goes on – in which the cleavage between the good and bad breast is less marked.

In such states of integration, a measure of synthesis between love and hatred in relation to part-objects comes about, which according to my present view gives rise to depressive anxiety, guilt and the desire to make reparation to the injured loved object – first of all to the good breast. That is to say that I now link the onset of depressive anxiety with the relation to part-objects. This modification is the result of further work on the earliest stages of the ego and of a fuller recognition of the gradual nature of the infant’s emotional development. There is no change in my view that the basis of depressive anxiety is the synthesis between destructive impulses and feelings of love towards one object . . .

p.138

. . . [As] splitting processes diminish in strength . . . the contrasting aspects of the objects and the conflicting feelings, impulses and phantasies towards it, come closer together in the infant’s mind. Persecutory anxiety persists and plays its part in the depressive position, but it lessens in quantity and depressive anxiety gains the ascendancy over persecutory anxiety. Since it is a loved person (internalized and external) who is felt to be injured by aggressive impulses, the infant suffers from intensified depressive feelings, more lasting than the fleeting experiences of depressive anxiety and guilt in the earlier stage. The more integrated ego is now increasingly confronted with a very painful psychic reality – the complaints and reproaches emanating from the internalized injured mother and father who are now complete objects, persons – and feels compelled under the stress of greater suffering to deal with the painful psychic reality. This leads to an over-riding urge to preserve, repair or revive the loved objects: the tendency to make reparation. As an alternative method, very likely a simultaneous one, of dealing with these anxieties, the ego resorts strongly to the manic defence.

(‘On the theory of anxiety and guilt’, 1948; pp. 34–36)

To be noted here is the clarification of Klein’s view that concern for the well-being of loved objects becomes, with maturation, an aspect of the self. Klein attributes both destructive and reparative attitudes to others primarily to emotions, the conflicting drives of hate and love towards the self’s objects. What we might think of as a morally desirable state of affairs arises as a consequence of the predominance of feelings of love over those of hate, in relation to others. This state of affairs is facilitated by ensuring benign conditions of nurture (most of her theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is based on her understanding of infancy), and also, when it comes to questions of remedy and repair, through psychoanalytically informed understanding. She primarily considered such understanding as occurring in the psychoanalytic consulting room, but we can also think of its extensions to many other social settings, including, in more enlightened circumstances, even those of the criminal justice system, which we consider in a later chapter.

Klein believed that dispositions to behave or to live well or badly were greatly influenced by unconscious states of mind, and therefore that understanding of these achieved through the psychoanalytic process was likely to be the most effective means of bringing about those changes in personality organisation that might influence behaviour for the better.

The relevance of Kleinian, and indeed other psychoanalytic, perspectives to moral capabilities lies not only in the developmental and theoretical understanding which they bring to these issues, but also to what they can accomplish in the practice of therapy. The process of understanding and discriminating between feelings and states of mind in psychotherapy inherently involves making discriminations of an ethically relevant kind. To come to recognise a desire as, for example, greedy, destructive or envious, or on the other hand as forgiving or reparative, is to have an understanding of their moral significance. Ethical meanings and criteria are embodied in the language of everyday life, or they would have little practical significance.

To illustrate this, we are going to provide an example from relatively recent child psychotherapy practice of the way in which a moral dimension emerges in a young child’s mind.

First, a brief outline of the circumstances of the family circumstances of the patient:

Jenny was adopted at about the age of one, and had suffered serious neglect from her drug-abusing young mother during her first year. Her father was serving a prison sentence. Her well-intentioned adoptive parents had found themselves horrified by her violent rejection of them, especially of mother, and her absolute unresponsiveness to ordinary discipline.

Jenny has asked her therapist for new scissors as the old ones don’t work well, and she finds the new ones as she opens her box of toys. The therapist has to explain that next week the session has to be at a different time which is being discussed just now with her parents. Jenny’s project is to make a pair of glasses for herself, and although the new scissors cut paper well, they do not work on the transparent paper for the lenses. She makes various attempts and gradually becomes frustrated, but is making an effort not to lose her temper. She says, ‘you are so stupid, what is your problem? I need adult scissors so I can do this.’ The therapist replies that Jenny is angry and feels that she has not given her good enough stuff, so it is her fault. She is responsible for Jenny’s being angry, she is the stupid one and Jenny is the smart one. ‘But perhaps,’ she adds, ‘you may be afraid I am so stupid I cannot help you.’ Jenny bangs the table, angrily. The therapist smiles, and Jenny smiles back. Jenny tries again with the scissors, knocking a pencil on to the floor. She orders her therapist to pick it up and the therapist comments that Jenny feels she is owed something and that the therapist should do whatever she says. Jenny then asks for help with the scissors – ‘you cut it straight for me. If you cannot make it straight you will die.’ The therapist tries to help, saying, ‘You are very frustrated and you cannot give me the space to make a mistake. There is only one thing allowed.’ The two then struggle together with the scissors, but fail nonetheless.

Suddenly Jenny says, ‘I know what to make’, and takes out some fresh paper, drawing attention to the things in her box from long ago. She says, ‘I want to make a sword, or perhaps an electric mosquito zapper.’ The therapist remarks ‘both good for attacking things’. Folding the paper as she wishes also proves difficult, and there is another episode of her becoming frustrated. The therapist speaks of her not knowing yet what will happen next week, and that having to leave this to the grown-ups to sort out makes her feel small, and angry. Jenny then again asks for help and they are able to co-operate on making the sword. Jenny asks, ‘how much time is left?’ and the therapist says that she is now worried that there will not be enough time for her to finish her sword. Jenny becomes bossily demanding, issuing more orders, but she does not explode when the therapist points out what she can do for herself, and the sword is satisfactorily completed. When it is time to stop Jenny herself puts away the toys and asks her therapist to put the lid on the box.

Here we can see how an angry child projects her frustration, her bad feelings, into her therapist who becomes the stupid one. When these feelings are tolerated and made sense of, she recovers a sense that there is someone helpful around, and that she herself can seek help, that there can be two people working well together. She shows how touchingly aware she is of the different state of mind she is in now from the violent hate-filled start of her therapy when she looks back at the old things in the box, and when, in smiling at the therapist, she acknowledges that her angry banging of the table is only one part of her feelings. The adult scissors she wants also refer to her sense of a growing-up aspect of herself, able to use scissors to cut paper and make things, not as a weapon to hurl at her therapist. Later, the sword-making echoes this. Her aggression can be mobilised constructively for symbolic play, and is no longer something she is taken over by. Alongside this containment of violent impulses is her expanding use of her mind to think with potent thought replacing impotent rage.

We can see this process as the emergence of a moral sensibility in Jenny, as she finds that she does not only feel self-righteous blame towards her therapist, but can now begin to recognise her as someone who both wants to help her and whom she can help too, for example in the clearing up at the end of the session. This happens because she has found herself in a relationship in which she can begin to express herself positively as well as negatively. The new scissors were a failure, but they also signalled for Jenny her therapist’s attempt to provide what she needed. This good intention could then be separated from the disappointment in the practical outcome. The threat Jenny utters more than once (‘if you cannot make it straight you will die’) describes the world she lived in for a long time. She, the infant, could not make her mother better. Her adoptive mother was not the longed-for idealised lost mother, and was therefore all wrong, from Jenny’s point of view. This had been a catastrophic pairing of bad baby and bad mother. Jenny’s therapist has had to live for a long time too in that sort of world, as Jenny’s internal reality was re-lived in the therapy. But she had resources that Jenny lacked. Her capacity to think about what was happening enabled her to bear Jenny’s anger, and thus enable her patient to see a potential for understanding and care beyond this. We can see here a recognition of differences between good and bad states of mind, of an incipient sense of moral responsibility, coming about through the psychotherapeutic process.

We suggest that this is the implicitly ethical dimension which is commonly present in Kleinian psychoanalytic practice. This is because the changes which it is hoped will accompany a successful psychoanalytic psychotherapy – the lessening of paranoid-schizoid splitting and of persecution by the superego, the strengthening of depressive concerns and identification with an object capable of both care and of thinking – are all elements of an ethical sensibility.

We will now consider the links between Klein’s ideas on the origins and nature of the moral sense and the broader context of British moral philosophy.

Philosophy is a normative discipline. Philosophical reasoning sets out to determine what is necessary and unquestionable, regardless of whether this ‘necessity’ lies in the sphere of what is true, what is good or what is aesthetically valuable. Its method is a self-reflective one, and aims to make explicit the assumptions and implications of the ways in which understandings are represented in language. This philosophical focus is different from the contingent and empirical concerns of the sciences. In the context of the natural science of Newton and his contemporaries, John Locke referred to the role of philosophy as an ‘under-labourer’, that is to say, acknowledging that the primary source of scientific knowledge must be empirical, and that philosophy’s contribution was mainly to clarify the assumptions and sharpen the conceptual tools on which investigation depended.

The particular focus of moral philosophy, as with much religious discourse within a theological basis of thinking, is with what is right or good. But even though its inquiries are concerned with ideals or norms of conduct or life, moral philosophy nevertheless can hardly refuse to take account of the realities of human nature as it is. Different moral philosophies in the Anglo-Saxon tradition have been configured according to differing ‘empirical’ definitions of this kind. Hobbes proposed a view of human nature as primarily organised around anxieties about survival, and about the need to make prudential adaptations to power to secure this. Hume and Adam Smith argued that human beings possessed an innate disposition to feel sympathy for the pains and pleasures of others, even though they remained primarily self-regarding. Later utilitarian moral philosophies such as that of Bentham and James Mill, following Hobbes, presupposed human beings who are essentially pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding creatures. John Stuart Mill developed this conception by recognising that pleasures were subject to definition and choice, and that discriminations between their qualities and kinds were central to the ethical life. Kant asserted that the rational will, taking account of the equal worth of all persons considered as ends in themselves, was the essence of morality, holding that emotions and the motivations they gave rise to were irrelevant to questions of ethical value. Wittgenstein gave primary attention to the highly particular location of ethical and other forms of understanding in what we might think of as cultures or moral communities, which he investigated through the complex forms of ordinary language. He was suspicious of abstract, generalising laws or principles, believing them to be sources of confusion.

There are latent connections between Klein’s psychoanalytic understanding of the moral sense, and each of these orientations in British moral philosophy. Klein’s ideas add descriptive and explanatory depth to the psychological assumptions which are implicit in accepted philosophical formulations, and sometimes challenge them, just as Freud’s theory of unconscious desires, motivations and compulsions have done.¹⁰ Her theory of identification deepens the theory of sympathies, providing an account of their development and conflictful nature. Psychoanalytic understanding, from Freud’s reflections on ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’ (1921) and ‘Civilization and its discontents’ (1930) onwards, in its essence draws attention to the precariousness of the ‘moral sentiments’ which Hume and Adam Smith had described as facts of human nature, and to the propensity to destructiveness and delusion to which human societies were subject. But whereas Hume lived in a society which had recently passed from a period of violent religious turmoil into a state of greater peace and security, the psychoanalysts from Freud onwards were writing in the midst of the social catastrophes of the twentieth century.

Klein’s account rejects the simplistic pleasure-seeking/pain-averse model of human nature advanced by the utilitarians. That is to say, it renders each of its aspects more complex. The experience of pleasures and pains, though bodily in origin, is far too varied to be understood through reduction to a rational calculus of quantity, intensity and duration, as Bentham attempted to do. Klein believed that pleasures and pains are not discrete phenomena, experienced by merely self-seeking individuals, but are embedded in complex relational and intentional states. Human beings understand pleasures and pains as being brought about by human agents, and what dominates and shapes the psyche are not merely pleasures and pains in themselves, but the meaning which these have in the context of relationships between the self and others. What is primary in Klein’s view is the relationship between the self and its objects, both internal and external, and this is a matter of qualities, not quantities, of satisfaction. John Stuart Mill’s elaboration of utilitarian doctrine – his idea that there were different forms and qualities of pleasure – that Bentham was wrong in his assertion that all pleasures and pains were morally equivalent – ‘push-pin is as good as poetry’ – went some way to redressing its limitations, as Richard Wollheim (1993b) has demonstrated. Before ‘utilities’ can be calculated, and questions of their just distribution can be decided, people have to work out what their ‘utility’ – what is meaningful and desirable for them – actually is. Wollheim has described this as Mill’s commitment to a ‘preliminary utilitarianism’, and explained what some see as contradictions in Mill’s moral philosophy (for example, his commitment to freedom of thought and expression as overruling the harm or displeasure that might be its consequence) as rather representing his recognition that ‘utility’ is an empty concept if there is no space to explore its meanings.

Klein’s idea that it is the balance between the emotions of love and hate which is crucial in shaping dispositions and relations between persons gives an emphasis to moral issues which is also distinct from that of Kant’s ascetic rationalism, which holds that sentiments should have no role in the ethical evaluation of actions. Klein’s belief was that a fulfilled person – we might say also a morally responsible person – is one who gains satisfaction from giving pleasure to others (this is consistent with Hume’s theory of sympathetic pleasure), whereas Kant held that the most ‘moral’ actions are those performed from a sense of duty and responsibility, even if this went against rather than with the grain of our emotional inclinations. As we have seen, Klein recognised the necessary role of the superego in development and in the recognition of moral norms, but observed that in its most punitive form it caused suffering not only to the self but also to its objects. One can think of Kantian moral theory as giving an unfortunately philosophical legitimacy to the power of the punitive superego.

There are other traditions of moral philosophy which seem able to absorb Kleinian insights into the origins and nature of the moral sense more readily than the different moral individualisms of utilitarian and Kantian philosophy. Aristotle’s more ‘social’ or, as modern Aristotelians have put it, more ‘communitarian’ conception of how a good life is to be understood approximates more closely to the Kleinian idea of the self living within a matrix of relationships than individualist models of selfhood. His idea of the ‘virtues’ as the primary terms of the moral life corresponds in psychoanalytic terms to the idea of the internal objects or ‘ego ideals’ around which lives are oriented. Aristotle thought that nurture, education and the formation of good habits were fundamental to moral development, but he had a more ‘external’ and pedagogic idea of this than is adequate to a psychoanalytic understanding of the development of the self. But the idea that relationships with others are at the centre of the moral life, and that moral life is lived in the context of many specific interactions between the self and its objects, does establish a philosophical context in which a psychoanalytic understanding can find a central place.

Arguments within British moral philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s against the prevailing assumptions of individualism opened up space to which the Kleinian understandings of moral psychology are relevant. Philosophers such as Philippa Foot (1958, 2001), Alasdair MacIntyre (1966) and Iris Murdoch (1961) challenged the twin orthodoxies of utilitarianism and Kantianism, arguing that each of them denuded ethical discussion of any substantive idea of value. The idea that the spheres of facts and values are logically entirely separate, and that moral judgements did not logically depend on any facts of human nature, was argued by Foot to fail to recognise how much of everyday discourse is composed of descriptions of behaviour which refer both to dimensions of fact and value. When a person is described as envious, or jealous, or kind, or aggressive, this is both an assertion of a fact about that person, but also implies an assessment of its moral relevance. Klein’s descriptions of states of mind, intentions and behaviours are both descriptive and evaluative in this way. Theoretically and clinically, one aim of psychoanalysis is to establish how such relations to persons or objects (envious or reparative ones, for example) come about, and how they cohere in distinct forms of personality organisation. On this argument, moral philosophy necessarily depends on assumptions and beliefs about the facts of human nature, and psychoanalytic investigation has provided valuable new understandings of this.

A belief that Klein shared with Freud, and which characterises all of psychoanalysis, is that there is a significant unconscious dimension to the human psyche, and that the freedom and well-being of individuals can be enhanced through its understanding, whether this is brought about through the relationships of everyday life, through literature and other forms of art or through the psychoanalytic process. This essential psychoanalytic idea was of course resisted by many philosophers, even to the extent of sustained antagonism towards it. But some philosophers, in the context of this controversy, sought to clarify ways in which key psychoanalytic ideas could be justified and defended. These writers included Stuart Hampshire, whose influential text Thought and Action (1959) had as its central commitment the idea that a condition of being able to act freely was the understanding of the causal influences on human thought and action, which in Hampshire’s view plausibly included unconscious beliefs and desires. Hampshire’s work was part of a larger current of ideas which characterised human action as being distinct in virtue of its being subject to the rational will of individuals. An anti-materialist current in post-war Anglo-Saxon philosophy was committed to clarifying what was distinctive about rational and self-governed action.¹¹

A later important contribution to this debate was Donald Davidson’s paper, ‘Paradoxes of irrationality’ (1982). Davidson’s argument began with a definition of rational human actions as characterised by their bringing together a subject’s beliefs and desires. A belief, for example, that unkind words cause pain to those who hear them, and a desire not to cause pain, may in combination lead to decisions to avoid unkindness of expression. Davidson proposed that the phenomenon of compulsive behaviours which might seem irrational, in that they may lead to consequences which are undesired by subjects, can be explained by positing the existence of a divided mind, one part of which entertains beliefs and desires unrecognised by the other. Unconscious beliefs and desires may thus be rational in their own terms (if a person is perceived as a dangerous enemy, it may make sense to hate and wish to harm that person), but if the belief does not correspond to reality it is in that sense irrational. It can be suggested that many of the behaviours and states of mind which are investigated by psychoanalysts are of this kind. Part of the work of analysis is to bring false beliefs and irrational desires into a closer relation to reality, as a way of lessening the extreme anxieties to which these can give rise. The model of different parts of the mind, relatively cut off from one another, postulated by Davidson is analogous to the idea of ‘parts of the self’ which has a large place in Kleinian analytic thinking.

There have also been contributions from philosophers more closely engaged with the work of Melanie Klein. Richard Wollheim, and a circle of philosophers associated with him, is the foremost of these. In many papers, and especially in his book The Thread of Life (1984), Wollheim set out a description of how a good and ethical life might be understood, which drew substantially on Klein’s ideas. Wollheim writes of ‘the evolution of morality as the transition from the dominion of the superego to the cultivation of the ego-ideal’, taking up the important insight into the nature of morality and the good which is developed in Klein’s theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.

Jim Hopkins’s work on the convergences between psychoanalytic, and especially Kleinian thinking, and developments in the neighbouring fields of attachment theory, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, has already been referred to.

A third philosopher who has contributed in important ways to this debate is Sebastian Gardner (1992, 1993). He argues that the understanding of irrationality demands a more radical acknowledgement of the role of emotion and phantasy in mental life than Davidson’s rationalistic model of ‘parallel minds’, of conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires, had acknowledged.¹² The understanding of the place of emotions in the psyche is greatly enriched by Klein’s theory of unconscious phantasy. Gardner acknowledges that we do think of emotions as appropriate or inappropriate to their objects and circumstances, and evaluate their rationality accordingly – for example, we decide when it is reasonable or unreasonable to feel anger with someone or something. But emotions are more than mere concomitants of our beliefs. The traditional conception of emotions as potentially disruptive and ungovernable, in good and bad ways, is correct. But they are not merely disordered states, but are rather in Gardner’s view shaped by structures of phantasy, which function as schemata through which we perceive the world in affective terms. These underlying schemata function much as conceptual schemata do in organising our perceptions of the natural world. Gardner suggests that Klein’s model of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is an example of the schemata or templates which organise our experience of the world, and that characteristic patterns of emotion are their effects. One highly significant aspect of these schemata is the way in which they encode deep-seated expectations of how human beings will normally behave towards one another. Klein’s account of these innate expectations is of course a complex one, which allows for many different developmental possibilities. But her theory of the depressive position establishes an expectation that human beings are capable of recognition of and care for one another as basic to the structures of their minds.

Since such mental schemata are essentially unconscious, this argument is consistent with the psychoanalytic view that emotions (e.g. seemingly irrational hatred or enthusiasm) cannot always be modified merely by pointing out their inconsistency or poor fit with relevant facts. It is the role of structures of unconscious phantasy in causing disturbances of feeling or belief that need to be addressed if changes in these are to occur. There has been a substantial psychoanalytic literature, following James Strachey’s seminal 1934 paper devoted to the problems of technique involved in accessing and addressing these levels of unconscious phantasy.

Our argument is that Klein’s psychoanalytic writing provides a ground-breaking account of the origins and nature of the moral sense, significantly modifying Freud’s earlier view in the direction of a less individually centred and more relational view of human nature. We have briefly indicated how Klein’s moral psychology can be understood in the context of the broader context of moral philosophical debate, and given some examples of how her ideas have been taken up within philosophy. Her theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions asserts that the capacity for taking responsibility for the self’s destructive emotions and actions, and the desire to make reparation for harms done, are essential concomitants of the integration of the personality. In her account, the integration and internal harmony of the self, the capacity for symbolic functioning, and for recognition and concern for others are linked together in a view of human development which is in many ways hopeful, even though fully realist in its recognition of the power of more negative human propensities.

1 The psychoanalyst close to Klein who explored implications of her ideas for ethics and politics was Roger Money-Kyrle. In his essay ‘Psycho-analysis and ethics’ in the New Directions in Psycho-Analysis volume (1955), in his book Psychoanalysis and Politics (1951) and in later essays published in his Collected Papers (Meltzer, 1978), Money-Kyrle sought to show that the psychoanalytic understanding of unconscious motivations, and in particular of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive aspects of the superego, provides moral insights which can contribute to a morally and socially responsible way of life.

2 These philosophers include Richard Wollheim, Sebastian Gardner, Jim Hopkins and Jonathan Lear.

3 This is connected to the biological and neurological basis of Freud’s earlier theories, in which ‘quantitative’ explanations in terms of flows of energy and discharges of tension are proposed as explanations of motivation. There seems to be a connection between this psychic model and the materialist presuppositions of the philosophical empiricism of Hobbes, whose goal had been to explain human motivation by developing an equivalent of the ‘laws of motion’ which Galileo had deployed in relation to physical nature, and Newton was later to develop, in a further relation to human nature. Hobbes’s version of this was his theory of appetites and aversions, and the primary human motivation to seek pleasure and avoid pain, which become the foundations of utilitarian moral theory. The shadow of these ideas can surely still be seen in Freud’s instinct theory.

4 This argument is part of Hopkins’s broader thesis (Hopkins, 2014) that a number of developments in the empirical human sciences, in particular in neuroscience, are now demonstrating substantial convergences with psychoanalytic theories which have hitherto been based mainly on the reconstructive evidence and inferences of psychoanalytic clinical practice.

5 Peter Fonagy and Mary Target (2003, Chapter 6) review the recent empirical research bearing on Klein’s theoretical conjectures. They conclude: ‘it has to be said that some of Melanie Klein’s ideas no longer seem as far-fetched as they did at first. None of this is proof of her ideas . . . but [they] . . . cannot be dismissed as implausible given the direction in which developmental science is progressing’ (p. 134).

6 Alan Shuttleworth (2002) has referred to this as ‘a bio-psycho-social model’.

7 Meira Likierman (2001; p. 160) put it thus: ‘Klein offers a very unusual angle on the development of identity. She shows that it is not a question of simple and increasing self-awareness. The most intense and disturbing parts of the self are only accommodated after they have journeyed through the minds of others, and after the infant has thus externalized his ego’s relationship with its most disturbing aspects.’

8 Psychoanalytic understandings have been more commonly anticipated, matched and exceeded in the symbolic forms of literature and art, than in the human sciences.

9 It is important to note that the ‘depressive position’ in Klein is an internal state full of anxiety about the hatred felt towards objects. This ‘position’, dominated by unconscious phantasy, can easily be confused with its resolution into a state of mind where ‘depressive anxiety’ mutates into actual concern for others, and the capacity to give real reparative expression to this. ‘The depressive position’ in Klein’s theory is a step in the direction of emotional and psychological integration – it has to be ‘worked through’ – it is not a state of perfect integration. Klein describes in ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (1946) the fluctuations between the depressive and the paranoid-schizoid positions which are a normal part of development.

10 The insistence in the Kleinian tradition on clinical evidence as the primary basis of understanding seems to have been an adaptation by the Kleinians to the empiricist tendencies of British culture. It was through reference to clinical facts that Klein and her colleagues sought to defend their theoretical challenges to Freudian orthodoxy in the ‘Controversial Discussions’ of the 1940s (Rustin, 2007).

11 The classical philosopher whose ideas about the contribution of understanding to freedom, and indeed to the integration and harmony of the self, have a close affinity with psychoanalytic perspective, is Spinoza, as Hampshire (1951; pp. 141–144) has pointed out.

12 Gardner’s argument was an element in a larger shift of attention from the 1980s onwards on to the field of the emotions, which gave rise to new areas of study in sociology (Hochschild, 1983) and history (Reddy, 2001) as well as in psychology (Panksepp, 1998) and philosophy (Wollheim, 1999).