Melanie Klein

The Kleinian universe, as has been stated to excess, is dominated by the mother. The omnipotence of this archaic figure is threatening and terrifying. Is the mother so pernicious that we have to abandon her and hasten her death? Is she unable to transform herself? And even if she is not, what does she become? Does the requisite abandonment of the mother constitute a journey toward the father, as Freud and Lacan believed? Or does it set the stage for subsequent reunions with a good mother who is finally restored, gratifying, and gratified? That is more likely because, in the eyes of our author, there is no birth without a witch and no baby without envy. And only the analyst—preferably a female one or at least a man who assumes his own femininity—is able to convince the newborn, who remains inside us forever, that it is possible to encounter fairies who deserve its gratitude.

Such systematizing visions of Klein’s work are not entirely inaccurate. The modest place, at best, that Freudian theory accords to the mother encouraged his successors, including Klein, to be dogmatic in the other direction. And yet, by placing too much emphasis on the mother, whom the founder rejected, one runs the risk of forgetting the father. In fact, what role does the father play in Klein’s theory? One of the first to formulate that question was Klein’s own daughter Melitta Schmideberg—who posed the question in anger.¹ Other detractors of Klein’s followed suit. Still, the psychoanalyst’s mind was far more complex than that.

The celebrated breast is never alone, for the penis is linked with it in fantasy. This view, which is hammered home beginning with Klein’s early articles in The Psychoanalysis of Children, is stated explicitly in Envy and Gratitude. Although envy emerges as soon as the breast is present, it also attacks the penis that is associated with it:

In the vicissitudes of the first exclusive relation with the mother, … when this relation is disturbed too soon, the rivalry with the father enters prematurely. Phantasies of the penis inside the mother, or inside her breast, turn the father into a hostile intruder.²

In other words—and I have already emphasized this point—from the beginning of Klein’s clinical experience, which was based on her analysis of Erich/Fritz and of Hans/Felix, she posited the existence of an archaic Oedipus conflict that is manifested from the child’s first night terrors. Such frights reflect repression, and repression exists only in the Oedipus conflict! As a result, although the Oedipus complex does not truly exist before the onset of the depressive position during the sixth month of life, the rivalry with the father emerges prematurely in the proto-Oedipus complex. This notion of prematurity, which appears to contradict the Freudian Oedipus complex that emerges at a later point, can nevertheless be reconciled with universal Freudian theory, and in particular with the thesis—of which Klein deduces the immediate consequences—of an oedipal rivalry that is phylogenetically constituted based on the murder-and-assimilation of the father of the primal horde. But in that case, is the penis already inside the breast or does it appear there only afterward?

In a 1924 speech to the Salzburg congress, Klein clarified her position: her conclusion, based on her analysis of Rita, was that the father’s penis as such—and not inasmuch as it may be confused with the inside of the mother—is a coveted object that can only succeed the mother’s breast. Early oedipal drives combine the oral and the vaginal: children desire intercourse as an oral act in which the mouth and the vagina are both receptors, a desire that facilitates the displacement of oral libido onto the genital.³

Still, it is with the depressive position—when love and hate eventually become one, when the ego can lose Mummy and rediscover her in its fantasies in the form of a whole object—that we become aware of what Klein termed “the relation to the second object, the father” and can put him in the context of “the other people in his surroundings”⁴ (brothers or sisters). This secondary function is hardly flattering, but it is effective all the same. The initial stages of the Oedipus conflict led Klein to posit the existence of two parents in the childhood fantasy, in the sense of an imago of the “combined parent figure.”⁵ In Envy and Gratitude, Klein returned to this theme and expounded upon it:

Among the features of the earliest stage of the Oedipus complex are the phantasies of the mother’s breast and the mother containing the penis of the father, or the father containing the mother. This is the basis of the combined parent figure, and I have elaborated the importance of this phantasy in earlier writings. The influence of the combined parent figure on the infant’s ability to differentiate between the parents, and to establish good relations with each of them, is affected by the strength of envy and the intensity of his Oedipus jealousy. For the suspicion that the parents are always getting sexual gratification from one another reinforces the phantasy—derived from various sources—that they are always combined.⁶

Excessive anxiety, however, can result in an inability to dissociate the relationship with the father from the relationship with the mother, which in turn can generate mental confusion.

When a boy’s jealous feelings rise to the surface, they are focused less on the original object (the breast–the brother) than on his rivals. The boy redirects his hatred toward his father, who is envied as if he possessed the mother, and here we see a case of classic oedipal jealousy. With the girl, in contrast, “the mother becomes the chief rival.”⁷ Female envy of the father’s penis, which Freud considered paramount,⁸ is secondary in Klein’s view: it is important only insofar as it reinforces female homosexuality: “This is essentially a flight mechanism and therefore does not lead to stable relations with the second object.”⁹ When envy and hatred toward the mother are strong and stable, they are redirected toward the realm of the father; or, in the alternative, they split off in such a way that one parent is simply detested and the other adored. As for the rivalry with the mother, Klein believed, unlike Freud, that it is not love for the father that forms the basis for this split but always the envy toward the mother that stems from “the mother’s possession of the father and his penis.”¹⁰ The father, or, more precisely, what he is reduced to, is no more than a possessor of the mother. We see this affirmation return throughout all of Klein’s work, including in her final text, Envy and Gratitude. In addition, and very significantly, Klein uses the term “appendage” in this context:

The father (or his penis) has become an appendage to the mother and it is on these grounds that the girl wants to rob her mother of him. Therefore in later life, every success in her relation to men becomes a victory over another woman. This applies even where there is no obvious rival, because the rivalry is then directed against the man’s mother, as can be seen in the frequent disturbances of the relation between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law….

When hate and envy of the mother are not so strong, … an idealization of the second object, the father’s penis and the father, may then be more successful.¹¹

Despite this final hypothesis—a tentative one at that—of a possible idealization of the father, it is the woman’s hatred toward the mother that endures, even under the influence of the father’s love. On that basis, female friendships and homosexuality both operate as a quest for a good object that eventually replaces the envied primordial object.

The envy of the breast is what underlies the other manifestations of female pathologies: “In a number of cases I found that frigidity, occurring in different degrees, was a result of unstable attitudes to the penis, based mainly on a flight from the primal object.”¹² Translation: if the woman flees the penis, it is because she fled the breast; she will be unable to feel pleasure and she will be frigid because experiencing pleasure is primarily a matter of pleasing herself with the breast that contains the penis.

For the man, concomitantly, homosexual guilt toward the woman is rooted in his feeling that, by hating the mother, he abandoned her too early, a “feeling of having turned away with hate from the mother and betrayed her by making an ally of the father’s penis and of the father.” This “betrayal of a loved woman”¹³ can inhibit male friendships, and the ensuing guilt can inspire the woman to flee, which itself can lead to homosexuality.

Although Klein’s conception of the early fantasy accords a central role to the breast, it includes a penis inside that breast. Even more important, by recognizing that oral drives are combined with genital ones, the dynamic of the fantasy encourages the ego to desire intercourse as an oral act of sucking at a breast that includes the penis, and then the penis in the image of the breast. This perspective, which applies to both sexes, means that both sexes experience a primary feminine phase—which is among the more striking of Klein’s analytic observations.¹⁴

The primary envy of the breast, which is replaced by an oral or receptive envy of the penis, causes the boy to experience an envy of femininity and/or maternity. Hanna Segal describes the process as follows:

For the little girl, this first oral turning to the penis is a heterosexual move paving the way to the genital situation and the wish to incorporate the penis in her vagina. But at the same time it contributes to her homosexual trends in that, at that stage of development, the oral desire is linked with incorporation and identification, and the wish to be fed by the penis is accompanied by a wish to possess a penis of her own.

For the little boy this turning to the penis of his father as an alternative to his other’s breast is primarily a move towards passive homosexuality, but at the same time this incorporation of his father’s penis helps in his identification with him and in that way strengthens his heterosexuality.¹⁵

Klein, who is more emphatic than Segal in her own observations and countertransference, proposes the following:

In this phase [i.e., the “feminine phase”] the boy has an oral-sucking fixation on his father’s penis, just as the girl has. This fixation is, I consider, the basis of true homosexuality in him. This view would agree with what Freud has said in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood …

In the phantasy of the boy, his mother incorporates his father’s penis, or rather, a number of them, inside herself; side by side with his relations to his real father, or, to be more precise, his father’s penis, he develops a relation in phantasy to his father’s penis inside his mother’s body…. He wants to take by force the penis which he imagines as being inside his mother and to injure her in doing so….

This result of the boy’s development [i.e., heterosexuality] depends essentially on the favourable course of his early feminine phase. As I earlier emphasized it is a condition for a firm establishment of the heterosexual position that the boy should succeed in overcoming this phase…. The boy often compensates the feelings of hate, anxiety, envy and inferiority that spring from his feminine phase by reinforcing his pride in the possession of a penis…. Thus and only thus, by sublimating his feminine components and overcoming his feelings of envy, hatred and anxiety towards his mother, which originated in his feminine phase, will the boy be able to consolidate his heterosexual position in the stage of genital dominance …

In both sexes the anxiety-situations relating to similar events inside the mother’s body, constitute the most profound danger-situations. Fear of castration, which is only a part—though an important part—of the anxiety felt about the whole body, becomes, in the male individual, a dominating theme that overshadows all his other fears to a greater or lesser extent. But this is precisely because one of the deepest sources to which disturbances in his sexual potency go back is his anxiety about the interior of his body.¹⁶

Klein’s notion of a primary feminine stage has been creatively developed by contemporary analysts. Florence Guignard, a careful reader of the later theories of Bion and Winnicott, thus distinguishes between two realms of intimacy that fall into rapid succession during the first six months of the infant’s life: the “primary maternal” realm, which generates the drama of the fantasies originating in intrauterine life and in castration, and the “primary feminine” realm, which consists of fantasies of seduction and the primal scene.¹⁷

In the “primary maternal” realm, the newborn establishes his initial link with the world based on his powerless omnipotence, whereas the mother contributes the narcissism of her heartfelt passion and her maternal masochism. The “primary feminine” realm, on the other hand, organizes the earliest female identifications in boys as well as girls, as Klein understood it, around greed toward the naked breast and the early genital desire for the penis that is included in that breast. The union between the breast and the penis is what makes the primary feminine realm “a specific space for organizing the psychic realm.”¹⁸ The “libidinal mutual stimulation” that takes places between mother and baby thus lays the foundation for the birth of psychic life as well as the reality principle. Put another way, the child’s capacity for psychic activity and thought depends on his primary identification with maternal femininity.

The modern evolution of Klein’s work thus attempts to compensate for her lack of attention to the father by defining early mutual stimulation as an “articulation of the desire-to-be-known with the identification with the father-who-knows.”¹⁹ Accordingly, the identification is twofold: the young ego identifies at a very early stage with the desire to make itself known (a desire that the woman manifests in the mother), and also with the knowing penetration carried out by the father’s penis. If it is true, as Freud believed, that there is only one, essentially male, libido, then the desire for knowledge would be decisively female.²⁰

Recent advances by female analysts studying female sexuality have shed new light on Klein’s relentless efforts to develop her young patients’ thought and to facilitate their knowledge processes. Femininity, defined as a desire for knowledge that facilitates the growth of a psychic inner life in which man and woman encounter each other, is what stimulates—in Klein’s view in particular and in the view of psychoanalysts in general—the desire and the ability to overcome inhibitions in thinking. And femininity also develops patients’ creativity through the analytic process itself. The message of the ear that the female analyst—and the female of the analyst—lends to the patient who comes to confide his ill-being is not “Act on your desire!” but “Create and recreate your thought by staying in touch with your feminine side!”

Klein showed an interest in female sexuality at a very early stage in her career.²¹ Although she acknowledged her debt to the work of Helene Deutsch, she also claimed that her own view “[went] beyond” that of her confederate.²² Klein was also an adherent of Karen Horney’s, particularly her discussion of Freud’s views on female castration and her emphasis on the gradual emergence of a penis envy that follows pregenital investments.²³ Klein further endorsed Ernest Jones’s view that women’s oral sadism provides a way to forcibly possess the father’s penis in order to undertake a relationship of identification with him.²⁴ Finally, on the theory that one small tribute won’t hurt anyone,²⁵ Klein cited the work of her own daughter, Melitta Schmideberg.²⁶ Armed with these acknowledged influences, Klein developed her own vision of femininity.

The starting point of her study is clearly Freudian. She cites Freud’s “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1926),²⁷ in which Freud himself recognizes that even if women do have a castration complex, “we can hardly speak with propriety of castration anxiety where castration has already taken place.”²⁸ It is rather bold of Melanie to cite Freud here as she refines her own thought, for she does not endorse Freud’s notion that the Oedipus complex in the girl is propelled by the her castration desires and fears.

In Klein’s view, the Oedipus complex in the girl emerges through her oral desires, which are closely accompanied by genital drives: the girl desires to take her father’s penis away from her mother. To summarize, the female Oedipus conflict does not follow the castration complex, as Freud would have it, even though it is true that she desires the penis and hates the mother who refuses it to her, as Freud understood very well in this instance: “But, according to my assumption, what she primarily wants is not to possess a penis of her own as an attribute of masculinity, but to incorporate her father’s penis as an object of oral satisfaction.”²⁹

As Helene Deutsch had suggested, the penis is thus assimilated into the mother’s breast, and the vagina assumes the passive role of a sucking mouth—with the caveat that, for Klein, these fantasies do not emerge upon the girl’s sexual maturity but result from her frustrations with the breast from the very beginnings of her childhood!

These early processes, which are manifested under the aegis of oral sadism and then anal sadism, explain why sadism is so predominant in the girl’s Oedipus conflict: she engages in “hate-filled phantasies” about her mother’s penis-appendage.³⁰ The little girl fears her mother’s reprisals, and, at the same time, fantasizes in a way that forces her to imagine her mother completely annihilated in an act of sadistic intercourse with the father. From that perspective, female masochism stems from the fear of dangerous introjected objects, particularly the father’s penis, and reflects nothing less than “[the girl’s] sadistic instincts turned inwards against those internalized objects”³¹ To put it bluntly, the penis introjected in herself is what punishes the female masochist who enjoys suffering.

Because the little girl’s destructive drives against her mother are so intense, she invests her urinary and excremental functions more strongly than does the boy: those functions are mobilized into internal attacks against the enigmatic interior of the mother as well as of the girl herself. Women’s investment of anality acts “in conformity with the hidden and mysterious nature of that world within her mother’s body and her own” Accordingly, “the woman’s mode of mastering anxiety remains under the domination of her relation to an inner world, to what is concealed, and therefore to the unconscious.”³² And yet this feminine position provides little protection from anxiety. What is more, although the girl perceives the vagina at a very early stage,³³ the phallic investment of the clitoris relegates this early awareness to second place. In Klein’s view, the high incidence of female frigidity proves that the vagina, which is experienced as a cavity that is threatened by sadistic fantasies, is invested defensively and long before the clitoris.

Regardless of what some may have alleged, Klein did not deny that girls experience a phallic stage.³⁴ She considered the identification with the father based on the introjected penis to be “a process comprising many stages,”³⁵ one that reinforces narcissism and the omnipotence of thought in the girl, whose virile position is expressed through the erotization of urinary functions. And yet sadism underlies the entire complex of female virility, while scoptophilia and urethral eroticism work to repress female desires per se.

In this context, then, the relationship between mother and child and the desire to be a mother are not merely an expression of penis envy, as Freud believed, for they also express a narcissistic relationship that is “more independent of [the woman’s] attitude to the man and closely connected with her own body and with the omnipotence of her excrements.”³⁶ In Klein’s view, the fetus can express the paternal superego: the hatred or fear that the woman will later feel toward her child overtakes the fantasies that liken the penis to bad and toxic excrement.³⁷ As a result, reparation, which is quite pronounced in women, is manifested as a desire to beautify the excremental penis: to create a beautiful child, to make oneself beautiful, to beautify one’s home, and so forth. Such specifically feminine acts of sublimation are reaction formations to sadistic fantasies about dangerous feces.³⁸

It follows, then, that the female superego, which is formed as a response to this sadistic impotence, is even more severe than is the boy’s. Because the girl is unable to edify her superego in the image of her same-sex parent (since the mother’s femininity is invisible and her interior is threatening), she structures her superego in a solely reactive way. Thus, “the girl’s super-ego becomes raised to very great heights and much magnified.” Torn between a powerful superego and the inner world of the unconscious, the woman, in this case like a child, possesses a much less stable ego than does the man. Luckily for her, however, “in her development the woman introjects her Oedipus objects more strongly than the man, which leads to a fuller ego-development … and she leans on the powerful super-ego within partly in order to dominate or to outdo it.”³⁹

Freud, who followed the work of his rather rebellious group of disciples on female sexuality, eventually proposed—after his mother’s death in 1931!—a new way of thinking about femininity in his “Female Sexuality,” written that same year.⁴⁰ Klein responded in the form of a “Postscript”⁴¹ to her own study entitled “The Effects of Early Anxiety-Situations on the Sexual Development of the Girl,” which is included in The Psychoanalysis of Children. Melanie, who disagreed with Freud’s notion of a persistent archaic attachment between mother and daughter⁴² and with the notion of “Minoan-Mycenaean”⁴³ attraction that precedes the Oedipus conflict, categorically refused the Freudian hypothesis of a nirvana among woman, and she emphasized the fundamental ambivalence in women’s relations with one another—a relationship she considered to be intrinsically laden with guilt: “[Freud] endeavours to isolate that attachment from the operation of her super-ego and her sense of guilt. This, in my judgment, is not possible.”⁴⁴

This consideration of the archaic maternal function, which pervades the primary object of desire as well as anxiety, provides a whole new perspective on women’s endogenous homosexuality. Not only did Melanie emphasize this point before Freud, but she did so much more emphatically than do Freud’s own writings on female sexuality. From the outset, in fact, Klein posited a conflict—rather than an osmosis—between the two protagonists. We know this ourselves to be true: anxiety and guilt are always present from a very early stage, but particularly between mother and daughter. Although the daughter may very well distance herself from her mother so that she can desire her father during the second six months of her life, her love for her father is nevertheless based on her initial—and eternally conflicted—bond with her mother. In the end, the daughter makes her way back to her father, but primary envy surreptitiously infiltrates her Oedipus complex because she refuses to forgive her mother for either the oral frustration that her mother brought about or for the oral satisfaction that, according to her sexual theories about the primal scene, her parents gain from each other through sexual intercourse. As a result, the daughter’s resentment permeates—overtly or covertly—her subsequent relationships with the opposite sex. Melanie implies that Freud borrowed this idea from her when he suggested that “many women repeat their relation to their mother in their relation to men.”⁴⁵ In the end, a woman’s object of desire is the other woman, even when such desire is cloaked in heterosexuality: that is what Melanie Klein asserted with greater conviction than did any of Freud’s other critics. In a woman’s husband you will always find her mother!⁴⁶

At the same time, while Freud acknowledged that “we are far from complete clarity” with respect to “the prehistory of the Oedipus complex,”⁴⁷ Melanie posited that men have a feminine passivity that is supported through orality. Klein paved the way to a study of men’s feminine side, which she understood as being either a necessary component of masculine heterosexuality or an incitement to homosexuality. To summarize, Klein recognized an archaic maternal realm that mandates two different types of femininity: women’s femininity and men’s femininity.⁴⁸

The mother’s interior continues to be the object of her daughter’s destructive drives. For a woman, the concomitant of this unconscious operation is that the ordeal of reality, which seeks to discern bad objects, takes place within herself. And as for the boy, whose excremental omnipotence is less developed, he invests his penis from a very early stage:

As the organ of penetration, the penis becomes, for the boy, the organ of perception. Like the eyes or the ear, the penis penetrates so it can know, and it facilitates the ego’s epistemophiliac drive as well as its journey along the path to knowledge. The penis engages in a penetration that is as destructive as one could imagine, but this sadism is accompanied by fantasies of reparation. Hence, after destroying the object through the sexual act, the boy (through fantasy) and the man (through his sexual experiences) are drawn to restoring that object through love.

The choice of male homosexuality is rooted in an attempt to absorb into the woman all that is terrifying and unknown: the ego protects itself by abandoning the woman for good. Such protection comes at a psychic cost, however. Even if the homosexual man’s unconscious comes out of this process divested, pacified, or even beautified, it runs the risk of eradicating his inner world:

In his homosexual attitude this significance is extended by his narcissistic choice of object to the penis of another male, and this penis now serves as a counter-proof against all his fears concerning the penis inside him and the interior of his body. Thus in homosexuality one mode of mastering anxiety is that the ego endeavours to deny, control or get the better of the unconscious by over-emphasizing reality and the external world and all that is tangible, visible and perceptible to consciousness.⁵⁰

Klein radically redefines Freud’s thesis of a social bond founded on a homosexuality among brothers: she sees such a bond as a secret confederation of brothers who band together against “parents combined in copulation,”⁵¹ particularly against a father abusing the mother. Klein also believes that the bond originates in masturbatory fantasies with sadistic overtones that the boy shares with an accomplice.⁵² The relationship between brothers, which at first protects the parental couple, reverses itself and reveals its paranoid character. On the one hand, the overinvested penis proves to be a persecuting object made in the image of the father’s penis and of the patient’s own feces. On the other hand, the precariousness of a good and helpful maternal imago encourages the instability of the ego.⁵³

The bad object introjected into the masculine ego can help explain both sexual impotence and alcoholism. With the alcoholic (note that Klein is paying tribute once again here to the work of her daughter Melitta Schmideberg), drinking at first destroys the internalized bad object and assuages persecutory anxiety, but, because all internalization is ambivalent, it quickly loses its ability to soothe and eventually takes on the meaning of the bad object itself.⁵⁴

And yet, as we complete our portrait of male sexuality as Melanie Klein saw it, we should also keep in mind that Klein in no way ignored the boy’s rivalry with his father during the phallic period, and that she emphasized that the boy needs to tolerate his aggressiveness and to identify with a good phallic image of the father:

If he has a strong primary belief in the omnipotence of his penis he can pit it against the omnipotence of his father’s penis and take up the struggle against that dreaded and admired organ…. If his ego is able to tolerate and modify a certain quantity of destructive feeling against his father and if his belief in his father’s “good” penis is strong enough, he can maintain both his rivalry with his father (which is essential for the establishment of a heterosexual position) and his identification with him.⁵⁵

Klein’s notion of the role played by the father and the mother in the child’s evolution or in psychosis was discussed at length by the Anna Freudians and later, in a different way, by Lacan and his own supporters. I will return later to Klein’s theory of symbolization, which will help us examine, from a different perspective, the gaps in her work with regard to the oedipal triangle, and in particular to the symbolic function of paternity.

Paradoxically, it is important to note that Klein’s relegation of the penis to “second” place and, more important, to a function as the mother’s “appendage” did not prevent her from basing her theory of splitting on the presence of the penis in the object (the breast) and from conceptualizing the first psychoanalytic model of sexuality founded upon the couple. Klein’s theory is supported not by the father himself—not even by the father of the primal horde (Freud) or the Name-of-the-Father (Lacan), nor by the mother herself (whatever the power of her breast as a source of anxiety, but also as a way of harnessing that anxiety, which makes it into a central part of the ego and the superego), but by both parents.

The two parents are at first “combined” in an act of sadistic intercourse. The lack of distinction between the two partners brings an aggravated sadism, even a mental confusion, to the new ego—which is precisely what generates the imago of the “combined parents.” On the heels of the depressive position, however, the young ego learns to distinguish between the two partners by separating the two distinct objects, and then the two total objects (the mother and the father, the woman and the man). This separation lessens envy and facilitates the working through of splitting. The split-off elements can then become integrated with genital sexuality. From that point on, the ego (or the self) learns to choose a dominant mode of sexual identification with the same-sex parent.

It is as if the Kleinian universe functioned—despite her cult of the maternal and particularly in the light of the Oedipus conflict as it emerges during the depressive position—as a dual system: woman and man, mother and father. It is true that this intuition was never sufficiently supported by a cohesive theory of language and the primal—a theory that is indeed lacking in Klein’s work, which created a gap that has been identified by both her successors and her critics.⁵⁶ Still, these initial steps toward a two-sided paradigm prove to be rich with unexplored possibilities in the realm of psychic bisexuality as well as its ethical and political consequences.

Although Klein based her theory on the dyad of the combined parents, such a dyad is not merely the product of empirical observations on the part of a mother anxious about her own children, nor is it just a respectful way of recasting the notions of the Jewish patriarch that Sigmund Freud was. In fact, and in anticipation of the Oedipus complex, Klein set forth an original and creative conception of symbolism. From the beginning, Klein’s tribute to the mother recognized both the parents and made the couple into the heterogeneous source of the bisexual autonomy of the self: she allocated (some) space for the father in her conception of the proto-Oedipus conflict, and afforded him an even greater role in the depressive position. And yet in Klein’s view, the cult of the mother, which is paramount, is transformed into matricide. The loss of the mother—which for the imaginary is tantamount to the death of the mother—becomes the organizing principle for the subject’s symbolic capacity.

It is worth remembering that the breast, whether good or bad, emerges as the first structuring object only after it has been devoured and destroyed. The mother as a whole object mitigates the exaggerated sadism of the paranoid-schizoid position only once she is “lost” during the depressive position. When the child is weaned—and thus has separated himself effectively—from the breast, he turns away from it and “loses” it. In fantasy life, of course, separation or loss is tantamount to death. Paradoxically, as we can see, the cult of the mother is, in Klein’s view, a pretext for matricide. And yet accepting loss through love allows for the development of the depressive position.

Both the cult of the mother and matricide play a saving role. From all appearances, however, matricide is far more than just the cult of the mother: without matricide, the internal object cannot be formed, the fantasy cannot be constructed, and reparation, as well as the redirection of hostility into the introjection of the self, is foreclosed. Kleinian negativity, which, as we shall see, guides the drive to intelligence by way of the fantasy, chooses the mother as its target: in order to think, one must first lose the mother. The paths toward this loss diverge: splitting leads us on the wrong track, whereas the depression that follows the separation and/or death is much more befitting. In the end, a pure positivity—it, too, innate—serves as the very capacity for love. And yet this grace depends greatly on the vagaries of envy or, rather, on the capacity to rid oneself of envy toward the mother—or, to put it more bluntly, to rid oneself of the mother altogether.

In the history of art, and Western art in particular, Medusa’s head—an image not only of female castration, as Freud rightfully observed,⁵⁷ but also of the loss of the archaic mother that the child absorbs during the depressive position—emerged just as the West was discovering psychic interiority as well as the individual expressiveness of each person’s face. This primary beheading (Medusa’s lost head and sliced-off head) was followed by more eroticized figures. Some of these figures manifest man’s phallic-symbolic power (such as the beheading of St. John the Baptist as he announces the coming of Christ), and others manifest the power struggle between men (David and Goliath) or between woman and man (Judith and Holofermes), and so forth.⁵⁸ The “beheading” of the mother, understood as both a “putting to death” and a “flight” to be taken both with the mother and against her—is a necessary precondition for the psychic freedom of the subject: that is what Klein had the courage to proclaim, in her own way and without equivocation.

As I have already noted, Klein’s later works, particularly Envy and Gratitude, emphasize the child’s innate capacity for love or gratitude that reinforces effective mothering. When this love for the mother buttresses the capacity for reparation that is an integral part of the depressive position, doesn’t it erase the tendencies toward matricide that characterize the child’s archaic positions—the positions that appear to dominate our author’s earlier writings? Some critics have endorsed such an interpretation, while others see this shift in Kleinian thinking toward love as being a variant of caritas, even the germ of a new form of socialism.⁵⁹

And yet this oblative tone does not overcome the negativity that dominates Klein’s listening to—and interpretation of—the unconscious. Because the death drive is forever, reparation and gratitude are but temporary crystallizations of negativity as well as its dialectical resting points. The capacity for gratitude must be forever cared for and protected—and such assiduous attention, which in modern culture appears to be the exclusive domain of psychoanalysts, demands that we constantly heed the destructive anxiety that works tirelessly by forcing love and gratitude into envy, if not by annihilating them through the fragmentation of the psyche. As for reparation itself, it is by separating from the mother, to which the self was once linked through an initial projective identification, that the self learns to engage in reparation. At that point the self can rediscover the mother, but not as it once knew her. On the contrary, the self never stops re-creating the mother through the very freedom it gained from being separated from her. The mother is a woman who is always renewed in images and in words, through a process of which “I” am the creator simply because I am the one who restores her.

Pity and remorse, which accompany the reparation of the lost object, carry the trace of the imaginary and symbolic matricide that reparation constantly evokes. In fact, the fear and anger common to the state of war that links me, in the paranoid-schizoid position, to Mummy-the breast are followed by a compassion for the other that Mummy becomes through the depressive position. And yet this compassion is no more than a scar of matricide: the ultimate evidence, if any were needed, that the imaginary reconciliation with the mother, which “I” need to be and to think at the cost of a putting-to-death that is excessive and of a matricide that becomes futile but that leaves me a memory that “haunts” me. It inhabits “my” dreams and “my” unconscious, and it appears on the surface of words to the extent that “I” set out in search of lost time.

Just as the myth of Oedipus illuminates Freudian theory, Klein focuses on the myth of Orestes after diagnosing the matricidal fantasy in her clinic and after unearthing its underlying logic.

In fact, in “Some Reflections on The Oresteia,”⁶⁰ Klein highlights a different sort of logical process that reflects subjective autonomy—though without ever denying the importance of Freud’s Oedipus. In the ancient Greek play, the murder of Orestes’s mother grants him freedom, though at the price of a depressive remorse that symbolizes the endless hounding of the Erinyes. Klein’s essay, which is somewhat disorganized and which she never completed, was published posthumously despite its gaping holes. It appears that she wrote it around the time of “On the Sense of Loneliness,” which was also published after her death. As we have seen, Klein’s reflection on solitude concludes with a tribute to the integration of the “good breast.” These two published legacies reflect an antinomic crossroad in Klein’s thought: the tension between the reparation of the mother and a reconciliation with the object, on the one hand, and the loss of the mother or her being put to death and symbolization, on the other. These are two inextricable sides of the complex process known as the individuation of the self.

Klein’s study of The Oresteia addresses three aspects of Aeschylus’s work from the perspective of her theories. She begins by describing Orestes’ fate. Orestes is the son of Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the gods so that the Greeks might embark on their war vessels immobilized by Neptune’s wrath. Orestes kills his mother, Clytemnestra, to avenge his father, whose murder she had encouraged to avenge the death of their daughter Iphigenia. And Orestes is also the brother of Electra, who indulged in passions no less matricidal, though they were more restrained in comparison. It was Electra who demanded that Clytemnestra be killed at the hands of Orestes. Klein could not help but see her own clinical universe in Aeschylus’s implicitly incestuous and explicitly murderous imbroglio, as hers was a world in which libido allows itself to be absorbed into the death drive. Such are the consequences of putting Clytemnestra to death: matricide clearly led to Orestes’ guilt, but he acquired an immense freedom and a preeminent symbolic capacity along the way.

In the final pages of her Oresteia, Klein tells us that the ego seeks whatever means are necessary to create symbols that can become an effective outlet for its emotions, but she also asks herself why it is that we have symbols at all. The answer is simple: it is because the mother is insufficient—precisely because she is incapable of satisfying the child’s emotional needs. Get rid of your mother, for you no longer need her: that would be the ultimate message of symbols were they able to explain to us why they exist. And then Klein proceeds to recall one of her earliest writings: her study of little Dick and of the difficulties he had in acquiring symbols and attaining thought.⁶¹

Does Orestes’ drama serve to introduce Klein’s reflection on the birth of symbols and her tribute to symbols? Or does this mythological detour explain that the symbol is the murderer of the mother? Or, in the end, is Klein implying that the symbol is the most effective murderer of the mother? It is clear that any such murder, as depicted and encouraged by the psychoanalyst, is but an imaginary one: the point is not to kill one’s mother, nor is it to kill anyone else, at least not in reality: “No reality situation can fulfil the often contradictory urges and wishes of the child’s fantasy life.”⁶²

Crimes and other aggressive actings out are merely failures of the symbol; they represent a failure of the imaginary matricide that, by itself, paves the way to thought. On the other hand, the creation of thought, and then the exercise of the sovereign freedom that has the potential to give birth to a work of genius, reflect a successful matricidal fantasy.

The antihero Orestes, an adherent of matricide if there ever was, displayed a devotion to deicide that was just as unrivaled. Unlike Oedipus, a man of desire and repression and an accomplice to the gods, Orestes was an avatar of Jupiter. Oedipus, a creator and a destroyer of enigmas, embodies the profile of the believer. To believe in the father, in the gods, or in knowledge: the differences among them are not as dramatic as some have claimed, for all manifestations of belief absorb both the desire to experience pleasure and the desire to die. Orestes, for his part, is the antison and the antihero … precisely because he is antinature. Klein rightfully explains that killing the mother-nature is tantamount to rising up against God: murdering the mother results in guilt, she wrote while reflecting on the depressive position, which itself creates remorse. Here, however, the analyst goes a step further and deduces that the mother, who is feared because she inflicts punishment, is the “prototype of God.”⁶³

Such an interpretation is not far removed from Sartre’s own reading of The Oresteia, a reading that informs his play The Flies: there, the son who murders his mother is radically deicidal.⁶⁴ Yet if Klein is promoting her nonbelief here—just as the mother of Fritz/Erich was said to be an “atheist”⁶⁵—she is also making it clear that her version of matricide bears not a hint of nihilism. To rid oneself of the mother becomes the sine qua non for accessing the symbol.

Indeed, it is when this access to symbolization is lacking that the dark side of Orestes emerges: where we find that side is also where the failure of Oedipus—of his desires and his repression—shall be. The subject returns to splitting and to the destruction of the soul in which psychosis hinders the psychodrama of the neuroses and breaks the psychic realm into bits. Isn’t it true that Klein’s patients who displayed traces of The Oresteia are the precursors of today’s gratuitous killers, of the mindless robots without a soul, and of A Clockwork Orange? Today, some of these fragmented personalities find refuge in art exhibits and other schizoid manifestations whose minimalist obscenities are welcomed by publishing houses claiming to be “avant-garde.” Psychoanalysts, for their part, sense the failure of Orestes as well as of symbolization in the new maladies of the soul that take refuge in the merchants and other players who populate our new megalopolises.

And yet Orestes also displays a more reasonable side. The philosophical agenda that accompanies Klein’s genius strives to rehabilitate those features in order to discover within them the ultimate preconditions for thought—that is, within the very space that harbors the advent of psychic space and intelligence but that also accumulates the dangers of its suffocation. When the gods are tired or otherwise compromised, all we can do is to reflect upon these fertile sources—to care for them, preserve them, and foster them.

Alongside these acerbic interpretations, Klein’s ode to matricide is a plea to preserve our symbolic capacity. The mother of psychoanalysis considered symbolism, the exclusive domain of humans, to be an uncertain miracle that is always already threatened and whose fate clearly depends on the mother, though only as long as “I” can get beyond her. The gist of what Melanie-Libussa’s daughter is saying here is that, although the mother is omnipotent, we can—and we must—make do without her and that we are all the better for it. That is the message—a symbolic one it turns out—of the Kleinian “crime.”

We can thus understand why some feminists have praised Klein for being the modern creator of the myth of the mother-goddess, while others hold her in contempt for the very same reason: isn’t it intolerable to envy one’s own mother? Still others reject Klein because they believe she encourages matricide.

Perhaps the only people who truly understand Klein are the female authors of detective stories, though they neither read her nor need to read her: such authors share her unconscious knowledge that when “I” talk about murder, it is not because “I hold a grudge” against men who carry the phallus or because “I” wish to extricate myself from them—at least those are not the only reasons. Instead, it is because, whether daughter and mother (or daughter or mother), “I” know the sort of envy of which “I” must rid myself—the overwhelmingly sadistic desire to work through, lose, and in a sense kill—so that I might acquire a baseline freedom to think. The detective story seems true to the extent that it surpasses the sort of popular literature that recounts the lowbrow dramas and rather vapid charms of an eventually transgressed repression. Such queens of pulp fiction dive into a catastrophic psyche that is no longer a soul worthy of that name. Acts of splitting and dismembering (as Klein understands them), reversals, acts of envy and ingratitude, and incarnated phantoms that recall the concrete objects and tyrannical superego of Mother Melanie all haunt these spaces, which are exposed and then explored and exhibited with the sweetness of a relatively serene mourning process. The queens of pulp fiction—and we should emphasize the feminine nature of this vernacular expression, as if it were self-evident or commonplace—are depressed women who have reconciled themselves with being put to death, who remember that in the beginning was an envious sadism, and who never stop curing themselves from the sadism they describe.

I imagine that these women display the quiet violence of the elderly Mrs. Klein, who herself might have written pulp fiction had she been given the opportunity to possess a mother tongue and if she had not become a primary detective—also known as a psychoanalyst. And an analyst she was, in any event, and without a doubt, even when she appeared to forget that enigmas still remain and when she rushed to apply a ready-made body of knowledge that she had developed in her earlier investigations. Still, even when she pushed the templates of her systems too far, she laid anxiety bare—and, as with Richard—she did so with a perfect aim and a magic touch in order to trace more effectively the labyrinth of thought.