Melanie Klein

Whereas for Freud the unconscious foundation of psychic life is centered on desire and on the repression of desire, all of Melanie Klein’s work is dominated by an interest in anxiety. Still, could she be said to have eviscerated libido for the sake of the death drive or to have discarded Eros to take comfort in Thanatos, as some have accused her of doing?

The archaic ego, as fragile as it is, desires the breast, but because it strives for an immediate, infinite, and impossible gratification, it does so excessively, so much so¹ that it encounters frustration. In Klein’s view, frustration is not a “lack” that is limited to renewing desire until it can become the “hallucinatory wish-fulfillment” that makes us lose touch with the boundary between what Freud termed representation (fantasy-like) and perception (realist), or that makes us explore the always open and metonymic trajectory of what Lacan calls “the object petit a.”² For Klein, the intensity of frustrated desire is described, rather, as anxiety, which is “automatic”³ before it is separated into paranoid-schizoid anxiety and depressive anxiety. Before frustrated desire begins the long process of integrating the ego, its violence is such that it does not tolerate the lack but attaches instead onto an object-target, a pseudo-object, or an abject. There is nothing missing, then, to be desired, but everything wounds, gets wounded, and allows itself to be attacked according to the principles of retributive justice.

Because of Melanie’s focus on the death drive, her critics have often erroneously concluded that she was complacent about death and ignored the erotic forces of life. Klein’s explicit debate on the subject, which took place rather late in her life, in 1948, provides us a more accurate perspective that merits some discussion before we continue to explore Klein’s thought.

After reminding us that Freud, in his “Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1926), argued that “the unconscious seems to contain nothing that would lend substance to the concept of the annihilation of life,”⁴ Melanie boldly states as follows: “I do not share this view because my analytic observations show that there is in the unconscious a fear of annihilation of life.”⁵

Klein’s belief could not be clearer: with the death drive, she presumes that “in the deepest layers of the mind there is a response to this instinct in the form of fear of annihilation of life.”⁶

Under the effects of the death drive, the psyche expresses a fear for life. For the sake of life, it affords itself a way to respond to the fear of the annihilation of life, and its most fundamental mechanisms are nothing more than defenses against any such annihilation. The death drive is immediately and dialectically restored to its positive version, which is the very preservation of life.

This passage is interesting not only because it takes issue with Freud, who, as Melanie wrote, avoided “regarding the fear of death”⁷—in contrast to her, who, as we have seen, “regards” this fear, reinforced as she was by her clinical experience with psychosis, as a particularly early infantile psychosis. What is particularly interesting is that the psychoanalyst adopts—and then expands—Freud’s efforts to attribute to the psyche the actions favorable to life: “the fear of death (or fear for life),”⁸ she writes. And it is this very “fear for life,” “arising from the inner working of the death instinct,” that is the “first cause of anxiety.” Even more specifically, the fear in question here is a fear for the life of the object (the mother), and even more so for the life of the ego. Accordingly, because the struggle between the two drives endures throughout our life, “this source of anxiety is never eliminated.” It becomes clear, then, that Melanie considered the “inner working”⁹ of the death drive to be directly linked to the life drive, and not dissociated from it. Dissociation emerges instead in psychosis, and it poses equally interesting questions of its own. But here, in this debate with Freud, we are operating at a level of universality that considers all manifestations of the drive, even the most normal ones, to be contingent on the death drive that itself subsists on a fear for life. In a word, it is for Eros’s sake that our anxiety about the annihilation of life penetrates the deepest layers of the psyche.

Without being vitalist in any way, and while even suggesting that a fear for life neglects the erotic and/or life drives, Klein’s theory of anxiety is dominated, quite explicitly, by such a fear. Is it a female subject who is emerging here, a confederate of a psychoanalyst who paid close attention to the various psychoses? Is it a woman who has no fear of regarding death because she fears for the life that it affords, and who faces head-on the dangers of annihilation that weigh on this life from its very beginnings? Is it to better defend herself from these dangers, especially because her familiarity with the “fear of death” showed her how much this initial negativity—this phobia of being, this nonbeing—can become (under certain biological and environmental conditions) a veritable work of the negative, even a renaissance?¹⁰

Though on the opposite side of the spectrum from Hannah Arendt, Melanie nevertheless appears to have shared Arendt’s concern for the sort of life that emerges through the revelation and accompaniment of that which threatens it.¹¹ “Full of birth,” as Arendt would put it, which Melanie showed herself to be through the therapeutic relentlessness that pervaded her incisive interpretations—and also through the privileged mode she assigns to the death drive, which is first described as a sadistic desire, as a type of envy, as she would later put it. In sum, the death drive is a condensation of love and hatred, otherwise known as paroxysmal desire.

Eros is hardly extinct, then, in this primary capturing of the object that operates through desire transformed into anxiety—either orally, anally, or genitally. Eros, in fact, has a “fear for life” and is in no rush to reappear in the privileged form of pleasure—which in Klein’s view is essentially the pleasure of intelligence. Although the anxiety that is interpreted through transference develops in clearly delineated phases, it is able to confront splitting and repression, and, by lifting repression, it is transformed into a symbolization of sorts: an uninhibited libido is a libido that thinks, and a desire separated from anxiety is a capacity for symbolization.¹²

We are familiar with Freud’s resistance to the notion of an unconscious affect: “Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are concerned.”¹³ As for anxiety, the founder of psychoanalysis believed that it was either a sign of increasing stimulation in the psychic apparatus (which is the case of current neuroses, an “innocuous” example of which being the anxiety of virgins) or the effect of repressed libido (which is the case with the psychoneuroses).

Melanie Klein, in contrast, was immediately drawn to unconscious anxiety, particularly when she listened to her son, whom she referred to as Fritz and Felix.¹⁴ Although Klein did not, strictly speaking, develop a theory of affects, her explicit study of anxiety became the foundation for a post-Freudian conception of affects that is still being developed today.¹⁵ Melanie Klein thus specifically related anxiety to the inhibitions, which are spared the symptom, though at the cost of a distortion of thought, or tics. Because desire is fundamentally a type of anxiety, the ego erects psychic barriers designed to curb its growth—precautions, inhibitions, and taboos that resemble certain forms of phobic defenses. Castration anxiety, which was manifested in Felix, joins this tableau and buttresses Klein’s idea of a commonality between desire and anxiety.

But it is the sadism of the archaic ego, more than anything else, that prolongs original anxiety. A strong oral desire to devour, which is manifested at the very beginning of life, returns to the subject with the same content but with a different target: it is not I who wishes to devour, for I am afraid of being poisoned by the bad breast in which I projected my bad teeth—such is the logic of the sadistic fantasy that corresponds to primary paranoid-schizoid anxiety. Although Klein associated such anxiety with oedipal aggression (Rita, she pointed out, wished to steal children on the verge of being born out of their mothers’ stomachs and also became competitive with her father), genital drives are inextricably linked with oral, urethral, and anal sadistic drives. It turns out that oral sadism, which is often identified with Kleinian theory,¹⁶ emerged rather late in her development, while aggressive anality caught Klein’s attention as early as 1924, during her analysis of Trude, a girl aged three years and three months:

Early on in her analysis she asked me to pretend that I was in bed and asleep. She would then say that she was going to attack me and look into my buttocks for faeces (which I found also represented children) and that she was going to take them out. Such attacks were followed by her crouching in a corner, playing that she was in bed, covering herself with cushions (which were to protect her body and which also stood for children); at the same time she actually wetted herself and showed clearly that she was very much afraid of being attacked by me.¹⁷

And it was not until Klein’s analyses of Ruth and Peter, which took place between 1924 and 1925, that she became aware of the “fundamental rôle”¹⁸ played by oral-sadistic drives in sadistic fantasies and in their corresponding anxieties:

[I found] in the analysis of young children full confirmation of Abraham’s discoveries. These analyses, which gave me further scope for observation, since they lasted longer than Rita’s and Trude’s, led me towards a fuller insight into the fundamental rôle of oral desires and anxieties in mental development, normal and abnormal.¹⁹

From that perspective, Klein associated her own observations, the story of Peter, and the story of two criminals as reported by the press: one of a man who engaged in homosexual relations with young men whom he would then kill by decapitating them and then cutting them into pieces, and the other of a man who killed his victims and made them into sausages.²⁰ Peter had a fantasy in which he was masturbating with his father and his young brother, and he represented that scene through the help of dolls that he decapitated, selling the body to a butcher and retaining the head, which he believed was the most appetizing body part. During his analysis, moreover, he succumbed to countless dismemberings and devourings of icons and dolls. Immediately imprinting this sadism in the Oedipus conflict and in the desire to be punished that generates the early guilt of the superego, Klein wrote the following:

One may regard it as a rule that in every so-called “naughty” child the desire to be punished is at work too. I should like to quote Nietzsche and what he called his “pale criminal”; he knew much about the criminal driven by his sense of guilt.²¹

This unconscious sadism defends itself, as we have seen, by splitting the internal object as well as the external object into a good breast and a bad breast. This helps us appreciate the difference between this sort of fantasy, which Klein attributed to the earliest stages of the ego, and what Freud called hallucinatory wish-fulfillment.²² In both cases, the perceptions of reality are replaced by a representation that deforms them in response to unconscious drives. For Freud, however, desire prevails, and libido, unlike frustration, builds up an idyllic vision that replaces gratification with an idealized representation of gratification. Klein, for her part, recognizes the destructive violence of desire even more radically than does the Freud of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920).

On the one hand, this early violence reins in anxiety—imperfectly at that—only by splitting the fantasy itself and by leaving its negative mark on the fantasy by splitting the object of anxiety: a split between good and bad. On the other hand, although Klein always acknowledged the fantasy of the good breast and even made it into the focal point of the ego (as if she were defending herself in anticipation of those who would glean nothing more from her theory than the mere presence of the bad breast), the negative of the death drive constantly reappears in order to generate new defenses that are partly beneficial and partly destructive. Accordingly, Klein replaces the plenitude of bliss implicit in Freud’s concept of “hallucinatory wish-fulfillment” with a constant work of the negative and an interminable sublimation of mourning, with the death drive sustaining psychic development—and yet hindering that development all the while even though it never truly subsides.

The intensity of this destructive drive is innate, Klein believed, a conviction that only grew in her later writings. Although Klein believed that “states of frustration or increased anxiety” resulting from an insufficient reality reinforce “the oral-sadistic and cannibalistic desires,” she still insisted on their importance: “Accordingly, the strength of the destructive impulses in their interaction with libidinal impulses would provide the constitutional basis for the intensity of greed.”²³

Such remarks might lead us to believe that the analyst’s mind succumbed to therapeutic pessimism. Indeed, how can analytic treatment interact with this “constitutional basis” that Klein evokes so regularly and so passionately? Is it only by encouraging the optimal realization of what is innate, without changing the fundamental and genetically determined balance between love and hate? Or is it by transforming this very equilibrium through transference, interpretation, and a new environment?²⁴ This question remains unanswered, so much so that Klein’s work bears witness to a generalized pessimism about the relevance of analytic treatment, even as she concedes its limitations. Klein appears to believe, paradoxically, that a good environment does not modify the constitutional basis, which she believes manifests itself even in the face of superior mothering.²⁵ A deficient environment or extensive deprivation, on the other hand, will aggravate any innate aggressive qualities. It is the psychoanalyst, then, who must perform a task that is not entirely unfeasible: to reduce splitting and to assist the ego in integrating the split-off parts.

At the heart of this destructive universe, the analyst posits that the evolution of the ego in the normal course of development—and analytic treatment when it is successful—allow for the working through of destructive anxieties and sadistic fantasies. The ego takes shape by way of a depressive working through. Our ability to mourn the lost object completely replaces primal sadism with psychic discomfort: nostalgia and guilt, then, form the quieter side of Thanatos. Anxiety has not disappeared, as it is always present with Klein, but it chooses another domain: rather than splitting or fragmenting and rather than destroying and tearing into pieces, anxiety is tolerated as a source of pain relating to the Other and a source of guilt about having taken pleasure in hurting him. The sadism and persecutory anxiety of the first three months of life are followed by the capacity of a strengthened ego—the ego of the “depressive position” that emerges at six months of age—to introject the good object. The ego can do so more easily if it possesses an innate capacity for love:

One major derivative of the capacity for love is the feeling of gratitude…. Gratitude is rooted in the emotions and attitudes that arise in the earliest stage of infancy, when for the baby the mother is the one and only object…. But the internal factors underlying it—above all the capacity for love—appear to be innate.²⁶

Naturally, the depressive position offers considerable benefits: sadism becomes grief, nostalgia abates destructiveness, and the black sun of melancholia develops the ego, which, rather than splitting and denying, works through/represses/makes reparation to/and creates.

In tracing the metamorphosis of the death drive into what Klein refers to as “psychization,” one cannot help but find the mother of psychoanalysis to be eminently Shakespearean. Is it not the case that the playwright’s sonnet 146 already implies that the sublimating excess of “Death once dead,” or “putting Death to death,” is realized only through the internal life of the “poor soul,” and only then if the soul is capable of consuming within itself the death that originates from the outside?²⁷

Klein’s Shakespearean vision of psychic functioning—a vision of a soul that sustains itself through (and that subsists on) the death that devours men—is directly reflected in her analytic technique. The analyst’s task is to listen to—beyond and through desire—psychic suffering as well as to its companion, aggressive anxiety. As a separate but related matter, the analyst also “intervenes at the locus of maximal latent anxiety”²⁸ in order to listen more attentively to the anxious and aggressive material that presents itself in analytic sessions so she can interpret it directly and frequently. Although this perspective may invite fears of an excessively rapid acceleration of anxiety through the analyst’s psychic encroachment upon the child, one could also counter, as does Florence Bégoin-Guignard, that the opposite approach, one that spaces out children’s analytic sessions in order to “respect” them more and to practice “nonintervention,” is an “invitation to intensify the child’s tendencies toward massive projective identification with the omnipotent internal objects that he uses to intrude into the analyst’s psyche and to exert total control over his thought.”²⁹ At that point, we discover reinforced splitting and the formation of “false selves.” And what is the cure? The analyst must consider his own pregenital conflicts, his cannibalistic or other forms of aggressiveness, and his own potential for overcoming the “depressive position”—all of these being traps that the analyst’s countertransference directs toward his own sadism and pain. These traps grow in size and strength as the analyst listens to children, and then to adults, because infantile defenses are at once more powerful and less fixed than they are in adults, and thus openly appeal to the child inside the analyst.

The very least we can say is that Melanie Klein did not succumb to such appeal. She began her work as an analyst when she was around fourteen years old, and her disciples devoted a special issue of International Journal of Psycho-Analysis to her for her seventieth birthday in 1952. In 1955 the issue’s contents, along with a few other commentaries and two articles by Klein herself, were included in a volume entitled New Directions in Psychoanalysis. One could easily have surmised at that point that Klein’s work had come to an end, but then all of a sudden, in 1957, the “mother of psychoanalysis” published Envy and Gratitude. Klein’s emphasis on a primordial aggressive drive, a theme already present in her earlier works—especially those that touch upon the paranoid-schizoid position—reappears in that volume in the form of an envy of the breast. Is this a return of Christian sin? St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Shakespeare are mentioned, and Othello joins Milton, Chaucer, and Spenser to provide a basis, within the bounds of tradition, for Melanie’s prior clinical observations about aggressiveness and its elaboration, which are synthesized into a new binary vision: envy along with gratitude.

Whereas jealousy is associated with a love of an object, envy precedes it and is more archaic. Jealousy is alleviated by a regained love while envy is never alleviated; jealousy is triangular and envy is binary.

The working through of envy by means of jealousy is at the same time an important defence against envy. Jealousy is felt to be much more acceptable and gives rise much less to guilt than the primary envy which destroys the first good object.³⁰

Supported by primal greed, envy seeks to possess its object completely without concerning itself with its possible destruction: envy wishes to appropriate all that is good in the object and, if that proves impossible, does not hesitate to destroy the object in order to avoid the origin of the envious feeling. Although envy is rooted in primitive love and admiration, it is distinguishable from greed: as submerged as it is by the death drive, it reflects a lesser degree of Eros.

Readers of Freud are already familiar with his notion of envy, whose most fundamental manifestation is “penis envy” in women—the counterpart to the castration complex, which is itself a source of inhibition, frigidity, and negative therapeutic reaction. In Klein’s view, oral envy—the envy of the mother’s breast—dominates the psyche long before penis envy does:

In this context I wish to consider the woman’s penis-envy mainly in so far as it is of oral origin. As we know, under the dominance of oral desires, the penis is strongly equated with the breast (Abraham) and in my experience the woman’s penis-envy can be traced back to envy of the mother’s breast. I have found that if the penis-envy of women is analysed on these lines, we can see that its root lies in the earliest relation to the mother, in the fundamental envy of the mother’s breast, and in the destructive feelings allied with it.³¹

Envy encourages everything, even as it impedes the development of the psyche: it grants the psyche a beneficial object, but it is an object that must be appropriated until it is vitiated or destroyed. As Melanie embarks on this final journey, she revisits her beloved theme of the loved-and-hated primary object. The breast, which is an aftereffect of nostalgia for the womb—itself a remnant of the birth trauma—is fantasized as being an inexhaustible breast, one that is idealized and thus intensifies hatred—because the real object never corresponds to the psychic object. To this fundamental situation is added deprivation: the breast is withdrawn, it is missed, the mother’s care is not always adequate, and so forth. Excessive frustration, but also excessive indulgence (isn’t Winnicott’s “good enough mother” also a “bad enough” one?), serve only to aggravate this innate envy:

I have often referred to the infant’s desire for the inexhaustible, ever-present breast. But as has been suggested … it is not only food he desires; he also wants to be freed from destructive impulses and persecutory anxiety. This feeling that the mother is omnipotent and that it is up to her to prevent all pain and evils from internal and external sources is also found in the analysis of adults.³²

At the same time (and here, the good breast returns with a vengeance), if the child feels satisfied after having first experienced a certain degree of frustration, he becomes better able to deal with his anxieties. The mother thus contains destructive anxieties, and, like a containing object, she encourages the integration of the ego. The bliss and gratitude brought on by the container, then, counterbalance the destructive drives as they diminish envy and greed. What Melanie Klein is describing here is a jubilant bond with the mother, on which she had never previously focused in quite the same way, and one that is rooted in the preverbal stage as a basis for the gratitude that will subsequently generate the capacity for reparation, sublimation, and generosity. And yet, because nothing is so simple in the world of the death drive, the analyst does not forget that gratitude itself can be “enacted” by guilt, in which case it would be distinct from “true” gratitude:

All of this is felt by the infant in much more primitive ways than language can express. When these pre-verbal emotions and phantasies are revived in the transference situation, they appear as “memories in feelings,” … and are reconstructed and put into words with the help of the analyst. In the same way, words have to be used when we are restructuring and describing other phenomena belonging to the early stages of development.³³

One of author’s clinical examples makes clear the extent to which primordial envy is unconsciously transmitted to adults and curtails their capacity for gratitude, love, and fulfillment as well as the analytic work that they nevertheless choose to undertake. A patient describes the following dream: she was seated in a restaurant but, when nobody came to serve her, she decided to join a queue. In front of her was a woman who took several “petits fours” (the woman said in French “petits fru” rather than “petits fours”) and walked away with them. The analysand, who was behind her, did the same thing. Klein and her patient trace the associations: the cake woman looks like the analyst, and “petits frou” (kleine Frou) makes her think of Frau Klein. The analyst interprets the dream as follows: the patient had missed some sessions, allegedly because of a sore shoulder and her childish need to receive affection and be taken care of, but no one came. The dream recaptured the grief that appeared during the missed sessions and that was associated with an unhappy childhood and with unsatisfying breast-feeding. The “two or three petits fours” (kleine Frou), like the two breasts, linked Frau Klein, through identification and projection, to the patient’s greed. The cakes represent the mother and the analyst’s frustrating breast as well as the breast of the patient, who agreed to feed herself in the end by taking her place in the queue.

To frustration had thus been added envy of the breast. This envy had given rise to bitter resentment, for the mother had been felt to be selfish and mean, feeding and loving herself rather than her baby. In the analytic situation I was suspected of having enjoyed myself during the time when she was absent, or of having given the time to other patients whom I preferred. The queue which the patient had decided to join referred to other more favoured rivals.

The response to the analysis of the dream produced a striking change in the emotional situation. The patient now experienced a feeling of happiness and gratitude more vividly than in previous analytic sessions…. She was aware that she was envious and jealous of various people but had not been able to recognize it sufficiently in the relation to the analyst because it was too painful to experience that she was envying and spoiling the analyst as well as the success of the analysis.³⁴

It was thus in Klein’s later writings, after she interpreted the violent nature of envy as being the definitive version of the death drive, that she expounded upon the capacity for love. Although Klein reminds us that Freud, in his “Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1926), proclaimed that the unconscious ego has no capacity for representing death (“the unconscious seems to contain nothing that could give any content to the concept of the annihilation of life”),³⁵ she indicates where she diverges from the master:

The threat of annihilation by the death instinct within is, in my view—which differs from Freud’s on this point—the primordial anxiety, and it is the ego which, in the service of the life instinct—possibly even called into operation by the life instinct—deflects to some extent that threat outwards. This fundamental defence against the death instinct Freud attributed to the organism, whereas I regard this process as the prime activity of the ego.³⁶

It is thus the ego, and not the organism, that is the agent of hatred, but also of love, envy, and gratitude. Through splitting, the ego defends itself from destructiveness and thus envy until it becomes capable of experiencing love: a capacity that reinforces the “depressive position” in particular inasmuch as that position begins the process of resolving the Oedipus conflict. It is on that basis that the struggle between the two forces continues throughout psychic life, with varying degrees of success for the two protagonists. Klein, for her part, lauds the many thinkers before who have reproached envy as being the worst sort of sin because it opposes life itself. “Love envieth not” (First Letter to the Corinthians); Saint Augustine describes Life as a creative force that stands in opposition to a destructive force; in Milton’s Paradise Lost, envy connotes a destruction of creativity; Chaucer condemns envy as being “the worst sin that is; for all other sins are sins only against one virtue, whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness.” Klein’s exploration of the duality between envy and gratitude concludes provisionally with the following heartfelt tribute to the forces of enjoyment and sublimation:

I suggest that the happiness experienced in infancy and the love for the good object which enriches the personality underlie the capacity for enjoyment and sublimation, and still make themselves felt in old age. When Goethe said, “He is the happiest of men who can make the end of his life agree closely with the beginning,” I would interpret “the beginning” as the early happy relation to the mother which throughout life mitigates hate and anxiety and still gives the old person support and contentment. 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.³⁷

We should not be deceived by what we read here, for this brief interlude does not introduce some sort of idyllic state, and Klein continued to be drawn to anxiety and destructiveness. Was it because those symptoms are more prominent in those sufferers who look to psychoanalysis for assistance? Or was it because the death drive is the more persistent of the two drives? It may well be that in the beginning is the good object along with the love that it inspires, as we have just seen is the view shared by Goethe and Klein. And yet, if we begin by analyzing this beginning, as Klein never stopped doing even though she remained skeptical of all beginnings, we may very well discover a large display of envy, ingratitude, sadism, and suffering. As she put it:

Excessive envy interferes with adequate oral gratification and so acts as a stimulus towards the intensification of genital desires and trends. This implies that the infant turns too early towards genital gratification, with the consequence that the oral relation becomes genitalized and the genital trends become too much coloured by oral grievances and anxieties…. With some infants, the flight into genitality is also a defence against hating and injuring the first object towards which ambivalent feelings operate.³⁸

It is clear that we can never be too suspicious of the many faces of envy! By analyzing them and theorizing them, Melanie Klein no doubt continued her own analysis and worked through her countertransference toward the negative therapeutic reaction. Did she not write the following in her unfinished Autobiography?:

When I abruptly finished my analysis with Abraham, there was a great deal which had not been analyzed and I have continually proceeded along the lines of knowing more about my deepest anxieties and defences. In spite of the scepticism which I said was quite characteristic of a large part of my analytic life, I have never been hopeless, nor am I now.³⁹

This tends to validate the view of Didier Anzieu, who cites the passage above, that all theories have an unrealized fate, particularly those that examine, as Klein’s does, the prematurity of the human newborn. It also vindicates his view that the freshness of Klein’s work is like a “promise of a youth forever rejuvenated through psychoanalysis.”⁴⁰