Melanie Klein

In light of the early emergence of the ego and the superego, as well as the Oedipus conflict and incarnate fantasies, we now view the infant’s psychic universe, as Klein conceived it, as being consumed from the start with a sort of primary symbolization, however rudimentary it may be. As much a generator of social bonds as it is defensive and inhibiting, such symbolization is destined to be modified before it reaches the level of what we call, in the strict sense of the word, a thought. In some people, that level is reached only with the help of psychoanalysis. Using some of Freud’s essays as a starting point, Klein revived the notion of a rudimentary presence of a symbolization of the drives, so much so that she appears to have broken ranks with the founder, even though neither she nor her disciples ever stopped mentioning their link to the legacy left by that master. Such loyalty-combined-with-innovation, a constant in Melanie Klein’s work, appears most prominently (often implicitly more than explicitly) with respect to symbolism and its stages, a concept that the Kleinians would later attempt to flesh out.

Dick was a four-year-old boy who was, in casual parlance, “slow.” He could barely speak, seemed indifferent to the presence or absence of his mother and nurse, displayed no emotion when he hurt himself, had great difficulty manipulating knives and scissors, and had the intelligence level of a fifteen- to eighteen-month-old child (to the extent that one can have faith in such evaluations). The analyst described what both she and Dick’s mother considered to be his “strong negative attitude,”¹ as “negativistic behaviour alternating with signs of automatic obedience.”² Unlike the sort of neurotic child who is somewhat inhibited in his play but who is nevertheless capable of symbolizing relationships with objects (a child, say, like Fritz³), Dick displayed no affective relationship with the objects around him; he “called out” to no one, and his relations to his surroundings “were not coloured by phantasy.”⁴ The analyst diagnosed him as having schizophrenia (which she argued was more common in children than was typically believed), based on his display of “an inhibition in development” rather than “regression.”⁵ Contemporary clinicians would most likely see autistic features here, but, as Klein pointed out, her goal was not to commit herself “on the subject of diagnosis.”⁶ Most important for our purposes, in fact, is to follow the intensity of Klein’s observations: the conclusions she draws about Dick’s mental state and development, but also the more basic notions about the genesis of symbolism that she derives from this case.

Klein, who as we know was a student and analysand of Ferenczi’s, adopted Ferenczi’s view that at the heart of symbolism is identification, which is essentially the young child’s effort to discover, within every external object, his own organs and their function. Ernest Jones had posited that the pleasure principle is what enables such identification to occur, an identification that is itself a precursor to symbolism. The similarity between the identified inside and outside is founded upon the similar pleasure that both of them generate. Klein distanced herself from Jones’s view, however, as she claimed that it is not pleasure but anxiety that helps unleash the identification mechanism:

Since the child desires to destroy the organs (penis, vagina, breasts) which stand for the objects, he conceives a dread of the latter. This anxiety contributes to make him equate the organs in question with other things; owing to this equation, these in their turn become objects of anxiety, and so he is impelled constantly to make other and new equations, which form the basis of his interest in the new objects and of symbolism.⁷

We should keep in mind the term equation—Hanna Segal subsequently differentiated between the old ones and the new ones by granting them a specific role in the two-stage symbolization process that she elucidated.⁸

In the primal and prominent sadism displayed by certain subjects (such as Dick), then, one can detect rudiments of symbolism that are ineffable and that can impede those subjects’ access to the activity of the imaginary. Dick, for example, “had almost no interests [and] did not play.”⁹ Only the analyst could sense the rudiments of his sadistic fantasies—as we have seen, Winnicott spoke of “primitive retaliation” and Bion “nameless dreads.” Melanie’s approach was more biblical: she believed that states of battle and retributive justice dominate the universe of primary violence imposed by the death drive, even more ruthlessly so when that drive is excessive. A skeptical reader cannot help but wonder if Klein is mistaken here or if she was perhaps simply dreaming of herself. Or was it Dick who confirmed her hypotheses? And if so, what is the meaning of such a “confirmation?”

Melanie Klein’s second conclusion invites only more questions: “The sadistic phantasies directed against the inside of [the mother’s] body constitute the first and basic relation to the outside world and to reality.”¹⁰ In other words, if these fantasies are successfully manifested in language and play, they will create a fantasy-like reality with the external world, an “unreal reality” that “gradually” prepares for “a true relation to reality.”¹¹

In Klein’s view, then, it is possible to distinguish between two degrees of symbolism, as reflected in her analysis of Dick. First, a primary symbolism of the drives that is rudimentary but that already obeys the logic of “equations” is borne out by Klein’s 1946 conception of the mechanism of projective identification.¹² Second, a symbolism of the named fantasy uses the verbalization furnished by a third party (the analyst) as a way to establish an early means of negating anxiety (its Verneinung, its retrenchment, and the beginning of its repression) as well as a concomitant construction of a “true relation to reality” that replaces the “unreal reality” that the child had thus far found to be overwhelming. In 1934 Klein will link this logical thought process, which she laid out in painstaking detail, to her discussion of the depressive position, in particular to the way that position turns “equations” into the “symbol proper.”¹³

What led Klein to begin drawing these conclusions in 1930? Dick resisted play and was indifferent to his surroundings. She concluded that it was important to change technique and first to overcome “this, the fundamental obstacle to establishing contact with him.”¹⁴ Relying heavily on her earlier work, particularly with Fritz, Melanie insinuated herself as if she were he: she decided to “graft,” as Lacan put it,¹⁵ Dick’s presumed but silent fantasy onto the boy by formulating it herself:

I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them “Daddy-train” and “Dick-train.” Thereupon he picked up the train I called “Dick” and made it roll to the window and said “Station.” I explained: “The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.” He left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shut himself in, saying “dark” and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him: “It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.” Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: “Nurse?”¹⁶

During the third session, Dick started looking at objects with some interest. The analyst detected an aggressive posture and offered him some scissors, but he was unable to use them. Melanie then tore off some pieces of wood attached to the car, “acting on a glance which he gave me,” at which point Dick threw the destroyed car aside and said, “Gone.” Klein remarks, “I told him that this meant that Dick was cutting faeces out of his mother.”¹⁷

With extraordinary clinical insight, Klein associated the privative or negative sense of being “gone” with anal eroticism and the destruction of imagined fetuses inside the mother’s body as being identical with excrements. The child emerged from his hiding place and immediately displayed a burgeoning curiosity for other toys, for the bathroom, and so forth. Everything is eternally linked, and equations multiply into other equations. Not until Klein’s loyal disciple Hanna Segal did someone sort this whole mess out …

In view of Dick’s apathy, Klein hypothesized that he understood language even though he did not express himself. Accordingly, she decided to assume the role of the speaking subject, which implies that she believed Dick possessed two forms of linguistic competence: both a passive familiarity with language and a fantasy-like presymbolism, that is, an infralinguistic capacity to fantasize that accorded with the fantasies communicated by Melanie’s speech. What Klein presumed to be preverbal fantasies were hardly innocent ones: they were oedipal fantasies (the same ones she observed in neurotic children who played and spoke, fantasies in conformance with Freud’s paradigm), but in Dick’s case, they were intensified with a violent sadism.

Based on what she knew about her young patient, Melanie offered the hypothesis (which will be later deemed a function of countertransference) that the mother’s body incited enormous fear in Dick because he desired to attack it to empty it of the father’s feces and from the feces that represented other children. In Dick, Klein believed, oral sadism (to which was linked urethral, muscular, and anal sadism) had become intensely exaggerated and had been replaced early on by genitality. This sadistic-and-genital joining with the maternal object (Dick had troubles nursing and suffered from early digestive problems, rectal prolapse, and hemorrhoids, and he had trouble learning to control his bowel movements) was aggravated by his mother’s depression and, more generally, by the lack of love in his family, which was compensated for only in part by the affection his nurse showed him. Yet once she discovered that the child masturbated, she reprimanded him and made him feel guilty. Klein interpreted that guilt as an inhibition of sadism: Dick was incapable of expressing any sort of aggression and even refused to chew his food. “Dick’s further development had come to grief because he could not bring into phantasy the sadistic relation to the mother’s body.”¹⁸

Melanie’s ear picked up on the fact that Dick’s oral desire for the penis had emerged early on as a major source of his anxiety:

We came to see this phantasied penis and a growing feeling of aggression against it in many forms, the desire to eat and destroy it being specially prominent. For example, on one occasion Dick lifted a little toy man to his mouth, gnashed his teeth and said “Tea daddy,” by which he meant “Eat daddy.”¹⁹ He then asked for a drink of water. The introjection of the father’s penis proved to be associated with the dread both of it, as of a primitive, harm-inflicting super-ego, and of being punished by the mother thus robbed: dread, that is, of the external and the introjected objects. And at this point there came into prominence the fact which I have already mentioned, and which was a determining factor in his development, namely, that the genital phase had become active in Dick prematurely. This was shown in the circumstance that such representations as I have just spoken of were followed not by anxiety only, but by remorse, pity and a feeling that he must make restitution…. Side by side with his incapacity for tolerating anxiety, this premature empathy became a decisive factor in his warding-off of all destructive impulses. Dick cut himself off from reality and brought his phantasy-life to a standstill by taking refuge in the phantasies of the dark, empty mother’s body.²⁰

Melanie Klein first attested to the child’s desire for his father by seeing it as a combination of the young boy’s feminine position as he assimilated the man’s sexual organ with his mouth, on the one hand, and his oedipal desire to kill the rival who was his father, on the other. From that she concluded that Dick had reduced his mother to the space “between the doors” where it is “dark.”²¹ As she put it,

He had thus succeeded in withdrawing his attention also from the different objects in the outside world which represented the contents of the mother’s body—the father’s penis, faeces, children. His own penis, as the organ of sadism, and his own excreta were to be got rid of (or denied) as being dangerous and aggressive.²²

The analyst formulated, in the first instance for herself, the fantasy of this cannibalistic aggression toward the-mother-and-the-father and restored it for the child through the verbal and playful mechanisms that she thought he was able to engage in. What she did was to make Dick understand that the darkness between the doors was not his mother, but merely resembled her—that it was a “signifier,” as Dr. Lacan would later put it. In response, Dick began to acquire the capacity to signify and began to experience a world of similarities and signifiance and not of identities—a world of games and speech:

It had been possible for me, in Dick’s analysis, to gain access to his unconscious by getting into contact with such rudiments of phantasy-life and symbol-formation as he displayed. The result was a diminution of his latent anxiety, so that it was possible for a certain amount of anxiety to become manifest.²³

So are these sadistic “rudiments of phantasy-life”²⁴ present, but just not expressed as fantasies? Melanie expressed them herself: the trains are daddy and Dick, the station is none other than a mummy to be penetrated, to wreck the car is to destroy mummy by removing dirty objects from her tummy—she recites the very pages from the psychoanalytic bible that credits Freud and Klein hereself for such opinions. Yet it is clearly these verbalizations, and nothing else, that freed Dick from his hiding place (from the “between two doors” that Melanie did not refrain from interpreting as a “black tummy”). And so Dick began to call out for other people (the nurse, to start with); he looked for toys; and he washed himself in the bathroom, which continued to be his mummy’s body as well as his own. The world began to exist, as if it were created by the series of equations that arose out of the exchange between therapist and child. Dick could finally glean something out of the experience: the unnameable real had become a comforting imaginary. And this had occurred with the help of the analyst’s speech. But would just anyone’s speech have sufficed?

Certainly not. To begin with, there has to be a third party—in the sense of a different person, a stranger to the osmotic dyad—which is itself too self-contained or “empathetic” (as Klein puts it)—that the child had thus far engaged in with a disappointed or depressed mother. Neither the nurse nor the father nor any other person could have offered such words.

But that alone was not enough. This maximal alterity of the “subject-presumed-to-know”—the analyst—is realized through a speech that has a very specific content: a speech that tells and retells an oedipal myth with unusually aggressive connotations and that describes an oedipal sadism that targets “daddy in mummy’s body.” Dick desired to eat daddy in mummy by way of an Oedipus conflict that coveted the father’s penis itself, especially as it was the noble “signifier” of the “Name-of-the-Father.” That is what Klein was talking about with her “brute instinct.” Still, the violence of the analyst’s speech, which unknowingly took refuge in the signifier (though not to the point of ignoring the cannibalistic drive), is what unleashed Dick’s oral and genital sadism: it was denied for what it was, but in the end it turned into psychic curiosity and thought.

One could always assume²⁵ that any sort of discourse would have sufficed because discourse, regardless of its form, uses the peaks and valleys of the signifier (with the alteration between presence and absence driving the very motor of the sign) to orchestrate the banging of the two doors between which the child was hiding. That would be an eminently unwise proposition, however, because what Melanie heard was not a random signifier, let alone an empty one, but the oedipal sexualization and the intense burden of the cannibalistic death drive: “Eat daddy” interchanged with “Tea daddy.” By acknowledging these phenomena in transference and by grafting them onto Dick’s play, the analyst got the child to acknowledge his anxiety and to represent it in the open space of transference itself, which is nothing less than the space of this particular interpretive speech.²⁶

Dick was thus freed from his morbid oedipal anxiety because it was exposed to him by the Other. He became able to represent it to himself, even to hallucinate it, though not in the sense of a hallucination of gratification (which is the original Freudian connotation of the word hallucination) but a hallucination—a fantasy, it turns out—of frustration. “I cannot penetrate mummy and kill daddy inside her; that makes me frustrated; it’s a game; it’s just a game with Mrs. Klein; I play, therefore I think, therefore I am”—such would be the trajectory of the Kleinian syllogism as manifested in the link between play and interpretation.

The verbal recognition of oedipal anxiety introduced “difference” into the psychic apparatus. A breach of sorts shattered the osmosis that froze the child’s fearful fascination with his mother. The verbalization of anxiety-on-top-of-pleasure is what sanctioned the ever-threatened state of entropy between mother and child. Interpretation created a gap in the lack of differentiation that accompanies the early identification based on pleasure and displeasure, an identification that existed between the mother and the child. As a result, the child could avoid the risk of a disintegrated ego and organism. The analyst’s speech was a scansion that punctuated the ineffable hallucinatory continuity that had engulfed Dick.

To speak, as Klein does, about what Dick hallucinated he had done with daddy-mummy is not the same as to make it into a fantasy awaiting an audience. Solitary and unnameable, this silent fantasy gave the child a crippling sense of gratification. The analyst’s words soothed her young patient’s anxiety and aggression by offering him a chance to distance himself from them through speech and play. What the Other said endeavored to remove the dyads good/evil and identification/projection that underlay the ineffable fantasy—the rudiments of symbolization—of his “unreal reality” removed from the world. In its place, the fantasy was granted the status of a veritable psychic experience. It is true that the experience became a psychic one in the sense that it could be communicated between two complete and separated persons, between two subjects (Dick and Mrs. Klein) who acted outside the scene of the fantasy itself, although they were capable (and because they were capable) of transmitting the scene between them. That is what enabled Dick to enjoy a certain autonomy—and it is what instilled in him an “authentic reality” that carved out a space for the imaginary life of play. Before Dick’s analysis, these transpositions were inhibited by equations: he could not enjoy them and did not express his fantasies. After Dick’s analysis, the transpositions finally emerged because they were influenced by the symbols in the analyst’s speech that also provided a place for the child. These identities were transformed into similarities, and they developed into a playful curiosity—and in the end an intellectual curiosity—about reality.

By intervening in two ways—through the speech of a third party and through the recognition of sadistic oedipal anxiety—interpretation soft-pedaled the defenses and splitting that to that point had formed the basis of the child’s psyche. As verbalization came to acknowledge destructive drives, the inhibiting defenses that Dick had formed against those drives became neither as strong nor as necessary. Beforehand, the child had structured himself not on a model of repression but on a model of splitting. This dual recognition of his aggressive Oedipus conflict and of the way his analysis verbalized that conflict modified the status of his fantasies. Put another way, the degree of symbolization that Dick attained afforded him a position as a subject of desire with respect to Mrs. Klein, who gradually replaced the static ego in its paranoid-schizoid passion for mummy.

Klein’s accompaniment of Dick here, it would seem, participated in a trajectory of negativity, a notion that appears on two occasions in the analyst’s case study when she refers to Dick’s destructiveness, though she uses the term negativity in a more general sense here than do others and from an empirical rather than a theoretical perspective within the context of her own interventions aimed at driving out her patient’s destructive negativity. Klein’s goal, in fact, was to uncover Dick’s negativism and, by reinforcing it with speech, to raise it to a higher level in which it denies its own status as negativism and transforms itself into a form of self-knowledge. This analysis led to a true evolution in the potential for thinking as well as a chance for a spiraling negativity to reverse itself into a positive form. Because of the destruction endemic to the rudiments of fantasy, negativity infiltrates the space of play (what Winnicott would later refer to as the “transitional space”) made of fantasies that are verbalized by the analyst, that are seen as such by the patient, and that have the same effect as a removal of inhibitions that releases a form of playful, cognitive creativity.

A number of contributions by Klein’s friends and disciples develop—more theoretically than did her own clinical genius—the logical components of the “work of the negative”²⁷ that the psychoanalyst had nevertheless pointed out and encouraged in her analysis of Dick in particular. Should we say that it was the work of the negative—that is, the work of the symbolization process—that enabled her to give birth through Dick? Because she made the child into a creator of symbols rather than a simple user of symbols?²⁸

These studies lavish attention on the various features of the negative as reflected in the young child. Klein’s disciples, as they returned to notions first advanced during the Great Controversial Discussions of 1941–1955, emphasized the manifestations of the death drive in the experience of the young ego: “the force of death,” “cruel suffering,” “opening the floodgates of aggressive anxiety,” “a desire for retaliation,” “hostility,” “a hatred that precedes love,” “ordeals,” “defenses against anxiety,” “primary narcissistic anxiety,” “a defiance of the object,” “despair,” and so forth. And yet, without being satisfied with these realist affirmations, these authors emphasized that this perceived negativity reflects a psychic reality that is intrinsically fantasy-like and thus “subjective,” and that this subjectivity is by necessity a subjectivity of the observed object (the child) as well as of the agent of observation (the analyst).²⁹

From that perspective—and this is the Kleinians’ second important contribution—the Kleinians tried to set forth a theoretical foundation for the stages of the creation of symbolism and judgment, beginning with the fantasy and proceeding through the constitution of reality and of our knowledge of reality. Two of Freud’s works, which received little attention at the time by the (Anna) Freudians themselves, provided a starting point for their own work: the section on “Fort” and “Da” in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) and “Negation” (1925).³⁰ To summarize, through a concerted effort by a group of female Kleinians—for at that point all of the most important theorists were women—we have learned about the successive stages involved in getting beyond the fantasies of projective identification and thus unveiling the symbol proper, which is “felt to represent the object,” as Hanna Segal put it.³¹

Susan Isaacs³² elaborated upon Klein’s thinking about the shift between the rudiments of symbolism and symbolism itself in the light of Freud’s commentary on “Fort” and “Da.” In rereading Freud, Isaacs painstakingly noted the degree to which the child identifies the presence or absence of the mother with the back-and-forth motion of the reel: the child plays this game by expressively uttering “o-o-o-o” (“Fort,” the German word for “gone”) followed by a jubilant “Da!” (the German for “There!”). After having mastered the game, the child manages to find a way to make himself disappear: he crouches down in front of the large mirror that reaches down to the floor until his own image disappears, which is followed by a “long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o.’”³³ Isaacs concludes that the emergence of language is preceded, though not in a linear way, by a generic continuity in which the mastery of the presence or absence of the object, which culminates in the mastery of the appearance or disappearance of the baby’s own image, is a sine qua non for understanding language—which itself develops well before the active use of language.³⁴ Her conclusion serves as a good introduction to what will become Lacan’s “mirror stage,” but here it is portrayed as a process of a heterogeneous negativity consisting of movements, fantasized acts, and verbalization, and only then of scopic images.

In her commentary on Freud’s “Negation” (1925),³⁵ Susan Isaacs develops in more detail the way the symbolic capacity is moored in an early corporeal and fantasy-like experience. She notes the following about Freud’s essay:

Even the intellectual functions of judgement and reality-testing “are derived from the interplay of the primary instinctual impulses,” and rest upon the mechanism of introjection …: he also shows us the part played in this derivation by phantasy. Referring to that aspect of judgement which asserts or denies that a thing has a particular property, Freud says: “Expressed in the language of the oldest, that is, of the oral instinctual impulses, the alternative runs thus: ‘I should like to take this into me and keep that out of me.’ That is to say, it is to be either inside me or outside me.” The wish thus formulated is the same thing as a phantasy.³⁶

Isaacs goes on to conclude that, from the perspective of Klein and her disciples, what Freud called “picturesquely … ‘the language of the oral impulse’” or, in other contexts, “the ‘mental expression’ of an instinct”³⁷ is the fantasy in the sense of “the psychic representatives of a bodily aim.”³⁸ In Isaacs’s view (which she supports with references to various cases studies on children that I have previously mentioned), an early, ineffable symbolism is founded upon “oral impulses, bound up with taste, smell, touch (of the lips and mouth), kinaesthetic, visceral, and other somatic sensations” because those drives, more than any others, are associated from the beginning with the experience of sucking and swallowing, of “taking things in.”³⁹ As Isaacs puts it,

The visual elements are relatively small…. The visual element in perception slowly increases, becoming suffused with tactile experience and spatially differentiated. The early visual images remain largely “eidetic” in quality—probably up to three or four years of age …: intensely vivid, concrete and often confused with perceptions …: for long intimately associated with somatic responses.⁴⁰

Later in the developmental process, the visual begins to “predominate over the somatic,” and the bodily elements “largely undergo repression,” while the visual elements geared toward the outside world, themselves easily purged of sexuality and emotion, become an “image” in the strict sense of a representation “in the mind.” The ego “realize[s]” that external objects exist and that their images are in “the mind.”⁴¹

Paula Heimann,⁴² for her part, focused on the repetition compulsion as a privileged manifestation of the death drive that was less “mute” than Freud believed.⁴³ She thus highlighted the continuity and the difference between, on the one hand, the “hallucination”—a means of primary symbolization and a model of fantasy as well as a source of thought⁴⁴—and on the other hand, a thought in the strict sense of the word that is capable of perceiving reality once the ego extricates itself from the id.⁴⁵ After pointing out the similarities between the two processes (as evidenced by the genius of language that is reflected, for example, in the German word Wahrnehmen or in such words as comprehend and apprehend that describe an effect of perception), Heimann herself came back to Freud, who rooted judgment in “the rejection of stimuli.” Put another way, perception is not merely reception, for it already comprises a sort of judgment that “functions as a barrier” against stimuli.⁴⁶ That is what is reflected in the mechanism of Freud’s Verneinung: the patient can name sexual stimulation or confess to it only if he denies it (On: “You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not his mother.” We emend this to: “So it is his mother.”⁴⁷). The analyst, however, detects a more somatic and primary negativity in the language of taste itself. In that vein, Paula Heimann cites, as does Susan Isaacs,⁴⁸ the same passage of Freud’s “Negation.”

One can only admire the efforts on the part of Klein’s compatriots to root her originality in Freud’s work by developing a legitimate theory of thought that arises out of Freud’s founding texts. The originality of their own work is quite striking, and we can better appreciate both its boldness and its limitations by comparing it with Lacan’s own analyses ten years later.⁴⁹

The Kleinians’ focus was on the experience of the drives underlying vision: on the Ausstossung or Verwerfung, to use Freud’s words, that precedes the scopic hold and that prefigures the Bejahung of judgment that takes place before the gaze and immediately through taste.⁵⁰ From the beginning Klein’s disciples drew attention to two asymmetrical (as Jean Hyppolite would say) stages of symbolization: the fantasy anchored in the drive, and then the judgment of existence focused on reality. At the same time, the Kleinians did not set forth the conditions for true symbolicity (although Hanna Segal took a step down that road in her 1957 article), nor did they examine philosophically the character and the preexistence of the symbolic function in human beings. It was clearly in the wake of Developments of Psychoanalysis, which was published in 1952, and in a spirit of sneaking up on the “proponents of the new psychoanalysis,”⁵¹ that Jacques Lacan and Jean Hyppolite attempted in 1954 to fill in the Kleinians’ gaps through a display of remarkable intellectual bravado that brought philosophy into the analytic field. They did so, however, by setting aside the domain of primary symbolization, which they considered to be “mythical,” and by questioning the omnipresence of the early Oedipus conflict so they could reformulate Freud’s Oedipus complex through their newfound theory of the Name of-the-Father.

Hyppolite, the Hegelian, appears closer to the Kleinians in that he detected an “asymmetry”⁵² in Freud between the concrete attitude of negation (Verwerfung and Ausstossung, which are prominent in the negativism of psychosis) and the symbol of negation. Hyppolite explains how, for Freud, the intellectual realm is dissociated from the affective one, although the affective realm is only “mythical”⁵³ because human beings are inscribed from the beginning in a “fundamental historicity.”⁵⁴ Thinking emerges long before that point, in primary symbolization, but it does not appear there as such. An asymmetry is also present in the inner workings of a judgment of attribution (“this is good or bad”) and a judgment of existence (“this exists in reality outside the scope of my representation,” which reflects the distinction between representation and perception and between hallucination and reality). The judgment of existence presumes that “I” rediscover in “my” memory (and thus that “I” attribute myself to “me”—who thus becomes a “subject”) a representation that belongs to an object and that de-sign-ates an absent object for the subject that “I” have become. Put another way, the judging subject cannot exist without a lost object: by relying on memory, “I” can signify the object only as it is—lost for the “ego” who, as a result of losing the object, is held out as a “subject.” The interaction between the judgment of existence and the judgment of attribution forms the basis of intelligence, in the sense of a symbolic thought that is distinct from the imaginary or from the fantasy.

Thought always emerges under the aegis of the Verneinung that negates primary negation. A “negation of the negation”⁵⁵ is thus the essence of such thought, which is distinct from the hallucination, though it arises out of its foundations: it is a “dialectical” negation. Verneinung “might be the very origin of intelligence,”⁵⁶ but the realm of the intellect reflects a different sort of negativity: a “suspension” of the content of what has been repressed “for which the term sublimation is not inappropriate.”⁵⁷ What Hyppolite is proposing here is a reading of Freud that accords with the Kleinians’ views on the birth of the symbol proper. Hyppolite posits that affirmation through judgment is the equivalent of Verneinung (affirmation is its “Ersatz”⁵⁸), whereas negation through judgment is the successor (Nachfloge) to the drive to destroy (Destruktionstrieb). Two mechanisms are at work here—“equivalent” and “successor,” though the latter is better defined as a “suspension”: “instead of being under the domination of the instincts of attraction and repulsion,” the repressed content is “taken up and used again in a sort of suspension,”⁵⁹ which generates “a margin of thought … an appearance of being in the form of non-being.”⁶⁰

Lacan’s reading, which has Heideggerean undertones, is uninterested in such degrees of symbolization. Instead, Lacan suggests more generally that “the primordial condition for something to emerge from the real and to present itself to the revelation of being”⁶¹ is realized through Verneinung. Alongside this philosophical perspective, and in a more psychoanalytic vein, Lacan emphasizes anal ejection—which is a medium of externality and of the formation of an object from the outside—and offers the archetypal example of the Wolf Man (along with his female identification through the passive investment of anality). Lacan revives the oral domain so dear to the Kleinians, most curiously, through the case of the Brain Man. Lacan borrows this other clinical case from the analyst Ernst Kris. The patient, a plagiarizer, felt compelled to eat brains. During his first analysis, he was the analysand of none other than Melitta Schmideberg, Melanie Klein’s own daughter!⁶²

Lacan’s epistemological lucidity, which sets forth his views on the role of the symbolic in constructing the subject, emphasizes language and verbalization. Not only is it speech that, particularly in psychoanalysis, structures the subject and reconstructs his perceptual memory (whose archaic nature is manifested in the hallucination in which it loses the very capacity to speak, the “disposition of the signifier”), but in the concrete form of the psychoanalytic cure, everything that lays claim to a first perception can have only a mythic character.⁶³ By choosing as its focus the symbol, without which nothing ek-sists, and by remaining wary of the mythic-imaginary, this view nevertheless runs the risk of forgetting the outposts of symbolization that the Freudian text had wisely highlighted and that the Kleinian school explores by lending all its weight to the imaginary incarnate. The Kleinians did so by emphasizing their work with the patient’s imaginary—but they also emphasized their work with the analyst’s imaginary and thus created the first clinical approach to transference that is inseparable from countertransference.

All the same, many analysts, both Kleinians and others, continue to confuse the domains of the knowable imaginary and of knowable reality. The Lacanian line of thinking, which distinguishes between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic precisely so they can be joined together, thus represents a considerable step forward. Before Lacan, however, the Controversial Discussions had already contributed a great deal, albeit from a more empirical or clinical perspective, toward clarifying the distinction between the use of the imaginary in the cure, on the one hand, and the consideration of an objective and knowable reality, on the other.

The effect of the analyst’s fantasy on the formation of the analytic object (whether it be the patient’s associative discourse or, even more powerfully, the archaic, unnamed, and presumed fantasy), has come to be called countertransference, as we know. Klein herself appears to have had some qualms about this notion,⁶⁴ but it is not the least of her school’s accomplishments to have drawn attention to the dynamics of countertransference all the same. Credit for this is due to Paula Heimann’s work during the Controversial Discussions of 1941–1945. During a highly scholarly debate that culminated in some crucial epistemological arguments, Marjorie Brierley criticized Heimann on the following grounds:

If we persist in equating mental functions with our subjective interpretations of them, we forfeit our claim to be scientists and revert to the primitive state of the Chinese peasant who interprets an eclipse as the sun being swallowed by a dragon.⁶⁵

In response to Dr. Brierley, Heimann courageously offered a different rationale for psychoanalysis, one that was not so far removed from the position advanced by the Chinese peasant: “What we are studying is not the solar system, but the mind of the Chinese peasant, not the eclipse but the belief of the peasant concerning the eclipse.”⁶⁶

In 1950, and in a later work as well,⁶⁷ the same Paula Heimann endeavored not only to justify the advent of countertransference and its interpretation for the patient as being indispensable to the analytic cure but to consider such countertransference to be a symptom of intuition and empathy as well.⁶⁸ The analyst was consumed with patients’ projections before she recognized her patients’ projective identification. But she also recognized her own identification—precisely in order to get beyond it. In truth, it is by enacting her own unconscious reserves that the analyst can rid herself of a mode of listening that stems from the superego or simply from the conscious and thus adopt the celebrated and yet enigmatic “benevolent listening,” which operates from a distance, of course, but which is rooted above all in identification, intuition, and empathy.⁶⁹

Finally, although Hanna Segal’s article entitled “Notes on Symbol Formation” does not reach the philosophical depth of the French debate, it contributes an essential ingredient to Klein’s theory of the symbol, as manifested brilliantly in the case study of Dick.

Under the weight of projective identification, as Segal points out, a part of the ego is identified with the object, such that the symbol and symbolism become one. Under these conditions, there is no symbol proper to speak of, but only a “symbolic equation”⁷⁰ (the rag is mummy; which is still not “the rag looks like mummy” or “the rag takes the place for me of the mummy whom I lost and who is no longer there”). Put another way, the internal object replaces the equivalent external object. This archaic logical process is also characteristic of the thought process of the schizophrenic who tries to deny the ideal object and to control the persecuting object. Still, the depressive position and the work of mourning allow us to experience the loss of object, and to form an internal psychic reality, as we have seen, as something separated from the lost object and different from it: the equation breaks down and signifiance emerges. Only then do we see the symbol, a product of a psyche that evokes a lost reality that for that reason alone is recognized as being truly real. The continuity of the sublimation-symbolization, fantasy-thought, and splitting-repression process is thus assured, as the process is focused on the potential for loss. From this new perspective, “symbolic equations” no longer appear to be simple regressions but, rather, play a role in a “genetic sequence” as primitive symbols, as a primary symbolization that is contemporaneous with the beginnings of life and that precedes the emergence of the signifier/signified/referent that structures the matrix of thought in the end.

The careful way in which the Kleinians and the post-Kleinians have traced the evolution of symbolism still leaves open the question of the role of the father, which Melanie always underestimated. This lack encourages and demands a more elaborate clinical and theoretical framework for this “true” symbolic function that follows the “equations.” Didn’t the Kleinians neglect the role of “primary identification” with the “father of personal prehistory” from the time of the earliest relations with the rudiments of objects? Doesn’t primary identification with the father play a role from the time of the “equations,” before the process of symbolization through the depressive position? Doesn’t the phallic ordeal of castration, manifested differently but inevitably for both sexes, impose its own indelible imprint on the reinforcement of this transition between identity and similarity, equations and symbols, and fantasy and thought? These questions must be left unanswered here; they invoke the most pressing problems of psychoanalytic study today.⁷¹

In the wake of Klein’s work and by focusing on the clinical approach to psychosis and autism, several of Klein’s disciples have developed a theory about the archaic states of symbolization. Some have considered these states to reflect the existence of a primitive or primal symbolism. As dangerous and philosophically foolhardy as such a notion may seem, the clinical research that supports it is quite reassuring. Following Hanna Segal, for example, W. R. Bion returned to the evolution of the symbolic capacity in the young child, but he worked his way back before the depressive position and described the primitive thought that marks the paranoid-schizoid phase: in his view, projective identification is the first form of “thinking.”⁷² He considers it to be a preverbal thought that is strictly private and that is made up of links among various sensory impressions, of “ideographs pertinent to the sense of vision,” “a primitive matrix of ideographs.” The ego and the object transform these sensory occurrences into “alpha elements”⁷³ that are rendered “suitable for employment in dream thoughts, unconscious waking thinking, dreams, contact-barrier, memory.”⁷⁴ The alpha elements are the same as the elements of preverbal thought that are attacked by a person’s psychotic part, the part that destroys the very capacity to “unite” by imposing splitting and fragmentation. This results in elements that are not linked together and that can be used only in projective identification—what Bion refers to as “beta elements”⁷⁵ or “the thing-in-itself to which the sense-impression corresponds.”⁷⁶ The beta elements are comparable to the “bizarre objects” that characterize psychotic fragmentation as well as hallucinatory images, a source of terror. The attacks are visited not only upon the object (as Klein believed), for they also target—and may even prefer—thought itself in the sense of a process of linking. As Bion revisits Klein’s conclusions about the shift from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position, he describes a transformation from disintegration to integration that is at the core of what he calls “learning from experience.” Bion believes that this transformation and the object enable the person to “feed on” sensory and emotional occurrences by “assimilating” them as if “digesting” them—with the result that “thinking” is nothing less than “linking.”

At the root of this linking activity is a hallucinatory experience or “emotional experience” that recalls the child’s encounter with the breast. We hear echoes of Klein’s theory here, even though Bion offers an original approach of his own. Bion presumes the existence of an innate preconception of the breast, a knowledge a priori of the breast that evokes Kant’s notion of a “knowledge wholly a priori.” This sort of a “thought as no thing”⁷⁷ that awaits being filled up by the breast is destined to be replaced by the non-realization of the breast. Put another way, the baby experiences the need for a real encounter to take place within the interaction between mother and baby as a negative—as frustration—in the context of the a priori of a breast that is already there. Freud posited an initial real gratification through the breast that was followed by a moment of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment. Bion, for his part, reversed this order by positing an already-there, a transcendental occurrence of the drives that was originally granted a preconception that is itself innate in the object: a “thing-in-itself.” The union between pre-conception and nonrealization generates “protothoughts”⁷⁸ that have the features of “beta elements”: to wit, a sort of alliance between the bad breast that is encountered in reality and the need for a breast experienced as a “thing-in-itself.” Only then comes the “realization of the breast,” or the real experience of the breast through the interactions between the baby and the mother.

From that point each baby finds his own way of combining his capacity for tolerating the frustration endemic to his thought and his real experience, satisfying or not, of his mother’s care. The ensuing level of his own envy and hate will be either excessive or tolerable accordingly.

Bion also presumes, as a modification to Klein’s notion of projective identification, that the child can project onto his mother what he does not like about himself. This primitive mode of “realistic”⁷⁹ communication is comparable to the experience created by the baby that enables him to exert a degree of control over the stimulation that originates from the outside world, whereas he remains defenseless against the internal stimulation from his drives. Bion believed that the youngest children experience “the mother’s capacity for reverie,”⁸⁰ which is capable—or incapable—of absorbing “beta elements” and of transforming them into “alpha elements,” thereby ensuing optimal conditions for the child to differentiate between a stimulation and its representation. That is what gives rise to the environment required for the emergence of an abstraction of the breast, of the idea of the breast, of the “representation of the breast as a ‘thing-in-itself,’” the true symbol of autoerotic gratification or secondary narcissism.

We can now appreciate the extent to which Bion enhances the notion of the omnipotent Kleinian phantasy, which has been often criticized for not being sufficiently attentive to the reality of the maternal environment, to the reality of the intervention—both conscious and unconscious—of the mother. The mother acting also as a lover, according to a notion advanced by French psychoanalysts,⁸¹ is capable of a reverie that is sufficiently receptive and sufficiently distant, perhaps even suppressive of the hold that the mother and the child have on each other, to facilitate the emergence and development of the child’s symbolism. The integration of the ego during the depressive position organizes the “alpha elements” into a “membrane” or a “contact barrier” that forms a basis for the distinction between conscious and unconscious. Symbolism operates as an antidepressant apparatus that inhabits the quantity of stimulation and facilitates the transformation of beta elements into alpha elements. A contained, which reflects impressions of the digestive system, is projected onto a container, which is the object that contains (at first, this object is simply the mother) and that is structured in the end as “an apparatus [that makes] it possible to think the already existing thought.”⁸² Created in the mother, this apparatus for thinking the thought facilitates the formation of an analogous apparatus in the child, such that it becomes possible for the baby and his Other to communicate psychic and existential occurrences (love, well-being, a sense of security, and so forth).

Although Bion’s notions reflect an oversimplified distinction between the affect and representation, and although they remain locked within a mystical conception of a psychic reality adorned with a hallucinatory receptivity and “the suspension of memory, desire, [and] understanding,”⁸³ his work has considerably enriched our understanding of psychosis.⁸⁴

Finally, the clinical practice of autism has modified or refined Klein’s theory in several important ways. It has been observed that autistic children are incapable of projective identification because they do not distinguish between outside and inside and do not appear to engage in a relation to the object. Is that an autoeroticism before the onset of the object relation?

Donald Meltzer offers a different perspective on the autistic child. For him, such children are exhibiting not defenses against anxiety but a true “onslaught of sensations” that results from both “inadequate equipment” (neurological deficiencies) and a “failure of dependence.” For these children, the breast is like a sheet of paper, what Klein calls an “object,” but it is two-dimensional and thus lacks the three-dimensional quality necessary for the “geography of the fantasy.” What Meltzer and his followers theorize is even more violent than Klein’s primitive splitting: an early segmentation of perceptual capacities within psychosis. Meanings are disparate and varied, the attention Bion wrote about is suspended, time does not flow, and, concomitantly, the self has the feeling of “breaking into pieces.”⁸⁵

Esther Bick, for her part, speaks of a binding identification: the child’s fear of losing his identity is so great that, in order to glean an identity for himself, he latches onto his mother. From that perspective, clinicians have explored the subject’s primary life that occurs well before projective identification, and have proposed a true phenomenology of the early bonds, which in this case take the form of a narcissistic identification centered on the psychic function of skin.⁸⁶

A group of psychoanalysts working in France has also received attention recently for their work on autism based on these post-Kleinian advances, some of the most prominent being Annie Anzieu, Cléopâtre Athanassiou, Bernard Golse, Geneviève Haag, and Didier Houzel.⁸⁷ A new continent of psychoanalysis has thus emerged in the wake of the Freudian discovery, one that could not have taken hold without Melanie Klein’s genius. Through the work of her followers, moreover, Klein’s innovations, which, it must be said, occasionally fell victim to dogmatism, offer an exceptional fecundity and diversity, and the clinicians specializing in autism and in infantile psychosis are able to link Klein’s initial forays into the subject with their own creative approach to listening to ill-being that they practice every day.

From that perspective, other clinicians, beginning with Frances Tustin, have conceptualized an autism that is endogenous, primary, or normal. This autism is a primitive state of undifferentiated autosensuality, a sort of “extra-uterine gestation” that is replaced by the narcissistic stage, which begins by presenting an idea of a self separated from the outside world. Tustin revives Freud’s notion of a narcissistic stage, but he develops it, in the wake of Klein, by closely analyzing the relationship between mother and baby that emerges in it, a relationship that is already based on objects and that is subjected to separation trauma. Some babies are unable to tolerate such separation; they experience it as a “projective explosion” of urine, gas, feces, saliva, and other substances that are linked to the absent nipple, which forces the infant to confront a terrifying world that is no more than a “black hole.” The mother is summoned to contain this explosion and to introduce discontinuity in order to move toward symbolization. If she fails to do so, the child can express himself only through increased use of “the sensations of his own body” to flush out emptiness and hostile black material. A veritable mourning of the “primordial sensation” becomes necessary, a primitive reflexivity of the body that is established by the mother or the therapist.

This new version of an autistic primary symbolism common to all subjects is manifested in “normal,” nonautistic psyches in the form of a tendency toward a quiet retreat from the world, an escape to the primary that challenges all forms of subjectivity without being truly narcissistic.⁸⁸ On the contrary, in fact, the introduction of the negative, once the child is able to formulate it, indicates that he has entered a three-dimensional world following his two-dimensional experience. In that sense, Tustin interprets Klein’s case study of Dick by emphasizing the point at which the young patient hurled a toy and said, “Gone.” Dick had recognized the loss of the object in the presence of a third party, introjected unpleasant affects, and introduced this ordeal into the internal psychic world of speech: the symbol and the psyche are constructed as a “third world” that soothes the child, precisely because it can be shared through language.⁸⁹

Finally, among the many extensions of Klein’s thought, we should keep in mind the contributions made by someone who ranked among Klein’s most loyal followers before he joined the “Independents.”⁹⁰ D. W. Winnicott, who was analyzed by Joan Riviere and James Strachey and who was the analyst of Eric Clyne, Melanie’s son, was able to ward off the strange desire on the part of this mother and this leader of a school to supervise Clyne’s treatment herself!⁹¹ Although Winnicott resisted the idea of a death drive and of innate envy, and although Melanie cooled to him as a result, he was able to retain a creative closeness with the Kleinian legacy and to outline one of the most daring variants of psychoanalytic thought. Winnicott’s sensitive clinical approach to the early years of childhood and to psychotic suffering earned him both a broad audience and renown beyond the specialized realm of psychoanalysis. In his effort to hone in on the relationship between mother and child and on the creation of the particular brand of symbolism that it generates (or hinders), Winnicott proposed calling that bond a “transitional state,” which he believed was at the root of all our creative potential. I will limit myself here to illustrating just a few key moments in the transitional by citing the language that he himself used during a series of lectures addressed toward students of social work:

In the day-to-day life of infancy we can watch the infant exploiting this third or illusory world which is neither inner reality nor external fact, and which we allow to the infant although we do not allow it to the adult or even to an older child. We see the infant sucking fingers or adopting a technique of twiddling the face or murmuring a sound or clutching a piece of cloth, and we know that the infant is claiming magical control over the world…. These terms imply that there is a temporary state belonging to early infancy in which the infant is allowed to claim magical control over external reality, a control which we know is made real by the mother’s adapting, but the infant does not yet know this…. Out of these transitional phenomena develop much of what we variously allow and greatly value under the headings of religion and art and also the little madnesses which are legitimate at the moment, according to the prevailing cultural pattern.⁹²

Is it a transitional object that the child created—or that he found in the mother? Is it both found and created?

I would put it this way. Some babies are fortunate enough to have a mother whose initial active adaptation to their infant’s need was good enough. This enables them to have the illusion of actually finding what was created (hallucinated). Eventually, after a capacity for relationships has been established, such babies can take the next step towards recognition of the essential aloneness of the human being. Eventually such a baby grows up to say “I know there is no direct contact between external reality and myself, only an illusion of contact, a midway phenomenon that works very well for me when I am not tired. I couldn’t care less that there is a philosophical problem involved.”⁹³

This disarming Winnicott was able, in the face of Melanie the warrior, to deftly absorb our most primary fantasies, and, by paying tribute to the baby in us, to stimulate our desires for freedom in religion, in the arts, or elsewhere. We are grateful for his conception of freedom that has Kleinian overtones but that is also original in its Protestant inspiration.

Because the liberation of my desire is preceded by its elaboration and sublimation, at the end of my analysis I find myself in a state of perpetual rebirth. In Winnicott’s view, birth presumes that the embryo has acquired a biological and physical life autonomy that is capable of extricating itself from the encroaching environment and of avoiding being traumatized by the violent act of birth. This fundamental independence is, in some ways, a precondition for the “inner psychic reality”⁹⁴ that Winnicott considered to be our most precious and mysterious freedom, inasmuch as we are beings, as opposed to actors or doers. Winnicott detected this interior in “the capacity to be alone,” a subject Klein took up in her own way,⁹⁵ as well as in the voting booths of democracies. He tried to revive the principle of freedom that characterizes the living elements in analytic treatment itself: analytic work uncovers the “false selves” that are constructed as defenses against invasion from the outside, and it rehabilitates our endemic interiority. Authentic inner life must nevertheless be perpetually re-created, for it is an endless process that only then makes us free.

In Winnicott’s writings, the adjective free is used as a synonym for an “inner life that must be perpetually re-created,” one that operates in tandem with an external life that must always be internalized. In Freud, the word free essentially signifies a resistance to the twin tyrants of external reality and the desires of the drives. After Klein and Winnicott, the term has come to mean something else: free means to internalize the outside, provided that this outside (the mother, to begin with) allows for play and allows itself to play.⁹⁶ In sum, at the end of an analysis that has been terminated but that remains infinite, and because we have revealed freedom at the cost of our desires, we find ourselves not only mortal but “full of birth,” to come back again to Hannah Arendt’s idea, in the sense that we are capable of creating a psychic inner life that is to be forever replenished.

Was the sensitive pediatrician too quick to dispose of philosophical questions? Even if he was, he tempered the violence of Klein’s work in order to propose a way of caring for children—and thus for the human beings that they become—that combines the wisdom of English empiricism and the bold innovations of Melanie Klein.

Klein, for her part, did not ignore the “transitional space” of creativity, for she did not confine herself to the primitive forms of sublimation that were endemic to the savage fantasies of her patients who were psychotic or inhibited children. She broadened her inquiry to include works of art that allowed her to flesh out the permanency of primitive logical processes, which she treated with the dignity of a contagious and cathartic creativity.

In 1929 Melanie Klein, still in Berlin, read a review in the Berliner Tageblatt of Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges, which had just been performed in Vienna. The German translation called it “The Magic Word” (Das Zauberwort), which is none other than “mummy.” Melanie painstakingly reviewed the story of the opera and saw within it—thanks to “the profound psychological insight of Colette,”⁹⁷ who wrote the libretto—the sadistic anxieties of a six-year-old boy. His anxieties inhibit him at first, but they become a source of generosity in the end.

At the beginning of the tale, the little boy is restless, does not want to do his homework, and becomes angry with his pestering and threatening mother. The maladjusted lad breaks dishes and objects, torments a squirrel and a cat, screams, plays with the fire in the fireplace, breaks a grandfather clock, pours ink on the table, and so forth. All of a sudden, the mistreated objects come alive and seek revenge. The child steps back, becomes consumed with despair, and hides in the garden—but there too he is pursued by terrifying insects, frogs, and other animals. He also comes across the wounded squirrel, and, without thinking about it, bandages the squirrel’s leg and mumbles, “Mama.” “He is restored to the human world,” our analyst observes before penetrating more deeply into the psychology of the neurotic young boy. “I refer to the attack on the mother’s body and on the father’s penis in it.”⁹⁸

Colette and Ravel thus illustrate the early sadism that precedes the anal phase, that is, at the very moment when the oedipal tendencies emerge! In ontogenetic development, these tendencies are followed by a genital phase that puts an end to sadism. At that point the child became capable of pity and love, as evidenced by his behavior toward the squirrel. In 1934, as we know, Klein would attribute such solicitude toward the “whole object” to the advent of the depressive position. In 1929 though, she limited herself to commenting on the insights offered by Colette, who observed that the young boy’s sadism was unleashed by oral frustration: didn’t the mother forbid the child from “[eating] up all the cakes in the world” and didn’t she threaten to feed him only “tea without sugar and dry bread”?⁹⁹

We are as far as we could be from Proust’s tea and savory madeleine. As we recall, our little Marcel experienced no frustration with the world of taste, for the kiss from his mother as he lay down to bed was the only thing that brought him a grievous memory of such frustration. Is that why Proust’s masterpiece never describes the future narrator’s sadism? Although our taster from Combray loves to denounce the nastiness of other people—the Baron de Charlus, Mme Verdurin, or the Guermantes—he shields himself from any suspicion of violence on his part. In Ravel’s work, on the other hand, a cannibalistic anxiety imbues desire, and Colette’s intuition presages the analyst’s insight as she portrays infantile logic and the sortilèges—or spells—of the unconscious.

At the same time, Klein sees the artistic creation as more than just a diagnostic tool. The work of art can also serve as an initial—and perhaps even an optimal—way of caring for other people. Is it more effective than interpretation? That question is implicit in another article that the analyst discusses in the same essay: Karin Michaelis’s “The Empty Space,” which recounts the story of Ruth Kjär. This wealthy and independent woman, a gifted interior designer, suffered from depression and complained that, “There is an empty space in me, which I can never fill!”¹⁰⁰ Her melancholia got much worse after she married. One day, Ruth’s brother-in-law removed and sold a beautiful object, one of the paintings that adorned her home, which left an empty space on her wall. This reification of emptiness only heightened her despair (we should note that the agent of her frustration was her husband’s brother, a painter). Following this incident, nothing seemed to be able to halt her ever worsening depression, until one day Ruth decided to replace the painting. Although she had never painted before, she created a magnificent picture. Her husband, and then her brother-in-law, expressed their awe and disbelief. To convince them as well as herself, she went on to paint a series of pictures—“masterly” ones!¹⁰¹ After her initial effort, she first painted a life-size portrait of a dark, nude woman, then her younger sister, and finally a portrait of an old woman and her mother. “The blank space has been filled.”¹⁰² The archaic frustration—which stemmed from her mother, which she relived in her marriage, and which was focalized in the loss of the painting—was “repaired” by a creativity that supplanted her depression.

Early on, then, Klein proposed the notion of a “reparation” that was concomitant with the loss of the object in the depressive position, a notion that she would elaborate upon in 1934: “The desire to make reparation, to make good the injury psychologically done to the mother and also to restore herself was at the bottom of the compelling urge to paint these portraits of her relatives.”¹⁰³

The sadistic desire to destroy the mother, which was at the unconscious foundation of Ruth Kjär’s melancholia and which was transformed into a feeling of frustration, was replaced by reparation. The work of art functions as an autoanalytic activity that absorbs guilt as well as the acknowledgement of guilt. As the work is created, anxiety is diminished, and the artist’s personal success increases the confidence of the depressed person whom he conceals through his capacity to love and restore the object as a good object. Accordingly, the creator deems unconscious hatred to be less frightening and threatening. In the end, the recapitulations of success integrate the repaired object with the ego, such that the melancholic man or woman no longer needs to exert an exhausting degree of control over the Other but accepts instead his or her object of desire of love as it is. From that perspective, the work of art provides a way to re-create the harmony of the inner world and to maintain tolerable relations with the outside, if not to experience love with other people (through marriage, in this case), despite the enduring conflicts that stem from the upheavals of childhood.

In line with her schematic approach that applies her theories to aesthetic objects in order to find “illustrations” of those theories, Klein also analyzes Julien Green’s novel If I Were You.¹⁰⁴ The subtitle of Klein’s study is entitled “A Novel Illustrating Projective Identification.” The hero, a young worker named Fabien Especel (or, playing around with the signifier, “espèce-elle”?), who is unhappy and unsatisfied, orphaned by a father who squandered the family’s money, makes a pact with the devil that allows him to be transformed into other people. Melanie Klein traces with great delight the complex maze of the “projective identification” through which Fabien successively becomes M. Poujars, Paul Esmenard, Fruges, Georges, and finally Camille. The frustration and aggression that he experiences during these transformations, which are tinged with a homosexuality that the analyst does not hesitate to detect underneath the masks, nearly disappear upon his discovery of a good maternal image—the baker—that revives for him the loving life of his early childhood.

It is as if Fabien takes on the identities of other men because he is unable to identify with his father. He loves them—temporarily—and is disappointed in each instance as he seeks to adopt a passive feminine position toward them.¹⁰⁵ The restoration of the archaic mother takes place through a fantasy: having entered a church filled with candlelight, he imagines the baker pregnant with all the children he made for her. Because of this positive vision, the hero reconciles himself with his “sinful” thoughts and overcomes the envy and greed that secretly consume him.¹⁰⁶ Is this a conception of Christianity as a reparation of the Virgin Mother who abates the incestuous fantasies of the son? From that point on Fabien renounces an ineffective solution to his anxieties that consists of a distraught flight into his projective identifications, which are as disappointing as they are exhausting because he tries to gather up his projected parts. In the analyst’s view the final scene of the novel depicts this tension and this impossible reunion very well: as Fabien lies in bed with a fever (wasn’t his pact with the devil a hallucination brought on by a fever?), Fabien-Camille moves toward the door of his home. But the reunion of his split-off parts never takes place.

In fact, the hero dies with the words “Our Father” on his lips, which suggests that he has reconciled with his own father. Still, his final double, Fabien-Camille, whom the sick boy believes he hears near the doorway in anticipation of giving him his identity back, is not really there. No one is there, in fact, as his mother points out. At the same time, a certain reunion has taken place: the reunion of a son dying after a coma with … his mother, who, he has finally recognized, loves him.

As a result of overcoming the fundamental psychotic anxieties of infancy, the intrinsic need for integration comes out in full force. He achieves integration concurrently with good object relations and thereby repairs what had gone wrong in his life.”¹⁰⁷

The reader of Klein is still hungry: the mechanism of reparation certainly does not exhaust the creative process, no more than do the themes of falsity and of perversion, sadomasochism, or profanation, which appear in Julien Green’s novel but which are not addressed by our psychoanalyst-turned-literary-critic. The naïveté of Klein the essayist is juxtaposed with the perseverance of Klein the theorist as she reveals the details of the logic behind what she has discovered on the couch: projective identification and its replacement by a reparation process that is wholly dependent on the experience of loss.

Still, what Green recounts is not the death of a mother (as the child’s sadistic fantasy would have it, in Klein’s view) but the death of the son. Is that the secret of the writer-son and homosexual, his version of the sacrifice that imbues the Kleinian template? His goal is to preserve his mother, to never lose her, and to let her live by making himself into a creator, though at the cost of a certain death of the self. Fabien’s death could also be considered an abandonment of sexual identity: neither man nor woman, man and woman, nothing, neuter, everything. And all of this occurs so that the writer-son might re-create all the identities, identify with them all, and project himself everywhere. And, in the path of the infinite reparation that describes the engagement in the imaginary, so he can try to settle his debt to a mother to whom reparation has thus been made, but even more so his debt to a hated father. It is an endless payment, an inconsolable payment, a payment to the death.

Klein’s text is replete with important questions, but it limits itself in a scholarly fashion to being an ambitious and cautious illustration of psychoanalytic theses, those that became the theses of her school.

Melanie sought to preserve her young patients’ capacity to sublimate-symbolize. When art and literature effect a dynamic that is comparable to the ordeals of psychic survival that she has described, she enjoyed holding those texts up to the mirror of her theory, which she polished herself while sitting in her analyst’s chair and listening to her analysands. Along the way, literature benefited from being in the spotlight, though it also jealously retained its enigmas. The analyst, for her part, solidified her concepts and reinforced her clinical practice by returning to the sundry details of the confessed and acknowledged fantasies that make up what is known as a cultural imaginary.

All the same, might we describe her critical approach as displaying a theoretical pretension that profanes the subtle flesh of the work of art? I am more inclined to detect some humility—no doubt in crude form but noble in the end—on the part of a woman who dared to shed some light on the world of artistic illusions. She did so without ever doubting that such illusions, like fantasies, are inevitable and necessary. In her own way, was Klein not a creator as well, with her own projective identifications with her patients and in her imaginary, fantasy-like, interpretations? “If I were you,” she thought as she interpreted. Was it Melanie or was it the final disguise, this time a successful one, of Fabien?

The version of psychoanalysis that Klein has bequeathed us is an experience of the imaginary that does not lay claim to beauty but that seeks to know itself without ever denying the imaginary proper.