Melanie Klein

The hypothesis that a stage extending over several months precedes object-relations implies that—except for the libido attached to the infant’s own body—impulses, phantasies[,] anxieties, and defenses either are not present in him, or are not related to an object, that is to say, they would operate in vacuo. 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.¹

Belated yet definitive, Klein’s declaration sets forth the parameters of her fundamental debate with Freudian theory. In fact, what Freud (whose views on this subject were ever changing) describes as the young child’s first (objectless) state of narcissism, Klein describes as an object relation that operates from the time of birth.² Although the divergence between these two theoretical stances is undisputed, these differences are more complex than they first appear.

When Freud began to develop his concept of narcissism in “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914),³ he described an “autoerotism”⁴ that emerges early in life, an instinctual and, even more important, archaic, self-gratification for the baby that precedes a “new psychical action” known as “narcissism” in which the ego as a totality is deemed an object of love. In the years leading up to this discovery, Freud discussed narcissism in the context of homosexuality and psychosis: his studies on Leonardo Da Vinci (1910),⁵ President Schreber (1911),⁶ and the Wolf Man (which he worked on between 1910 and 1914 and published in 1918)⁷ developed the notion of a narcissistic act that emerges on the heels of an identification. Da Vinci repressed his love for his mother by putting himself in her place: he identified with her and was thus drawn to objects of love that reminded him of her; if he chose to love young boys, it was because he loved them in the same way his own mother had loved him. In a different though somewhat similar way, the Wolf Man identified alternatively with his father and his mother in the context of a primal scene rife with anal sadism. What is more, the Wolf Man’s identification with his Nanya only reinforced his adoption of a passive feminine position with respect to his father, with the result that his repressed homosexuality culminated in a narcissistic identification. President Schreber, who, like Da Vinci and the Wolf Man, invested heavily in anality and displayed a feminine passivity and a rather exalted interest in religion, withdrew his libido from objects and localized it in his own ego instead. Freud noted the following in response: just as the transference neuroses enabled him to illustrate the dynamic drives endemic to the psychic apparatus, dementia praecox and paranoia guided him toward the psycho-analysis of the ego. Until that point, narcissism was integrated with the demands of the ego—and it protected that ego.

Beginning with “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917),⁸ Freud emphasized the identification with the lost object and its ambivalent internalization (at once love and hatred) within the mourning or depressed ego. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920),⁹ on the other hand, replaced the “ego drives”—which were contrasted with the “sexual drives”—with a new duality of drives: the “life drive” and the “death drive.”¹⁰ Finally, with “The Ego and the Id” (1923)¹¹ Freud outlined a new structure for the psychic apparatus that would later form the basis of Melanie Klein’s own conception of narcissism.¹²

With Freud’s “second topography” (the id, the ego, and the superego), narcissism, which had been previously defined as a function of ego investment¹³ through a surge of identifications withdrawing from objects, became “secondary narcissism.” The term “primary narcissism,” on the other hand, was now used to describe an objectless state characterized by the total absence of any relationship with other people and by a lack of any differentiation between the ego and the id. Intrauterine life and sleep are the closest approximations we have of this objectless narcissistic state.

Several critics¹⁴ have found Freud’s notion of narcissism to be imprecise and inadequate. Indeed, if narcissism is already an internalization of an object relation, can we really speak of a truly objectless state? And even if an objectless state exists, which still remains to be seen, the phrase “primary narcissism” would be inapposite because it represents the beginnings of an object relation. Finally, it is difficult to understand “just how [we are] supposed to picture the transition from a monad shut in upon itself to a progressive discovery of the object.”¹⁵ Recent studies that are sensitive to the work of Melanie Klein, particularly the work of André Green, have refined this notion by distinguishing “life narcissism” from “death narcissism” and by deeming narcissism to be not a state but a structure.¹⁶

This brief discussion helps us better understand the role that Klein accords to the object relation, and more specifically to the “internal object.” Klein broadly outlines her notion of the object, which in her view takes on the true meaning of “object”—as opposed to the “ego”—only through the “depressive position.” What is more, narcissism does not truly disappear in Kleinian theory and practice; instead, it takes the form of a “narcissistic state” in which libido withdraws from external objects and directs itself exclusively toward internalized objects.

Finally, it is worth noting that other theories of child psychology offer competing views on the subject of narcissism. At the same time, however, the hypothesis that a baby is capable of establishing a certain type of object relation has become widely accepted in recent years, which tends to confirm Klein’s insights.

In Piaget’s view, for example, “the universe of the young baby [which Piaget calls stage 3: the stage between the ages of five and seven months] is a world without objects, consisting only of shifting and unsubstantial ‘tableaux’ which appear and are then totally reabsorbed, either without returning, or reappearing in a modified or analogous form.”¹⁷ Although the baby establishes contact with an identical being that nevertheless changes its position and its state, there is no permanent scheme in the cognitive sense that would suggest the existence of an initial “object” (which will not be acquired until stage 4, that is, between the ages of nine and ten months). Henri Wallon, on the other hand, has posited the existence of a radical subjectivism that operates from the time of birth based on the baby’s jubilation upon seeing his own image and on his imitation of his mother’s facial gestures.¹⁸ More recently, C. G. Carpenter has asserted that a two-week-old infant is capable of synthesizing the parts of his mother’s body into a unified and complete visual image that he associates with her auditory traits.¹⁹ Various cognitive science studies have wholeheartedly endorsed such views,²⁰ and among psychoanalysts, Michael Balint has acknowledged the existence of a primary object relation.²¹

Using her own unique psychoanalytic perspective—and while reworking her notions as the years went by—Klein theorized the early existence of an extremely early “object,” an object that she would later term, very cautiously at that, a “bodily presence.” Her writings on the subject, which she began in 1919–1921 and which were published in a 1932 anthology, started going down this path, but it was more precisely her 1934 discovery of the “depressive position” that reinforced her notion of the child’s relationship with the object. At the same time, although Klein described the paranoid position in her later works—her 1946 formulation of a “paranoid-schizoid position” was associated with the notion of “projective identification”—her study of the universe that precedes the depressive position would cause her to modify her theory considerably. The two-volume study of Klein by Jean-Michel Petot²² painstakingly retraces this evolution, which I am unable to discuss in detail here. I will limit myself to presenting the most essential features of Klein’s notions to the extent they reflect the totality of her journey and in the context of its final destination, particularly in the seminal texts she wrote in 1952 that illustrate the ultimate coherence of her doctrine.²³

Klein believed that the child, from the very beginnings of life, is consumed with anxiety and racked by destructive drives that put him in danger of being disintegrated. We see here a return, and an intensified one at that, to Freud’s notion of the “death drive.”

For Freud, however, neither the unconscious nor the baby knows death. At first Melanie adopted Abraham’s view that aggressiveness in children appears only during the oral-sadistic stage, which led her to theorize a “pre-ambivalent oral stage.” In her later work, however, she asserted that the death drive exists from the moment of birth:

From the beginning the destructive impulse is turned against the object and is first expressed in phantasied oral-sadistic attacks on the mother’s breast, which soon develop into onslaughts on her body by all sadistic means. The persecutory fears arising from the infant’s oral-sadistic impulses to rob the mother’s body of its good contents, and from the anal-sadistic impulses to put his excrements into her (including the desire to enter her body in order to control her from within) are of great importance for the development of paranoia and schizophrenia.²⁴

I have often expressed my view that object-relations exist from the beginning of life, the first object being the mother’s breast which to the child becomes split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this splitting results in a severance of love and hate. I have further suggested that the relation to the first object implies its introjection and projection, and thus from the beginning object-relations are moulded by an interaction between introjection and projection, between internal and external objects and situations. These processes participate in the building up of the ego and super-ego and prepare the ground for the onset of the Oedipus complex in the second half of the first year.²⁵

A close reading of these passages shows that, even though Klein uses such terms as “object” and “ego,” she also establishes, with respect to this early stage at the beginning of life, a distinction between inside and outside, between inner and outer. The early ego, in summary, is deemed to be exceptionally fragile, so much such that, under the weight of both the anxiety-death drive that lies at its origins and the intolerable feeling of being abandoned by the object (the mother), the ego gives way to an incessant back-and-forth motion and to projection-introjection. To defend itself against being the sole target of this primary destructiveness and to stave off separation, the ego jettisons that destructiveness in part and redirects it toward the outside world. At that point, the ego is drawn into what might be called a quasi-object—the breast—in the sense that the fragile ego is not truly separated in the sense of a “subject” separated from an “object,” but it incessantly consumes the breast from within and ejects the breast into the outside world by constructing-vacating itself while constructing-vacating the Other. This dynamic is dominated by the fantasy-like omnipotence that the child exerts over his mother.

As if Klein were suggesting that this “primary” object—the breast—is unstable, she modifies her theory substantially: at a very early stage, the child perceives the breast as being the “part object” of nursing, but also as other parts of the mother’s body (her voice, her face, her hands, and her bosom) that constitute a bodily “presence.”²⁶ The mother’s holding and handling of the baby impress him with a “physical closeness” with the no less “unstable” wholeness of an Other—or, more accurately, a container.²⁷ It is a container that is merely part of the process of differentiating with the ego. Isn’t it true that the ego is founded upon “some indefinite connection between the breast and other parts and aspects of the mother”?²⁸

Furthermore, although this quasi-object that is the primary breast exists completely in an outside world in which the infantile ego deems it to be an externality from the very beginnings of life, it is just as much a construction from within, that is, an internal image, to the extent that the fragile ego, as it constructs and deconstructs the boundary between the inside and the outside, is where this quasi-object (or this object-being-constituted) is formed. From the outset, then, the primal object of the paranoid-schizoid position emerges, in Klein’s view, if and only if it is an internal object constructed through a fantasy of omnipotence.

At the same time, this internal focus has no purely drive-based or spectral quality. It is not only the drive that is projected and introjected (as love or hatred, desire or destruction), but bits of the baby as well (his organs—the mouth, the anus, and so forth—as well as his bodily products). Klein’s view on this subject differs from Freud’s. In addition, however much the internal object reflects the imaginary and attests to the presence of the fantasy in the early ego, it is also made up of substantive and sensorial elements: good or bad “bits” of the breast are situated within the ego or expelled from it into the mother’s breast. Nourishing substances such as the mother’s milk or excremental substances such as urine and feces are projected and introjected. Klein’s internal object is an amalgam of representations, sensations, and substances—in a word, it is a diverse array of heterogeneous internal objects. Her notion of the internal object is entirely distinct from Lacan’s imaginary, for Lacan believed that narcissism takes hold through the intermediary of the object as a function of the subject’s absorption into his mirror image—into the very place where he realizes he is an Other who is sustained by the alterity of a mother already placed under the rubric of a third-party phallus. And yet this spectral distortion—which, for Lacan, has the advantage of highlighting the role that the scopic function plays in structuring the ego and the object, but especially of situating the binary relationship inside the triangulation dominated by the symbolic function of the father—is bereft of the heterogeneity²⁹ that characterizes Klein’s notions of the internal object and of fantasy. Klein’s thinking here evokes a cornucopia of images, sensations, and substances whose theoretical “impurity” is superseded by the clinical advances she proposes: the complexity of the internal object, in Klein’s view, is indispensable for tracking the specifics of the fantasy in childhood as well as in borderline states or psychosis.

Finally, this early world is founded upon a process of “discriminating” between inside and outside, between good and bad, and so forth, that shares in the construction of the ego and the superego, unless that very construction is what leads to the discrimination.³⁰ In connection with the fragility of the early ego as it responds to the death drive, and before we examine the details of how the early ego functions, we should consider the importance of the capacity for making binary distinctions: in Klein’s view, such a capacity ushers in an early form of semiosis that functions as an innate precondition to the child’s subsequent acquisition of the symbol.³¹

We see below that, when Klein analyzed Rita, she situated the construction of the internal object within the dynamics of anxiety, of the destructive drive, and of guilt, all the while elucidating the mechanisms of projection and introjection:

Before she was two years old, Rita became conspicuous for the remorse she used to feel at every small wrongdoing, and for her over-sensitiveness to reproach…. What determined her identification with the bear was her fear of her real father’s displeasure. Here inhibition in play originated from her sense of guilt. When she was only two years and three months old she used to play with her doll—a game which gave her little pleasure—and would repeatedly declare that she was not the doll’s mother. Analysis showed that she was not permitted to play at being its mother, because, among other things, the doll-child stood for her little brother whom she had wanted to steal from her mother during the latter’s pregnancy. The prohibition, however, did not proceed from her real mother, but from an introjected one who treated her with far more severity and cruelty than the real one had ever done. Another symptom—an obsession—which Rita developed at the age of two was a bed-time ritual which took up a lot of time. The main point of it was that she had to be tightly tucked up in the bedclothes, otherwise a “mouse or a Butzen” would get in through the window and bite off her own “Butzen.” … On one occasion during her analytic session she put a toy elephant to her doll’s bed so as to prevent it from getting up and going into her parents’ bedroom and “doing something to them or taking something away from them.” The elephant was taking over the role of her internalized parents whose prohibiting influence she felt ever since, between the ages of one year and three months and two years, she had wished to take her mother’s place with her father, rob her of the child inside her, and injure and castrate both parents….

These games also proved that this anxiety referred not only to the child’s real parents, but also, and more especially, to its excessively stern introjected parents. What we meet with here corresponds to what we call the super-ego in adults…. Early analysis shows that the Oedipus conflict sets in as early as the second half of the first year of life and that at the same time the child begins to build up its superego.³²

Beginning with this clinical essay and before her subsequent formalization of the “paranoid-schizoid position,” Klein described an ego “dealing with anxiety.” For Klein, unlike Freud, it is not the organism, but the ego, however immature it may be, that projects and introjects the drive. Rita’s ego had a fear of annihilation that she experienced as a sort of persecution by an object to which her anxiety was drawn, an object that was powerful and uncontrollable. An initial mechanism emerged that helped her defend herself against this object: splitting. The object is split into a “good” object and a “bad” object, with the prototype of this division being the gratifying “good breast” and the frustrating “bad breast.” Splitting is accompanied by other movements and mechanisms that the ego can capitalize upon at a very early stage: projection, introjection, idealization, and denial. The way one experiences this threat from this external object led Klein to speak of a “paranoid position” that she based on the work of Fairbairn,³³ whose originality she admired although she diverged from his path. While Fairbairn emphasizes the ego’s relationship with objects, Klein, for her part, focuses on anxiety. Although Klein recognized that aggression and hatred exist from the beginning of life, she did not forget that the “good” breast—which, in the context of this position, she termed the “idealized breast”—already exists for the ego as a “paranoid-schizoid position,” which means that the “bad” breast is by no means the only breast that is internalized.

Klein’s concept of the “position,” then, invokes neither a “stage” as the term was understood by the psychoanalysts who preceded her, nor a “structure” in the modern postlinguistic sense of the word. Klein found herself speaking of masculine, feminine, libidinal, oral, and other “positions,” thereby describing a shifting psychic vantage point and challenging the strict chronology claimed by the proponents of psychoanalytic stages. Once Klein’s concepts were solidified into a “paranoid-schizoid position” and a “depressive position,” they began to connote a certain structure of emotional life—one that appears at a particular moment of history and that is susceptible to reappearing in the unconscious: “the regular association of a series of anxiogenic situations with a series of determinate defense mechanisms.”³⁴

Attendant to the “paranoid-schizoid position” that Klein came to discover late (in 1946) but that she placed at the forefront of her developments, the splitting of qualities in the object also emerges inside the ego itself. The violence of the fissure that splitting creates between the “good” and the “bad” protects the object, at least a part of which turns out to be accepted, and thus protects the ego. At the same time, sadism directed toward the Other, as reflected in this fracture, does not protect the ego entirely: the ego, through incorporation, “is in danger of being split in relation to the internalized object fragments.”³⁵ Furthermore, although this internal and external splitting is fantasy-like, the child still experiences it as being “very real,” with the result that his feelings, his objects, and, later, his thoughts, are “cut off from one another.”³⁶

And yet nothing is so simple in this Dantean world. The “good breast,” which becomes the core of the ego and that guarantees its strength, is also laden with traps. The idealization of the breast, which is a counterpart to the splitting of the ego, encourages the exaggeration of its good qualities in order to counteract the fear of the persecutory “bad breast.” Although idealization is concomitant with the fear of being persecuted, it is just as much a function of the drive-based desires that seek an unchecked degree of idealization.

And there we encounter the childhood hallucination that Klein conceptualized so differently from Freud. In Freud’s view, once the baby has sufficiently experienced gratification, he is capable of hallucinating gratification—that is, of experiencing gratification as if it were truly lacking—in a process Freud would later describe as being a “hallucinatory wish-fulfillment.” In Klein’s view, in contrast, as long as the infant is dominated by the paranoid-schizoid position, he is incapable of experiencing absence, with the result that he will experience the absence of the good object as an attack by the bad object. The infant will then proceed to split the object into a good part and a bad part while denying both frustration and persecution. He therefore denies the existence of the bad, but he vitiates psychic reality all the same because it is nothing but pain and thus bad. This omnipotent and maniacal omnipotence, which is what leads to hallucinatory wish-fulfillment in young children, is tantamount, for the unconscious, to an annihilation of painful circumstances, of the relationships that led to such circumstances, and of the ego forced to confront them. Denial and omnipotence thus play a role that is comparable to the role repression plays in optimal development, although in the schizophrenic these forces lead to delusions of grandeur and persecution.

All drives—oral drives as well as anal and urethral—participate in this logical process as part of their effort to wound, control, and possess the object. As a result, the various attacks and disturbances inflicted on the internal object “result in the feeling that the ego is in bits”³⁷ and can also result, in the schizophrenic, in intellectual deficiencies. Or instead, under the weight of the projective process, such attacks can appear to arise from a violent eruption of the external in the internal, of a control of the psyche by other people, and of the sort of fantasies that culminate in paranoia.

As is often the case when Klein initiates radical innovations, she reassures us—and reassures herself—as she rediscovers Freud’s authority. In her view, Freud’s case study of President Schreber, which she reread in the wake of the master, appears to have analyzed Schreber in a way that recalls her own notion of the paranoid-schizoid position. Didn’t Schreber describe how his Doctor Fleschig’s soul was first split into a live image, then into a persecuting image, and finally into forty or sixty bits, with God eventually reducing the life of the soul to only one or two forms? Freud concluded that the division was between God and Fleschig, who respectively represented the patient’s father and brother. Klein elaborated upon this conclusion, adding that Fleschig’s many souls reflected not just a splitting of the object but “a projection of Schreber’s feeling that his ego was split” as well. “The anxieties and phantasies about inner destruction and ego-disintegration bound up with this mechanism are projected on to the external world and underlie the delusions of its destruction.”³⁸

Didn’t Freud reach the same conclusions when he pointed out that Schreber rationalized his feeling of internal fragmentation by likening himself to “miracled up, cursory contraptions”³⁹ and by emphasizing that the paranoid person’s “world catastrophe” is the “projection of this internal catastrophe”?⁴⁰ Melanie Klein hailed—and highlighted with italics—Freud’s revolutionary insight that, in addition to the libido’s effect on the ego, “a secondary or induced disturbance of the libidinal processes may result from abnormal changes in the ego. Indeed, it is probable that processes of this kind constitute the distinctive characteristic of psychoses.”⁴¹ Even more similar to Melanie, Freud noted that these problems arise “somewhere at the beginning of the course of development from auto-erotism to object-love.”⁴² These remarks by Freud validate, in sum, the paranoid-schizoid position that Melanie invented as well as the projective identification that later became, for our theorist, an integral part of Freudianism.

Klein’s novel theories illuminate, among other things, the problematic forms of schizoid and paranoid defenses that she had previously observed, even in patients who were not psychotic: defenses that take the form of detached hostility or of an apparent lack of anxiety manifested as indifference. When a patient claims that he understands his analyst’s speech but that it “does not mean anything to him,” Klein interprets his words to mean that aspects of his personality and emotions are split and removed. She thus interprets his aggressiveness toward the analyst (in the context of a comparable aggressiveness toward his mother); the patient lowers his voice in response and claims to be “detached” from the totality of the situation. Klein saw all of this as a sign of his fear of losing her, a fear that he did not express through guilt or pain but, rather, counteracted with splitting. At the same time, her interpretations altered the patient’s mood: he found himself “hungry” and told her as much during his session. The emergence of the affect of appetite shows that introjection emerged as a result of libido: the patient began to experience more fully the ambiguity of his drives, both positive and negative. A synthesis of splitting was underway, which palliated the schizophrenic phenomena even though at first it exacerbated depression and anxiety.

Another one of Klein’s case studies, the case of Mr. A., reveals the essential mechanism of the paranoid-schizoid position that she theorized late in her career, one that is worth reiterating and that is at issue here.⁴³ During his analysis, this thirty-five-year old homosexual, who suffered from “disturbed potency” and obsessional neurosis with paranoid and hypochondriacal features, came to associate his fear of women with fantasies in which he saw his mother engaged in uninterrupted intercourse with his father. The patient’s energy dwindled as he spied on his parents; his masturbation was linked to fantasy scenes in which his parents destroyed each other. He was afraid of the father’s penis, which interfered with both his heterosexual and his homosexual position. Identifying with his mother, he experienced her as being essentially bad, and he expressed this fear by likening his analyst’s words to poisonous excrements—or by imagining that his father was speaking through his own mouth. Mr. A. had been “led … very early to introject a poisoning and dangerous mother-imago who impeded the development of a ‘good’ mother-imago,”⁴⁴ so much so that the imago could not defend against the threat posed by the father’s penis. The themes of poisoning and persecution grew accordingly and culminated in a hypochondriacal syndrome:

The fear of damaging the woman with his “bad” penis (or rather, of not being able to restore her in intercourse) was, apart from his fear of his mother’s dangerous body, the basis for Mr. A’s disturbed potency.⁴⁵

Projective identification, which is central to this aspect of Klein’s theory, is thus manifested as the projection of the parts of the self onto an object in order to possess that very object: the mother’s breast and the father’s penis contain the violence of the attack and the split that project them outside the world as bad objects: “It may result in the object being perceived as having acquired the characteristics of the projected part of the self but it can also result in the self becoming identified with the object of its projection.”⁴⁶

Mr. A conducted himself as a “bad” person, that is, as feminine and ill, homosexual, and hypochondriacal. Pathological projective identification is “a result of minute disintegration of the self or parts of the self which are then projected into the object and disintegrated; it results in the creation of ‘bizarre objects.’”⁴⁷

It follows, then, that if the goal of projective identification is the freedom from the unwanted part of the self that is threatening because it has been disintegrated by the death drive with a concomitant reversal of identities, such identification culminates in destroying the object—in vitiating it in order to possess it. But if projective identification projects onto the Other the good parts of the fragile ego in order to protect them from the outside world, it can result in an idealization of the object that, though excessive, devalues the ego. In either case, projective identification dominates a narcissistic structure because the object is internalized from within and is deprived of its own qualities from without, as identity is assured only at the expense of support from the Other. From that perspective, Klein’s notion of the “narcissistic structure” is based on this surging of the object onto itself, which weakens the ego, renders it incapable of love and transference, and reduces it to “a mere shell for such internal objects.”⁴⁸ The narcissistic structure is thus distinguishable from “narcissistic states,” which are states of identification with an internal ideal object, and thus recalls Freud’s auto-erotism. If primal splitting is the first step in differentiation, projective identification is the first step in bonding with the outside world.⁴⁹ This stage can be painful and unsatisfying if it fails as a defense, but if it projects a fragile ego, it can endure as a psychotic structure.

These various features of projective identification lend themselves to two applications. On the one hand, projective identification describes pathological states, particularly states of manic-depressive psychosis or psychosomatic illness. On the other hand, however, the endless game of projection and introjection constitutes what Florence Guignard calls a veritable “psychic exhalation” because its underpinnings reveal a sort of normalcy, even universality.⁵⁰ As Guignard points out, mourning and successful oedipal identifications are the only ways to avoid the effects of projective identification.⁵¹ In fact, we cannot prove Klein’s hypothesis that the infant engages in projective identification without conceding, as does Bion, that all forms of psychic life depend on the help of another form of psychic life that uses projective identification to “dream” of a newborn child with a psyche. Taking this notion to its logical extreme, one could say that it is the mother’s—and the analyst’s—projective identification that corroborates the normalcy—or the abnormality—of projective identification as a universal function that stimulates the psyche—even though psychotic symptoms, among other things, rigidify its underlying logic and cause it to generate symptoms.

Is the mother a quiet paranoid-schizophrenic who flirts with projective identification? In truth, the totality of fantasy functioning, the birth of secondary symbolization, particularly that of language, and psychoanalytic interpretation are all concerned with projective identification—which, incidentally, is at the heart of the interpretive process itself. In any event, this is a hypothesis, a painful one if there ever was, that should be reflected upon by mothers … and by psychoanalysts.

But to return to what Klein considered to be the primary appearance made by projective identification in the paranoid-schizoid position, such identification convinces us—if we need any convincing—that relationships and identifications are unstable during that stage, or mode, of the psyche. The very notion of the object becomes increasingly irrelevant in the light of the fluid exchange of fragments expelled without and integrated within.

Accordingly, because we cannot be certain of the identities that describe the archaic link between the ego and the Other, it may be more helpful to speak of an abject rather than of an ego or an object already there. The future subject is founded upon a dynamic of abjection whose optimal quality is fascination. And if this future subject readily grants himself a “presence” of other people that he internalizes as much it expels, he is not facing an object but, in fact, an ab-ject, with this a understood in the privative sense of the prefix, that is, as vitiating the object as well as the emerging subject. It is a subject and an object that, as such, are crystallized only through what Klein calls the “depressive position” or, strictly speaking, through the castration ordeal, the resolution of the Oedipus conflict, and the creative acquisition of language and thought.

Before the formation of the oedipal triangle, which divides the protagonists of the family, a trio, also oedipal but founded provisionally upon the uncertain identities of the protagonists (in reality, on their narcissistic and objectless unconscious), plays a role of its own, in Klein’s view, in the paranoid-schizoid position. Like a band in a Möbius strip that is characterized by its limitlessness, the future subject is forever transported toward the “ab-ject” (on the side of the mother) and toward “primary identification” with the “father of personal prehistory” (on the side of the loved and loving pre-oedipal father, who displays the traits of both parents). As a figure of fascination as well as abjection, this narcissistic state of the early object relation, which I have described as abject and an abjection, challenges not only pathology but limit states of sublimation as well: it challenges the sacred and the mystic as well as the difficulties posed by modern art.⁵² Melanie Klein exposes us to this sort of understanding of the archaic object, but only if we are willing to merge its genius into a consideration of the symbolic function of the father as set forth in Freud’s conception of the Oedipus conflict and Lacan’s notion of the Name-of-the Father—a function that is lacking in the matriarch.

In Kleinian theory, it is only through the “depressive position” that we can maintain a sufficiently stable and satisfying relationship with the object: the depressive position generates symbolization and language, which in turn designate an object for the ego. Melanie Klein introduced the concept of the “depressive position” in 1934 and expanded upon it in articles published in 1940, 1948, and 1952⁵³ as she localized the evolution of the child after the “paranoid-schizoid position,” a position she did not theorize until 1946.

Much closer to an organizing principle that is Freud’s notion of the Oedipus conflict, the “depressive position” is a theoretical construct that Melanie developed on the heels of a grief-ridden period that tore her apart. In April 1934, Hans Klein, Melanie’s eldest son, died in a mountain accident. While working in a paper factory founded by his paternal grandfather, he often sojourned in the Tatra mountains in Hungary. On one excursion the path crumbled away beneath him and led him to a fatal fall. His mother was so distraught that she was unable to attend his funeral in Budapest, remaining in London instead. At first Hans’s death was considered a suicide, but Eric Clyne has categorically denied that possibility, and Hans’s wife herself agreed that he had overcome his homosexual tendencies and anxieties. Still, “everything about Hans remains disturbingly shadowy.”⁵⁴ The Thirteenth International Psychoanalytic Congress took place on August 26–31 that same year; the grieving mother, although unable to attend her son’s funeral, traveled to the conference to read a paper entitled “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” which she also delivered to the British Psycho-Analytic Society in 1935. These two events—the mourning of her son and the invention of the “depressive position”—are no doubt linked: her paper described the psychic work of mourning while contributing to the development of the concept.

We are now quite familiar with the primary features of Klein’s “depressive position.” In her view, where she departed from previous psychoanalytic theory was in her belief that the child, beginning at six months of age, is capable of experiencing the loss of a whole object (the mother herself, and no longer simply the part object that was the breast) as a result of his diminished degree of splitting, and that this experience of loss is concomitant with the introjection of that object: “Not until the object is loved as a whole can its loss be felt as a whole.”⁵⁵

This psychological development is made possible thanks to neurobiological maturation, which ushers in a better synthesis of perceptions and a more sophisticated memory. Once the baby sees his mother as a unified or whole object, he can recall the gratification she has given him in the past, even if he finds himself frustrated in the present. At the same time, the child’s psychomotor maturation, cognitive development, and ability to walk hasten his awareness that the mother exists outside his field of vision—in a neighboring room for example—and that she will return to him (this development occurs during the beginning of the second year of life). The child is thus able to apprehend his mother as a whole, “both good and bad, but at once one and different” from him as well as from other members of the family—from the father, to begin with, and then from his brothers and sisters. This recognition of the mother as a complete person is accompanied by an integration of the ego, which is itself experienced as a total ego. From the inside as well as the outside, good and bad objects are linked with one another to the extent that they are distinguished from one another; these objects become less malformed; projection diminishes; integration increases; and the separation from the ego and the Other becomes more tolerable.

It is true, of course, that Klein came to this realization in part through the views of Karl Abraham, who, in addition to having already distinguished between the “part object” and the “whole object,” hypothesized beginning in 1923 an Ur-Verstimmung in childhood, which served as a model for the subsequent onset of melancholia and that linked this infantile Ur-Melancholie with oral eroticism.⁵⁶ Yet as attentive a student as Melanie was, she still sustained ideas of her own. In Abraham’s view, for example, the oral and anal stages are narcissistic, while for Klein, object relations originate with the oral-sadistic stage and are rooted in the emergence of the whole object in depressive ambivalence and anxiety. In that sense, Klein elevated what Abraham called the “stage” or symptom he termed “primal depression” into a “central position” around which psychic life is organized.

And yet, as is always the case with our analyst, psychic gain comes at a cost. A new form of distress enters the picture: the child discovers his dependence on his mother as a person as well as his own jealousy of other people; the paranoid anxieties brought on by this position are followed by new depressive anxieties. When the child finds himself in the paranoid-schizoid position, he is afraid that he will be destroyed by the very bad objects that he has projected outside him; when in the depressive position, on the other hand, he feels more ambivalent:

And it is not only the vehemence of the subject’s uncontrollable hatred but that of his love too which imperils the object. For at this stage of his development loving an object and devouring it are very closely connected. A little child which believes, when its mother disappears, that it has eaten her up and destroyed her (whether from motives of love or of hate) is tormented by anxiety both for her and for the good mother which it has absorbed into itself.⁵⁷

By retaining the memory of a good object, the child acquires a nostalgia for it that is comparable to mourning. But because this love, during the oral phase, is a love of devouring that is heavily laden with sadistic drives, the feeling of losing the good object is buttressed by a feeling of guilt over having destroyed it by assimilating it: “a characteristic depressive experience” originates from the “the sense that he has lost the good object through his own destructiveness.”⁵⁸ Fears of retribution, which were specific to the paranoid-schizoid position, endure, but now they are combined with the new feeling of guilt. Both this encroachment of the two positions and this prevalence of orality explain why infants have eating difficulties during this period and why both children and adults experience hypochondriacal anxieties. The paranoid person is afraid of being poisoned by external objects (food) onto which he has projected his aggressiveness, while the depressed hypochondriac is afraid for his organs, which represent internal objects and which must be constantly watched over, protected, and cared for.

In the new psychic dynamic introduced by the depressive position, the child discovers his own psychic reality: he begins to distinguish external reality from his own fantasies and desires. He modifies his belief in the omnipotence of thought, which he had previously subscribed to (and which, in the end, is magical rather than true thinking): he learns to distinguish between real things and their symbols, which signals the beginning of language acquisition. The depressive position is thus a precursor to our attainment of ideas, and the readers of In Search of Lost Time already know that Klein’s hypothesis finds unexpected support in none other than Marcel Proust, who wrote, “ideas come to us as the substitutes for griefs.”⁵⁹

Simultaneously, as the regime of the infantile superego moors a good object in the deepest recesses of the self, it adopts a new form. The severity of the melancholic superego is threatening, but it is different from the severity of the paranoid-schizoid position. At that point, to the attacks from the bad objects during the prior position is added “the urgent necessity to fulfill the very strict demands of the ‘good objects,’”⁶⁰ which nevertheless remain uncertain and which are capable of being easily transformed into “bad” ones. Racked by “contradictory and impossible claims from within”—a situation experienced as a sort of “gnawing of conscience”⁶¹—the ego is assailed by the “remorse of conscience”:

These strict demands serve the purpose of supporting the ego in its fight against its uncontrollable hatred and its bad attacking objects, with which the ego is partly identified. The stronger the anxiety is of losing the loved objects, the more the ego strives to save them, and the harder the task of restoration becomes, the stricter will grow the demands which are associated with the super-ego.⁶²

The child nevertheless abandons some of the parents’ tyrannical or monstrous features that constituted the persecuting archaic superego in the name of a whole object that he loves, however ambivalently. Because the superego therefore ceases to be a mere source of guilt, it becomes a source of love as well as a potential ally of the ego.

So which defenses remain at the disposal of the young ego so it can protect itself against the ambivalence (both the love and the hatred) that characterizes this depressive position? In place of the splitting, idealization, ejection, and destruction that we saw in the paranoid-schizoid position, the depressive position generates manic defenses. Though similar to their predecessors, these defenses offer something novel: they seek to exert omnipotence over the object-to-be-lost, and they do so triumphantly and contemptuously. Initially, these manic defenses are not pathological, and they play a positive role in development by protecting the ego from unbrided despair, particularly because reparation—the other mechanism that facilitates the resolution of mourning in the depressive position—is put into place only gradually.

Mania employs the same logical processes that appeared in the previous position—splitting, idealization, projective identification, and denial—but in mania these processes are better organized, the ego is more integrated, and the defenses are directed less toward the persecuting object than toward depressive anxiety and guilt itself. Focusing on the sensations themselves, they are drawn to the feeling of dependence. Thus, in order for the ego to defend itself from ambivalence, it splits off the internal world and the external world, to the point of denying the internal world itself along with all potential relationships (we should note that the mechanism of denying the internal world and its link to the external world allows us to diagnose the psychic source of social “anarchy” and the cult of the “solitary ego”). At that point a feeling of omnipotence emerges, one that is comparable to the paranoid-schizoid position and that relies on the mechanism of negation (in Klein’s reinterpretation of Helene Deutsch’s understanding of the term), with the initial negation centered on anxiety itself, as well as on the psychic reality that generates that anxiety.⁶³ The manic person appears indifferent because his defenses are directed, from the outset, toward the psychic reality that he pretends to undo, and if the subject finds himself in analysis, those defenses attack the very goal of the analysis while attempting to paralyze the analyst. At the same time, the maniacal ego subjects the internal or external object to a threefold treatment made of control, triumph, and scorn. The maniacal ego thus denies the importance of good objects; the manic person undervalues and absorbs them, with his detachment being the measure of his feeling of omnipotence over an eviscerated Other.

Klein’s depressive position offers yet another innovation, one that will eventually encourage creativity: the feeling of depression mobilizes the desire to make reparation to objects. The baby, by believing that he is responsible for the loss of his mother, also imagines that he can undo the nefarious effects of his aggression through her love and care for him. “The depressive conflict is a constant struggle between the infant’s destructiveness and his love and reparative impulses.”⁶⁴ To deal with the depressive suffering that results from his feeling of having damaged the external and internal object, the baby tries to make reparation and restoration to the good object. His love only grows in the process: “The reappearance of his mother and her care for him are essential to this process…. The non-appearance of his mother or the lack of her love can leave him at the mercy of his depressive and persecutory fears.”⁶⁵

This amounts to reparation, no doubt, but it is hardly idyllic as it is tainted with despair:

In truth, sublimation has the distasteful task of preserving “the bits to which the loved object has been reduced” through a supreme “effort to put them together…. It appears that the desire for perfection is rooted in the depressive anxiety of disintegration.”⁶⁷

We can now better appreciate the difficulty of the baby’s psychic work during the depressive position—as well as the difficulty of mourning that so struck Freud in his “Mourning and Melancholia” (1916).⁶⁸ Why, in fact, is it so difficult to accept that the loved one no longer exists in reality? Klein’s response is that the work of mourning is directed not toward the actual person but toward the internal object, and that it reflects the need to overcome any tendency toward a regression to paranoid sentiments or to manic defenses. Only then can the mourning work restore a lively and livable internal world: its goal is to tolerate the absence of the external object without falling prey to projective identification.

As we have seen, this painful ordeal offers substantial benefits as well: the pain of loss, the suffering of mourning, and the reparative drives that overcome manic defenses result in the reconstruction—that is, in the symbolization—of the internal and external lost object. It is thus that pain, suffering, and reparation are at the foundation of creativity and sublimation. If it is true, as Freud believed, that sublimation results from a successful abandonment of both the aim of the drive and the residual effects of the death drive, Klein adds that such abandonment occurs through the work of mourning, with the residual effects of the life drive. She highlights the creative side of the depressive position: if the ego is capable of making reparation to the lost object, rather than responding with manic defenses it can take root in a creative work that contains both pain and the work of mourning in the name of generating the symbol. “I suggest that such an assimilated object becomes a symbol within the ego. Every aspect of the object, every situation that has to be given up in the process of growing, gives rise to symbol formation.”⁶⁹

The “central position”⁷⁰ accorded to the depressive position significantly modifies Klein’s notion of the Oedipus conflict. In her early work the Oedipus conflict is front and center; Oedipus comes to the fore when hatred is at its peak, with the result in both boys and girls that the primordial bond with the breast also focuses on the father’s penis, which is fantasized as living inside the mother’s body. Later, upon discovering the depressive position, she changed her mind. From that point on Klein believed that the Oedipus conflict begins with the emergence of the depressive position—and that the Oedipus conflict is in fact endemic to that position. Parents, then, are perceived as separate beings—that is, they are no longer perceived as being combined parents—and the couple forms good whole objects: the child directs his ambivalent fantasies toward his parents, particularly when his parents are united through intercourse. Accordingly, it is not the fear of castration, aphanisis, and death that causes the child to abandon his oedipal desires (which is what Freud believed), but—long before the onset of the genital stage—the ambivalence that characterizes the depressive position itself (the love for one’s parents combined with the fear of hurting them through an ever-present destructive aggression). If the child avoids relying on manic defenses, reparation can enable him to dominate his oedipal desires and to transform them into creativity. Hence, it is through reparation that the mourning process can finally be completed. And when that fails to occur, a pathological manic-depressive state can come about:

The manic-depressive and the person who fails in the work of mourning, though their defenses may differ widely from each other, have this in common, that they have been unable in early childhood to establish their internal “good” objects and to feel secure in their inner world.⁷¹

From the perspective of the depressive position, the task of resolving the Oedipus conflict requires that a good breast (a good mother), a good father, and a good creative couple are established inside the ego. That entails introjecting the two sexes—the two Others—as manifested in the suffering common to depressive working-through. The difference between the sexes emerges against the backdrop of the depressive position. What’s more, although Klein does not dwell on this point, the distinction the child makes between the two protagonists of the couple reveals that the path to heterosexuality is an optimal way of resolving the depressive position.⁷²

This process entails considerable psychic difficulty, which helps explain certain failures—particularly the sort of failures generated by the formation of “clusters of defenses” that protect the child from depressive suffering, though at the price of a paranoid-schizoid regression that impedes intellectual development.

It is clear that in this Kleinian purgatory, every point turns into its counterpoint, but in a way that nevertheless portrays the paradise of sublimation—a sort of sublimation that can always be more effective, particularly through the help of analysis. And perhaps through the mother’s gratifying care as well…