Melanie Klein

In Klein’s theory of the psyche, oral sadism goes hand in hand with a tyrannical superego. Toward the beginning of her clinical experience, the psychoanalyst set forth the early genesis of the superego in “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict and of Super-Ego Formation,” an article that contains hints of an earlier 1928 study and that was published in The Psychoanalysis of Children.¹ Klein returned to the subject—with a new perspective and a new sense of purpose—in “The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties,” which she published in Love, Guilt, and Reparation.²

The sadism phase, which intensifies from birth on and which Klein designated in 1946 to be the “paranoid-schizoid position,” focuses, along with the breast, on the inside of the mother’s body that contains the father’s penis. There we shall find, as does Jean Bégoin, the prototype of the psychic realm.³

Klein describes two psychic events that will form the basis of the superego: first, the internalization of the incorporated object (the mother’s breast + the father’s penis) that defends the ego from the attacks of the id and that creates the core of the superego, and second, the ejection of this core into the anal-sadistic stage. The following are what Klein considers to be the three stages of this process:

1. The early stages of the Oedipus conflict and of the formation of the super-ego extend, roughly, from the middle of the first year to the third year of the child’s life.⁴

2. According to my observations, … the Oedipus conflict and the super-ego set in under the supremacy of the pre-genital impulses, and the objects which have been introjected in the oral-sadistic phase—the first object cathexes and identifications—form the beginnings of the early super-ego…. It would follow logically that the ego would regard the internalized object as so cruel an enemy of the id from the fact that the destructive instinct which the ego has turned outward has become directed against that object, and consequently nothing but hostility against the id can be expected…. The father of the primal horde was the external power which enforced an inhibition of instinct…. And cruel as this super-ego formed under the supremacy of sadism may be, it nevertheless even becomes at this early stage, the agency from which instinctual inhibitions proceed, as it takes over the ego’s defence against the destructive instinct.⁵

3. In the early anal-sadistic stage what [the child] is ejecting is his object, which he perceives as something hostile to him and which he equates with excrement. But as I see it, what is already being ejected in the early anal-sadistic stage is the terrifying superego which he has introjected in the oral-sadistic phase. Thus his act of ejection is a means of defence employed by his fear-ridden ego against his super-ego; it expels his internalized objects and at the same time projects them into the outerworld.⁶

Thus, as soon as sadism grows more intense, the extensive use of projective identification leads to persecutory anxieties associated with splitting, and these initial introjects construct a devouring superego that evokes a pitiless Saturn. The gradual discovery of the two positions, “depressive” and “paranoid-schizoid,” as well as the discovery of their fluctuation and their reciprocal recovery (which has been termed, after Bion, “Ps-D”), modifies the superego just as the Oedipus conflict is getting underway. Oral frustration is projected from the outset onto the two parents, who, according to the child’s fantasies, afford each other “mutual sexual pleasures”⁷ that they withhold from him. Beginning in the sixth month of life, along with the depressive position comes a true Oedipus conflict and a shift from the part object to the whole object: with weaning, the fantasy of the lost (or dead) mother generates guilt, and the persecuting superego is transformed into a “remorse of the conscience” that mourns the fact that it was never able to protect the “good object” from internalized persecutors. Object relations will then fight among themselves, mirroring the ego’s relationship with the superego and the id, or perhaps the superego’s relationship with the ego.

Klein’s divergence from Freudian theory is apparent and acknowledged. The Freudian superego, which appears in the second topography (id/ego/superego), is not truly dissociated from the ideal of the ego and the ego ideal, and it is often considered in the context of idealization⁸ rather than in the Kleinian context of the terror that characterizes its function in the paranoid-schizoid position (even though it evolves after that position). It is as if Freud did not fully realize the consequences of his own theory of the death drive—consequences that Klein, on the other hand, understood quite deeply. The Freudian superego intervenes quite late, moreover, because it is a contemporary of the Oedipus conflict, and more specifically of the phallic stage (which Klein prefers to call a genital stage) where the superego evaporates, a stage brought on by the abandonment of incestuous desires. For Klein, the superego is thus both younger and crueler: it is always oedipal, as we have seen, but in the sense of a Kleinian Oedipus conflict, an early one at that, and one that makes its debut with oral sadism.

The dual projective identification with the mother and the father is propelled by early genital desires that impregnate oral, urethral, and anal desires: libidinal stages emerge, in Klein’s view, during the first months of life. Klein’s 1945 article on the Oedipus complex⁹ clarifies the way the two sexes form the superego as she follows the fluctuation of the Oedipus complex throughout what will be termed the “paranoid-schizoid-depressive position”:

In my view, infants of both sexes experience genital desires directed toward their mother and father, and they have an unconscious knowledge of the vagina as well as of the penis. For these reasons Freud’s earlier term “genital phase” seems to me more adequate than his later concept of the “phallic phase.” …

The first introjected object, the mother’s breast, forms the basis of the super-ego. Just as the relation to the mother’s breast precedes and strongly influences the relation to the father’s penis, so the relation to the introjected mother affects in many ways the whole course of super-ego development. Some of the most important features of the superego, whether loving and protective or destructive and devouring, are derived from the early maternal components of the super-ego.¹⁰

Freud, who associated the emergence of the superego with the castration complex, believed that women were much less equipped for it than men.¹¹ Melanie, on the other hand, simply because she linked the superego with the internalization of the bad persecuting breast, was far more generous toward little girls: she believed that the superego is no less developed in girls than in boys, though theirs is of a different sort. In the end, a veritable sexual duality structures the earliest manifestation of the superego and generates the different Oedipus conflicts experienced by boys and by girls.

More precisely, a boy’s phallic stage succumbs to the threat of castration on the part of a father with whom he identified during his “primary identification with the father of personal prehistory.” A girl’s anxiety, on the other hand, is rooted in her fear of losing her mother’s love, which is associated with her fear of the mother’s death.¹² Klein will return to these ideas in Envy and Gratitude.¹³

In this context, idealization takes on persecuting tones. As distinguished from the “good” object, the “idealized” object emerges as a defense against the fragile young ego’s inability to fully internalize the good object:

Some people deal with their incapacity (derived from excessive envy) to possess a good object by idealizing it. This first idealization is precarious, for the envy experienced towards the good object is bound to extend to its idealized aspect…. Greed is an important factor in these indiscriminate identifications, for the need to get the best from everywhere interferes with the capacity for selection and discrimination.¹⁴

Because idealization is a function of persecuting anxiety more than of the capacity to love, and because idealization stems from the “innate feeling”¹⁵ that an “extremely good”¹⁶ maternal breast exists, this idealized object is invariably ambivalent.¹⁷ On the one hand, it counterbalances persecutory anxieties to some degree, but on the other hand, it persecutes itself because it contains powerful tyrannical elements that are not split. “The ideal breast is the counterpart of the devouring breast,”¹⁸ but “infants whose capacity for love is strong”¹⁹ feel less of a need for excessive idealization, which “denotes that persecution is the main driving force.”²⁰

Only an effective working through of the depressive position—a working through that is always underway and that is never fully realized—can successfully integrate the split-off parts while reconciling the persecutor and the ideal to form the “good” object and to abate the tyranny of the superego. Once the sexual identity of the “self” (a term that Klein increasingly used instead of “ego” to designate the totality of the psyche as opposed to the external object) takes shape, the child introjects the sexual functions at the genital level and detaches himself finally from his parents. This optimal evolution is followed by the formation of what Donald Meltzer calls the “Super-ego-Ideal.”²¹

Psychotic structures, in contrast, forever carry the burden of this persecuting Kleinian superego because they need it to counterbalance the despair that results from primary destructiveness and from the failure of all early object relations. In fact, the idealized tyrant—protective in turn—that consists of the ferocious superego of psychosis (when it proves itself to be a last-ditch defense against the total annihilation of psychic life and of life) continues to impede the development of the psychic realm: the biological survival of the psychotic personality comes at the cost of a maddening inhibition or distortion of psychic life.

The realm of the mind thus finds itself to be quashed at least in part by “concretizations,” in the sense that internal objects as well as the superego function as external objects, which leads to a denial of internal reality as well as of the link between the two. The psychic realm, which is a representation, is therefore experienced as an incarnation, as a container of objects that are perceived very concretely, that center on a container, and that inhibit symbolization as a result.²² The passage that Klein often quotes from Milton’s Samson Agonistes rings true here: “Thou art become (O worst imprisonment!) / The dungeon of thyself.” Alongside symbolization, which the psychotic subject is somewhat capable of, we find another reality, a “concrete” reality in which the word is the thing and the thing is the word. This process, already recognized by such close Kleinian disciples as Joan Riviere and Susan Isaacs, has been fully developed by the post-Kleinians.²³ But Klein had already touched on it herself, particularly in her case studies of Dick and of Richard, where she relied on the healthy parts of the personality—those that were capable of joining the split-off parts—to interpret persecutory anxieties through transference in an effort to transform them into depressive anxieties and to extend symbolization to the entire psychic realm. From that perspective, Klein’s case study of Richard reflects the degree to which abating the severity of the superego—as well as making interpretations that are susceptible of revealing that severity and of counteracting it with a verbalization shared with the patient through transference—are essential to the treatment of psychosis.

Klein completed her clinical work with Richard (who was ten years old at the time) in 1941. The Controversial Discussions with Anna Freud were in full force, as was the Second World War, which insinuates itself into the story of Richard.²⁴ The title of the case study, Narrative of a Child Analysis, suggests that it is a narrative of an analysis. Narration, the ultimate imaginary act, proves here to be a breeding ground for Klein’s work. Whether the text is recounting Richard’s words, relaying Klein’s interpretations, or clarifying those interpretations through her commentary, the entire analysis is structured as a narration, and not at all as a system of knowledge. Klein in fact subscribed to a certain cult of the narrative: she was drawn to Colette’s libretto for Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, to Julian Green’s novel If I Were You, and, a bit further afield, to the myth that she wove around Aeschylus’s Oresteia.²⁵ Her imaginary version of truth links her, unexpectedly, to a tribute to the narrated life that we have already observed in Hannah Arendt.²⁶

During Richard’s latency period, he suffered from characterological difficulties: insincerity, hypocrisy, and dissimulating charm. He also presented with inhibitions: he could no longer attend school because he suffered so from agoraphobic and claustrophobic anxieties. Richard was afraid of other children, although his fears, which were manifested at the beginning of treatment, were not excessive. Klein’s interpretations brought his anxieties to the fore, which in turn unleashed his tyrannical superego. As was the case with Richard’s sessions, what emerged from her study was a truly sadistic persecution that greatly surpassed the rigidity of the child’s stern and puritanical parents. This “paranoid object,” which inhabited Richard concretely, took the form of the family maid Bessie, seen as a Germanophobe and a poisoner, but also of Hitler, the most celebrated of the contemporary persecutors, who fascinated Richard as much as he terrified him, and with whom the young patient occasionally identified.

During the ninth week of Richard’s treatment, which lasted sixteen weeks in all, he fell into a manic state that was subsequently abated. When Richard expressed his fear of his father’s impending arrival, Klein’s interpretation revealed to him that he desired his father’s penis, an interpretation that immediately incited some violent material centered on a “monster” whose “meat was delicious”²⁷ and that was followed by Richard’s handling a yellow pencil that he constantly shoved in his orifices—his mouth, his ears, and his nose—and his nibbling as he told the story of a mouse that had scurried about his parent’s bedroom. During the following session, he described a dream about a trial that was very Kafkaesque (as Meltzer has wisely pointed out). In the dream, he was brought before a court without knowing exactly what he had been charged with:

Richard was at a law court. He did not know what he was accused of. He saw the judge, who looked quite nice and did not say anything. Richard went to a cinema, which seemed also to belong to the court. Then all the buildings which were part of the court tumbled down. He seemed to have become a giant and with his enormous black shoe he kicked the tumbled-down buildings and this made them stand up again. So he really put them right.²⁸

Melanie explained to Richard that the judge was his father, who was sometimes kind but other times terrifying when Richard wished to steal his father’s penis or his mother’s breast—hadn’t Richard been accused the previous day of picking roses? The charge that he destroyed the court buildings represented his desire to attack his parents and then to restore them to their original condition. His feeling that he was a giant meant that he contained within himself a giant-mother and a destructive monster-father; we might add that he also introjected a giant superego that procured for him not only the impression of being Hitler but also the feeling of omnipotent thought and the idea that he might be stronger than Hitler so he could fight him. The black Hitler-shoe suggested that he created and destroyed the buildings and subsequently put them back together, just as he had demolished his parents and then attempted to rebuild them.

The next day Richard offered some free associations concerning the inexplicable guilt that had caused him much anxiety in this dream: he was also being accused in the dream of breaking a window, which he had actually done a few days before in the playroom, but this misdeed was associated with his identification with Hitler and with the German plane, which had destroyed the conservatory in his family’s home and which had frightened Bessie, the cook-poisoner.

Klein’s case notes indicate that her interpretive work focused on Richard’s excessive splitting and idealization. The analyst believed that Richard was attacking his father’s penis, which he imagined was persecuting the inside of his mother’s body as well as his mother herself, and which he believed was causing her pain. Mr. Smith, who represented Richard’s father in these stories, was therefore transformed all too rapidly, sometimes into a good guy and sometimes into a bad guy. At the same time, the child distinguished between the father and the mother, idealizing the one and making the other into a bad object—and vice versa. In the same way, Richard, within his own self, manifested splitting-and-idealization in such a way that his bad part, “Hitler,” attacked and invaded his good parts. The analyst synthesized her painstaking work with her young patient as follows:

The fight against external foes … brought out persecutory fear of them which he attempted to counteract by manic defences. However, the fact that the fluctuations between what he felt to be good and bad in himself and others were less rapid, was bound up with greater synthesis between the good and bad aspects of the analyst and his mother on the one hand, and of the good and bad father on the other. Such processes of externalization and synthesis of the objects include greater integration of the ego and an increased capacity to differentiate between parts of himself and his objects. Such processes of externalization and synthesis of the objects included greater integration of the ego and an increased capacity to differentiate between parts of himself and his objects. Steps in integration and synthesis, however, stir up anxiety although they bring relief. This was shown in the drawing of the aeroplanes (Forty-sixth Session) where he appeared as both the German and the British plane, which implied a greater unconscious insight into his having simultaneously destructive and loving impulses.²⁹

Melanie Klein gradually shifted from the term “ego” to the term “self,” which she eventually used “to cover the whole of the personality, which includes not only the ego but the instinctual life which Freud called the id.”³⁰ Klein’s notion of the self—which is not the same as the psychic phenomenon that, in the eyes of other partisans of the ego or the self, is acquired and slowly solidified during the entire development of the child’s psychic apparatus—is present at birth and predates splitting. The Kleinian self represents the essential unity of the subject, which must be understood as what Klein considered to be a fundamental heterogeneity: at once meaning and the drive, capable of absorbing parts taken from the id or the ego, from bodily images and sundry objects as well as from irreducible concretizations. Richard’s analysis reflected such an amalgamated and yet unified conception of what Klein called the “self.” The case study of Richard—more so than the case studies of Fritz, Hans, Trude, Rita, Peter, Dick, or anyone else—reveals the dynamic yet diverse unity of the psychic apparatus: thanks to the analyst, a subject (if we can use that term without being too theoretically anachronistic) emerges who is made and destroyed through crises between the superego and its object.

For Richard, the “concretizations of the superego” functioned as external and persecuting objects that prevented him from thinking in any way other than through manic excitement. His speech was reduced to a feverish logorrhea. When the young patient was confronted with an interpretation, his speech and his thought would begin to change. Richard asked Mrs. Klein if she enjoyed their work together, as if he were trying to understand the meaning of the analytic activity as well as the way the psychic truths unveiled by the analyst had afforded him a sense of gratification that was different from the persecutory excitation that had come before: “Richard was silent for some time and deep in thought. Then he said he would like to understand what psychoanalysis really was. It seemed such a secret to him. He would like to get to the ‘heart of it.’”³¹

Another of Melanie Klein’s interpretations focused on Richard’s feeling of triumph when he seduced—as he believed he had!—his mother as well as Mrs. Klein (he would sleep in his mother’s quarters and could see his analyst on Sundays), just as he thought he could use his pencils to kill Hitler! Klein embellished this interpretation by stating that the naval battle between the English and the Germans, Japanese, and Italians “went on internally and not only externally,”³² that the child allowed himself to kill his mother when he believed that she debased herself by succumbing to his seduction as if she had forgotten the boundaries between what is permissible and what is not as well as the boundaries between good and evil, and that he believed the analyst herself attracted him and authorized him to desire his mother as well as herself. As Meltzer has pointed out, Richard’s manic state diminished only when interpretation addressed the most essential point, which was “the contempt of the object and the contempt in the transference for this Mrs Klein, whose bag and clock were the rocks behind which he could hide and attack everybody.”³³

The interpretation of the hostilities that fascinated Richard and their rebirth in the child’s inner world made it easier to tone down the superego and to work through Richard’s splitting. At the same time, the depressive feelings that accompanied the love for the lost object (Mummy, the analyst) could be consolidated until they dominated manic excitation and eventually colored the components of the superego with benevolence and gratitude. In fact, Mrs. Klein, who adopted during this phase of the analysis the functions of a constantly evolving superego, experienced some of they ways it changed in the final weeks of the analysis: during the thirteenth week of treatment, Richard asked Klein if she herself contained a bad father-Hitler, or, on the other hand, if she was content with her grandchildren, her good husband, or a good penis inside her. The trust Richard placed in his inner good mother and in the good father grew in pace with the trust he placed in Mrs. Klein:

I had already interpreted that one part of his self, felt to be good and allied with the good object, was fighting his destructive part combined with the bad objects. But his ego was not strong enough to deal with the impending disaster. I would conclude that the engine which he put behind my bag (which had in his analysis often represented myself) stood for his destructive impulses which he could not himself control and which were to be controlled by the analyst—ultimately by his good object. This good object was also felt to be the restraining and therefore helpful super-ego.³⁴

The goodness that Richard rediscovered and re-created expanded his psychic space and enabled him to symbolize both past and present conflicts. He became less vulnerable to being “dismantled” by the intrusions of a superego that was as tyrannical as it was “incarnate” and “concretized” in the form of real persecutors who were not imagined: Bessie and Cook, Hitler, his mother, his father, and the analyst herself during the beginning of treatment. The law court no longer had to haunt his dreams, not with Richard’s holding himself out as a grotesque giant donning colossal black shoes. The “heart” of psychoanalysis (or, rather, the heart of the psychoanalyst) was about to get the better of the “castle,” with its superego-like walls that Richard had drawn to designate the “law court.”

In truth, it appears that the raw, even cruel, simplicity of Klein’s interpretations was able to consolidate Richard’s psychic space, perhaps because the therapist never separated herself from the goodness that combined, in her mind, tactful listening and a relentless effort to understand what cannot be understood by linking her patient with her clinical reasoning. James Gammill, who proved in the end to be Klein’s most loyal disciple, has said as much: “[Klein] emphasized that one had to understand not only each young child’s specific vocabulary, but his personal style and mode of expression as well in order to formulate interpretations that were most likely to be understood and put to use…. In addition, she believed it was not enough for the patient to feel understood, for he should also realize what had made such understanding possible.”³⁵

What Melanie Klein sought was not a mountain of theories (or metalanguages) but a way to understand—and then to understand the how and why of understanding. Such a goal can be accomplished when the cognitive superego cooperates with the drive-based logic of the analyst, but perhaps it can also be the logic of the patient’s own suffering, provided he has the luck to have an analyst who is able to stick with him as long as Melanie did.

It turns out—as “the case of Richard” proves beyond cavil, perhaps because of Klein’s careful notes and the details they provide—that although Klein still appears to us to be too systematic and simplistic, it was because she showed us that desire itself is incredibly foolhardy. When anxious desire proves incapable of working through its own sadistic excesses, it redirects those excesses toward introjected objects that are entirely dissociated and reversible and that generate a superego that appears grandiose and protective—but that in reality is minuscule and destructive. From that point on, futile law courts inhabit us for real and stay inside us concretely, resulting, for example, in the exhausting series of poisoning Mummies-Bessies and of bombarding fathers-Hitlers. But Richard’s Hitler is only an Ubu, and the horrible trial inflicted upon the child is no more than a circus of internal sadomasochistic reversals. Jarry, for one, has already put Ubu down. But Melanie did not join him. With good (serious? maternal?) intentions, Klein had the courage to reveal the silliness of it all. For her, moreover, Ubu is not outside, but truly inside: Ubu is us and Ubu is you. Who could not fault her for making it so clear?

Not content with being incredibly foolhardy, our inner world is also wholly solitary. Even if the superego cannot take all the blame for this, Klein, at the end of her final work, “On the Sense of Loneliness,”³⁶ still contends that “the harsher the super-ego, the greater will be loneliness.”³⁷ And yet it is not the mere fact of being isolated, but the inner feeling of being alone—even in the company of friends or lovers—that Klein attributes to two essential factors that are no stranger to the early and tyrannical superego at issue here.

If the initial preverbal relationship with the mother is gratifying, it establishes a degree of contact with the unconscious of both the mother and the child that is so complete and so gratifying that nostalgia impresses it into the psyche. Speechless though it may be, this contact affords the sensation of being understood, a sensation that is so all-encompassing that it enhances the depressive impression of having suffered an irreplaceable loss. The context of the ensuing psychic evolution is so desirable that anxieties readily surface. Paranoid-schizoid anxiety, which emerges beginning at three months of age, and depressive anxiety, which emerges later, ravage the ego and seek support in a superego that mandates a return to the absolute communication providing a “foundation for the most complete experience of being understood.”³⁸ The integration of the ego, which is aimed at alleviating these anxieties, occurs gradually through the depressive position—but it remains incomplete, which is the second reason behind the sense of loneliness: “Since full integration is never achieved, complete understanding and acceptance of one’s own emotions, phantasies and anxieties is not possible and this continues as an important factor in loneliness.”³⁹

The hope of rediscovering total understanding by reunifying the ego’s split-off and misunderstood parts can thus be expressed by the fantasy of having a twin, as Bion has suggested. This hope can also appear in the form of an idealized internal object that deserves unwavering trust. But when the integration of the parts of the ego remains inaccessible, the feeling of nonintegration or exclusion surges forth, and we become convinced “that there is no person or group to which one belongs.”⁴⁰ Or instead, one can defend oneself against too great a dependence on the external object by thrusting oneself upon the internal object, with the result, in some adults, that they reject any sort of amicable exchange.

A nostalgic, serene, and autumnal tone imbues Klein’s final work, which touches on the paranoid-schizophrenic and manic-depressive symptoms of isolation and which concludes by describing an experience common to us all. By the end of this essay, the dramatic portrayal of solitude is transformed into an omnipresent feeling of forlornness that almost proves to be a clear understanding of our condition as beings who are separated and rejected from a paradise that was also a hell—albeit a hell that our superego never ceases to idealize so it can convince us more easily that we are banking on the impossible.

From paranoid-schizoid and manic-depressive loneliness to the present feeling of loneliness that carries traces of it, the early and tyrannical superego softens and transforms into a “good” superego. Such a superego always prohibits the destructive drives and arouses the depressive and paranoid anxieties that persuade us that neither unification nor communication among our split-off parts is possible. For better or worse, however, such a superego also allows the process of integration itself to unfold, which in turn allows us to know, at a minimum, why we experience joy and suffering. In the end, the sense of loneliness becomes the expression of the “urge towards integration, as well as the pain experienced in the process of integration,” both of which stem from “internal sources which remain powerful throughout life.”⁴¹

Melanie Klein, who in no way resigns herself to this view, concludes that loneliness is indeed our unavoidable destiny, but that it also affords us an opportunity. To concede as much does not make us happier, but it certainly makes us calmer because we are truer and, perhaps, more welcoming while at the same time never ceasing to be alone. Once we are alone, we can share the analytic understanding of our solitude. The draconian superego succumbs to the ideal ego, which Melanie rarely discusses but which emerges upon the reappearance, during the final pages of her work, of the “good breast” and its internalization: “The internalization of a good breast … is a foundation for integration which I have mentioned as one of the most important factors in diminishing the sense of loneliness.”⁴²