“The infant can only experience complete enjoyment if the capacity for love is sufficiently developed; and it is enjoyment that forms the basis for gratitude. Freud described the infant’s bliss in being suckled as the prototype of sexual gratification. In my view these experiences constitute not only the basis of sexual gratification but of all later happiness, and make possible the feeling of unity with another person.”
“An infant who has securely established the good object can also find compensations for loss and deprivation in adult life. All this is felt by the envious person as something he can never attain because he can never be satisfied, and therefore his envy is reinforced.”
In a nutshell
How we cope with pain and pleasure as an infant can shape the basic life outlook we carry into adulthood.
In a similar vein
Anna Freud The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (p 104)
Harry Harlow The Nature of Love (p 142)
Karen Horney Our Inner Conflicts (p 156)
R. D. Laing The Divided Self (p 186)
Jean Piaget The Language and Thought of the Child (p 222)
Prior to Freud, people thought that childhood was a time of simple happiness. Children’s rage, frustration, sadness, or lack of enthusiasm was explained away by physical factors, and their emotional lives were not taken seriously. But Freud showed that children experience significant conflicts, and that these shape us as we move into adulthood.
Taking up where Freud left off, Melanie Klein helped forge a whole subfield of psychoanalysis focusing on the earliest months of life. Other psycho-analysts including Anna Freud had focused on children, but Klein broke new ground in her emphasis on the mental life, including fantasies, defenses, and anxieties, of the infant. She believed that the way a baby comes to grips with its environment sets a pattern for adulthood, affecting the ability to love and the development of basic character traits such as envy and gratitude.
Klein never attended a university, and had three children before becoming a psychoanalyst. Yet this late starter attracted fanatical adherents, the “Kleinians,” who waged intellectual war against other Freudians, including Anna Freud and her camp in the 1940s. For a long time Klein’s detractors achieved their aim of sidelining her, but there has been a renewal of interest in her work, and her impact on child psychology cannot be denied.
Envy and Gratitude is a collection of writings covering the last 15 years of Klein’s life. From these essays and articles we examine her well-known “paranoid/schizoid” and “depressive” positions in childhood, her practice of psychoanalyzing children while they played, and her controversial idea that in infancy people develop a basically envious or grateful view of the world.
To understand Klein, we must appreciate that her work was based on the Freudian idea of “object relations,” in which emotions are always expressed toward an “object,” usually a person but sometimes even a part of a person.
Klein believed that the first of a child’s object relations is with the breast of the mother, which becomes the focus of all the baby’s feelings. From babies’ point of view, depending on whether they are satisfied, the breast seems to be either “good” or “bad,” and all their latent feelings of love and hate are poured into this relationship with the breast. Babies either idealize the breast’s source of love and sustenance, or feel persecuted by it if their needs are not instantly met. These split feelings are the first time that a human being experiences anxiety.
The splitting is what Klein called the “paranoid-schizoid” position. Whatever is good about the mother and her breast children “introject” or make part of themselves. Whatever is bad in themselves they “project” onto the mother. In short, the paranoid-schizoid position is babies’ attempt to establish some kind of control over the external and internal world before they develop their own ego or sense of self.
According to Klein, Freud’s “life instinct” and “death instinct” were evident even in infancy. These forces were what gave the early relationship to the “object” such intensity. There is both desperation to get what we need to survive, but also jealousy, anger, and aggression to destroy the object (observed in the baby’s anguished screaming and “scooping out” of the breast) when it is not forthcoming with its love, attention, or food.
In the second half of babies’ first year, however, Klein observed that the development of an ego means that the polarities of love and hate meld into one. The mother can now be seen to accommodate both, and children can take more responsibility for their feelings. This more realistic picture is helped along by the development of the superego—the socially conditioned self—which begins to take a major role in shaping children.
Freud believed that the superego developed over a number of years, but Klein found it displayed very early on, particularly in girls. She noted the sense of guilt regarding destructive feelings toward the mother, and the corresponding desire to make “reparation” or undo these negative feelings by being good or loving. The roots of schizophrenia, she theorized, were to be found in children’s relations with their superego, which often involved a frightening or strict mother figure.
The depressive position comes as the result of a child’s feelings of guilt that their own aggression, hatred, and greed will bring about the loss of the breast/mother. When a baby is weaned off breast milk, it is often the catalyst for the depressive position to occur, because the child may feel they have brought this loss on themselves.
In the first two years of life children have obsessions or tendencies to do with eating, defecation, or the repetition of certain stories or movements. As adults we know these obsessions are neurotic, but understand them as part of the infant’s desire to establish security. Children develop anxieties or psychotic tendencies, Klein wrote, only so that their still fragile ego can remain protected. The depressive position is actually the beginning of maturity, because babies now have greater sophistication in how they understand their own feelings and their world.
Normally, children’s defenses or neuroses lessen as they develop and are able to adjust themselves better to reality. However, how we work through the depressive and schizoid positions also sets a template for how we deal with these feelings as adults. The early negative states can be reactivated in adult life at certain events. Mourning, for instance, is not only about the person lost, but about our internal losses. The development of a strong ego or sense of self in infancy, according to Klein, is therefore vital to adult mental health.
If children can fully express love for their mother in infancy, this sets them up to be able to enjoy life and love fully in adulthood. However, some children, according to Klein, are more aggressive and greedy than others, and bear more of a grudge against their mother when they do not feel their needs are being met. Feelings of envy make children less able to enjoy and be grateful for the sustenance and attention they receive. Such babies, Klein asserted, become envious people as adults. In contrast, those infants who can internalize the good aspects of their parent(s) have a fundamentally positive and grateful view of life, and are capable of being loyal, possessing the courage of their convictions, and generally being of “good character.”
Klein noted that a loving, supportive environment in infancy cannot prevent the love/hate split, but it does enable children eventually to grow out of it. In contrast, infants who do not get what they need may spend the rest of their lives chasing external things to make up for what they feel is missing inside, or have to express the anger they have never resolved.
A couple took their son Peter to see Klein. Since Peter’s brother was born Peter had become very aggressive with his toys, doing what he could to break them. Observing Peter smashing two toy horses into each other, Klein wondered out loud to him whether the horses represented people; he agreed. As the bumping together continued, she gleaned that Peter had seen his parents having sex and it had generated considerable jealousy and anxiety. The bumping together represented the sexual act. By bringing Peter’s repressed feelings out into the open, Klein helped the boy to curb his aggression.
It may seem a stretch to believe that a child can make such interpretations, but Klein claimed that if you spoke in their language a child really could understand. She believed that the way children play is a window into their unconscious mind and what is troubling them. Given children’s difficulty in articulating all their thoughts, play was the best way of healing any mental issues.
The concept of “objects” in Freudian theory seems quite cold, but when we appreciate that in infancy we attach ourselves to a particular person (usually our biological mother) without giving much thought to who that person actually is—rather, we think only in terms of our own needs—the theory does make some sense. Arguably, this tendency carries over into adulthood, for in truth we are often less interested in who a person really is than in how they can satisfy some of our basic wants and wishes. It is only mature people who transcend “object relations” to really care about the worldview, interests, and aspirations of other people.
Whether or not you accept all Klein’s ideas, it cannot be denied that most of our relationships with our parents and siblings—even if they are good—are complex, and we should not instantly dismiss the notion that many of our attitudes or hang-ups stem from the first few months of life. For Klein, this was the crucial time when the interaction between natural tendencies and environment sets us up to be a basically satisfied or unsatisfied person.
For some, Klein creates a rich world of ideas that explains our deepest needs and longings. For others, her books seem like mumbo-jumbo—Freudianism taken to its worst extremes. Her explanation of schizophrenia, manic depression, and depression as outgrowths of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions in infancy should be viewed critically; these days, such conditions are being increasingly fathomed by brain science rather than psychoanalysis.
Klein’s style takes a while to get into, but for someone who was denied the chance to attend university she was clearly a profound thinker. Her own childhood clearly shaped her work, and her daughters provided a ready testing ground for her ideas. As with many children of psychoanalysts, this was not always appreciated.
Born in a middle-class suburb of Vienna in 1882, Klein was the youngest of four children. Her teenage ambition was to study medicine, but her marriage in 1903 to chemist Arthur Klein cut short her university experience.
The Kleins moved to Budapest in 1910 for Arthur’s work, where Klein discovered Sigmund Freud’s writings and first underwent psychoanalysis with Sandor Ferenczi. She met Freud at the 1918 Psycho-Analytic Congress in Budapest.
Splitting from her husband, Klein took her three children to Berlin, where she gained a mentor in psychoanalyst Karl Abraham. In 1926 she moved to London, where she remained for the rest of her life.
Klein’s personal tragedies included the death of her much-loved brother Emmanuel and sister Sidonie, both while they were young, and that of her son Hans in 1935. Her daughter Melitta, who also became a psychoanalyst, was one of her most vocal opponents. Klein also suffered from depression and anxiety for much of her life.
Klein’s writings include The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932), Contributions to Psychoanalysis (1948), and Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961). Love, Guilt, and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945 is a companion volume to Envy and Gratitude.
Klein died in 1980.