Melanie Klein

By confronting archaic anxieties, which had received little attention before her, and by winning over the British therapists, Melanie Klein gained an international audience within the psychoanalytic movement. To her innovative thought and her talent were added an indefatigable tenacity and an unparalleled ability to guide her friends, to divide her adversaries, and to regulate envies and gratitudes—the signs of a powerful woman. Many people noticed these qualities after Klein arrived in England. Just after Ferenczi’s 1927 visit to London, for example, Ferenczi wrote Freud, as we recall, to denounce “the domineering influence which Frau Melanie Klein has on the whole group…. Apart from the scientific value of her work, I find it an influence directed at Vienna.”¹ Did Melanie “mesmerize” the British Society, as some have accused her of doing? Although Klein rose to the status of an “idealized object,” did she nevertheless help lower herself into its “denigrated opposite?”² From the beginning, both her adherents and her skeptics acknowledged what the former considered her innovations and the latter her doctrinal transgressions. The debate only intensified when Anna Freud began to publish her own writings, which evinced an approach to child analysis that directly conflicted with Melanie’s. The first skirmishes took place when the master’s daughter attempted to be published in England.

Anna Freud (1895–1982) was thirteen years Melanie’s junior. The last of Freud’s children and one of his own analysands, Anna did not graduate from the gymnasium although she was highly intelligent. She was placed under the guidance of Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth so she could learn child analysis, and she became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1922. After practicing child analysis for two years, she hurriedly published The Psycho-Analytic Treatment of Children.³ It was important for the daughter and the heir of the inventor of psychoanalysis, whose cancer was already known, to confirm her father’s authority. When Anna addressed the Berlin Society in 1927, she contended that the analysis of normal children could be hazardous, which conflicted with Melanie’s view that analysis should play an integral role in the education of all children. Anna’s work essentially argued that the analyst should adopt the role of the child’s ideal ego so that treatment could get under way. Of course, such a notion of the analyst as a mentor whose authority exceeds that of the parents themselves was poles apart from Klein’s own conception.

The British analysts—Barbara Low (whose support of Anna Freud never dwindled and who wrote a very positive review of Anna’s book), David Eder, Edward Glover, Joan Riviere, Ella Sharpe, and Klein herself—pored over the master’s daughter’s work. Though a diverse group, they unanimously agreed, according to a letter Jones wrote Freud in response to his expostulations, that it was ill advised for Anna to have been “so hasty as to publish her first lectures in such an uncompromising form and on such a slender basis of experience,” a decision that risked imposing a “check” on the development of early analysis.⁴ Until the end of her life, Anna remained bitter about this denunciation, particularly with respect to Jones, who proved at this point that he could hold his own with Freud.

The antagonism between the two women only deepened. These two intransigent personalities—Anna/Antigone and Melanie/Valkyrie—who came from different cultures, each defended her own notion of child analysis. Their differences soon became quite apparent, at which point Melanie summarized Anna Freud’s principles of child analysis, which she found unacceptable, as follows:

1. No analysis of the child’s Oedipus complex was possible, as it might interfere with the child’s relations with its parents;

2. Child analysis should exert only an educative influence on the child;

3. A transference neurosis cannot be effected because the parents still exert a predominant role in the child’s life; and

4. The analyst should exert every effort to gain the child’s confidence.⁵

If such principles were adopted, they would in fact contradict Klein’s own observations, which many analysts had already accepted as forming the basis of a new analytic technique: the early emergence of the Oedipus complex, the concomitant presence of an aggressive object relation that results in the projection of the death drive, the prior emergence of the superego, the rapid emergence of transference in children and the meaning of its impact on interpretation, particularly in negative transference, and so forth. All of these insights were laid out in Melanie’s work—and she returned to them in the English version of The Psychoanalysis of Children in 1932.

The Anna Freudians, for their part, objected that Melanie, in addition to advancing the theoretical innovations I have just mentioned, failed to consider the real existence of the mother, interpreting instead the fantasies and innate drives projected by the child. As varied a group of clinicians as Melitta, Bowlby, and Winnicott shared this view to varying degrees, and some of the Independents would try to fill the gaps in Klein’s work by referring to Merrel Middlemore’s work The Nursing Couple.

The contentiousness between the two analysts, which preceded the Freuds’ arrival in London in 1939, underlay the dissensions that would later be articulated by clinicians both British and Continental and would be elaborated upon during the famous Controversial Discussions. A broader mindset, a commitment to scientific research based on empirical experience, and a highly democratic impulse that infiltrated the institutional politics of the British Society all helped transform this contentiousness into an unprecedented scholarly debate, as evidenced by the published Freud-Klein Controversies.⁶

Long before the Second World War, then, these diverging views hardened and led to fractures inside the very fabric of the British Psycho-Analytic Society. The impassioned quarrel between Melanie and Melitta, which Glover only encouraged, added even more venom to the discussions. Political realities entered the fray beginning in 1938, as many Continental analysts—Balint, Bibring, Edelberg, Hitschmann, Hoffer, Isakower, Kris, Lanton, Stengel, Schur, Stross, Sachs, Straub, and others—escaped the Nazis and settled in England. Their arrival en masse inflamed the brewing crisis. On the one hand, classic Freudianism and Anna Freudianism, which functioned as a hegemony, were confronted in England with a dissidence that was no small matter, as some on the Continent believed. On the other hand, because of both the war and the sudden influx of new immigrants, these practitioners were faced with a dearth of clients, even with unemployment. Who will submit to training analyses? How will we educate psychoanalytic trainees? Are some groups perhaps abusing their power by injuring others? As always, symbolic “power” proves to be economic as well. Behind all these theoretical machinations, a social struggle had started to overwhelm the psychoanalytic field.

Freud died on September 23, 1939. All his loved ones and disciples mourned him greatly. In the dramatic context of the war, moreover, his disappearance inspired his disciples to clarify their master’s ideas. Each of them claimed to speak for him, professed undivided loyalty, and in fact sought to appropriate his work in a grand totemic feast during which the sons—under the direction of the daughters—debated among themselves and tried to separate the “pure” from the “impure.” The history of psychoanalysis, still an emerging discipline, suggests that its protagonists experienced it, more or less unconsciously, as a religion. Jung’s schism with Freud had recently suggested as much, and Lacan’s dissidence would do so as well.

And yet in the face of this retreat, the reader may believe that the shake-ups in the British analytic movement during the war, which arose out of Melanie Klein’s work as well as her controversial discussions with the Anna Freudians, offer an encouraging example that this sort of religiosity can be overcome. To the violence of conflicts—which were indeed sacrificial, if not sacred—were added a viable work of reflection and a theoretical, clinical, and institutional development. The exchange of new and complementary perspectives opened up the path toward viable psychoanalytic research. Can we really pursue that path today, one that the successors to these pioneers have refined?

For the time being, Melanie dreaded the arrival of the Viennese contingent,⁷ whose conformity she rejected: “It will never be the same again. It’s a disaster.”⁸ The Viennese themselves, who found themselves persecuted and vulnerable because of their exile, were prone to feeling that “‘bei uns war es besser’ (we did it better in Vienna).”⁹ The stage was set for an ever-deepening conflict, a conflict fomented by both Glover and Melitta. Conflict spiraled even more because the analysts of English origin took refuge in the country during the war, while the Continentals remained in London and stuck together during their many days spent in theoretical discussion—at first in the majority, but then in the minority. A “middle group” crept up between the two brigades, and some observers pondered the meaning of the attendant intellectual tempest. One of them was James Strachey, who quite accurately described the “extremism”¹⁰ of the two camps and who wrote the following in 1940, in a bizarre letter to Edward Glover: “Why should these wretched fascists and communists invade our peaceful compromising island?—(bloody foreigners).”¹¹

As London was being torn apart and bombarded by Nazi war planes, psychoanalysts, unscathed by the blitz, spent their time arguing about the propriety of Klein’s contributions, the exact meaning that Freud sought to give to the “death drive” and the “superego,” the nature and early emergence of the “primal fantasies,” the “body-ego,” “rejection,” “negation,” the possibility or impossibility of a scientific judgment in psychoanalysis: in sum, they spent their days pondering the price of tea in China.

This “trivial”¹² debate began with some very practical questions: How should we train young analysts? Have the Kleinians not appropriated the majority of the candidates for themselves? An ad hoc committee was appointed that concluded that Melanie had not “manipulated” the young trainees! Irritated, the Kleinians who had once considered breaking away were able to relax for a moment. But the respite mattered little, as the theoretical disputes persevered. Glover and Melitta were uncompromising, Anna Freud showed herself to be more reasonable but still dictatorial and aggressive, Jones may have been simply feebleminded and wily, Ella Sharpe switched sides, Sylvia Payne was fairly objective, while Joan Riviere refused to accept any challenges from the Viennese—and only Winnicott, who was more independent and clearheaded than ever and who hardly ever participated in the discussions—allowed himself to bring up real life: “I would like to point out that an air raid is going on,” he once said during a debate on the subject of aggression in psychoanalysis!

The various factions had staked out their respective ground. With Anna Freud were Dorothy Burlingham, Kate Friedlander, Barbara Lantons, Hedwig Hoffer, Barbara Low, and Ella Sharpe, with Melitta off doing her own thing. Continentals, all of them men, and who were less effective than the ladies, also joined the group: S. H. Foulkes, Willi Hoffer, and Walter Schmideberg. The Kleinian camp included reliable woman: Paula Heimann, Joan Riviere, Susan Isaacs, and, for a time, Sylvia Payne, who would soon become an Independent; it also included such men as Roger Money-Kyrle, John Rickman, W. Scott, and D. W. Winnicott. The intermediaries made themselves heard as well: James Strachey, Marjorie Brierley, and others. The majority of the members of the British Society would gradually come from the Middle Group and would express concern about the Kleinians’ proselytizing tendencies.

Jones made an invaluable foray into diplomacy, one that approached hesitation and indecision, and he shuttled deftly between the two groups, as evidenced by the following excerpt from his January 21, 1942, letter to Anna Freud: “I consider Mrs Klein has made important contributions…. On the other hand she has neither a scientific nor an orderly mind and her presentations are lamentable.”¹³

Particularly her presentations on the Oedipus complex and the role of the father, he added, forgetting that he himself had endorsed Klein’s notions on those subjects in his 1934 article “The Phallic Phase”!¹⁴ In another letter, the society president was none too kind to Anna either: “[Anna] is certainly a tough and indigestible morsel. She has probably gone as far in analysis as she can and has no pioneering originality.”¹⁵

Jones, in fact, was nowhere to be found during the Controversial Discussions. He suffered from a series of psychosomatic illnesses and retreated into the countryside. He miraculously recovered just as the Discussions were ending, though by that point he had surrendered leadership to Glover—and had thus taken away any opportunity Melanie might have had to benefit from his influence. Fortunes changed, however, and Edward Glover, at first the director of research at the institute, felt increasingly put upon by the success of Klein’s theory and by the compromise that the two factions were forming. He resigned from the British Society in 1944 and joined the Swiss Society, expressing his dismay at seeing the British Society become “a woman ridden society” and at seeing the “Klein imbroglio” develop—which was really just a way of implicitly acknowledging that his attempts to discredit Melanie had failed.

Anna Freud, who shared child analyst training duties with Melanie Klein, resigned from the Training Committee and began to lead seminars from her home. She had already been accepted as an authority with her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, and she organized the Hampstead War Nursery, which remained under her influence.¹⁶

Their closest rival was the prestigious Tavistock Institute and Clinic, which Hugh Crichton-Miller founded in 1920 to treat those suffering from shell shock, that is, those nervous traumas—shaking, paralysis, hallucinations—that result from repeated exposure to explosives. Under the direction of John Rees, these activities grew to include the treatment of juvenile delinquents in individual or group therapy. Under the influence of Rickman and Bion, Freudian and Kleinian theories came to dominate the work of the Clinic, so much so that it came to be considered one of the bastions of Kleinianism. Beginning in 1946, John Bowlby introduced the Independents’ approach as well as family therapy to the Clinic, and Balint contributed his group therapy technique.¹⁷

Anna Freud, who was highly combative and even “dictatorial” but who was thrown off track by the dissemination of Klein’s views, threatened and manipulated until people began to fear she would follow Glover: Could Freud’s daughter actually resign from the British Psycho-Analytical Society? Never! What should be done about the mere prospect? The atmosphere could not have been more heated.

Melanie, too, entertained thoughts of breaking away, as some had suggested that she should do. She divided her time between her family in Cambridge and her patients, particularly in Pitlochry, Scotland, where she analyzed little Richard. As she was absent from the beginning of the Discussions, she sent her devotees in her place, who nevertheless remained under her firm and steady control: she supervised every aspect, for example, of Susan Isaacs’s work on the phantasy.¹⁸ Klein rarely intervened orally, and Jones occasionally prevented her from speaking,¹⁹ but she issued no shortage of notes and letters. When she presented written texts, moreover, the pages were dense.²⁰ A militant mind-set surrounded her. The most passionate of her supporters formed the “I.O. (Internal Object) Group” in order to clarify the matriarch’s theory and to make it accessible to the Viennese. The “battle group”—Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and the doctrinaire Joan Riviere—grew even tighter.

On both sides, women were the most active, but they never stopped turning to men: Papa Jones and Papa Glover were discussed or invited to the Discussions, and the symbolic authorities Freud and Abraham were often cited, particularly by Melanie.²¹ The figure of the father, whether dead or not, clearly hovered over the Discussions, even more so because the Kleinian faction appeared less strong than it actually was, with the result that Melanie’s political genius became more impressive than ever imagined. I will give two examples of this.

Just when all hopes of reconciliation had vanished, Klein attempted to compromise with Anna Freud in May 1942. Anna was “very surprised, though very pleased”²² by this development, and, even if the armistice was far from succeeding, Melanie’s idea was clear: she did not want schisms, she held herself out as a follower of Freud, she just needed some time to prove it, whether with Anna or against her, but in any event not against psychoanalysis, for all psychoanalysis is—and can only be—Freudian psychoanalysis. Klein hated the adjective “Kleinian,” and with good reason. It was only because of Glover’s malicious rumormongering that people thought she saw herself as a prophet, even as Jesus. Her determination to innovate within the context of Freudianism was a valid conviction and, for that very reason, provided a convincing strategy:

My greatest experience in this was “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and the Ego and the Id and what an experience it was. In a smaller way I saw in my own work [on reparation and the depressive position] repeatedly a new light appear and things altered by it…. I think these findings could not have been unworldly to have been made even by Freud and he would have had the greatness, the strength, the powers to present them to the world. I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I am not afraid of fighting against anybody, but I really don’t like fighting. What I wish to do is to quietly let others participate in something I know to be true, important, and helpful.²³

In a similar spirit, Klein sent Winnicott a note apologizing for asking him to tone down a resolution he had proposed presenting. By showing consideration for Winnicott, she was preserving more than anything else their shared place in the Freud locomotive. And then she forwarded her comments on Winnicott’s proposed text to the other members of the group:

I think the impression which it might give that Freud is more or less history would not only be dangerous, but the fact itself is not true. Freud’s writings are very much alive, and still a guide for our work…. Anything which could give the impression that we think that Freud could be put on a shelf is the most dangerous trap we could fall into.²⁴

That view could already be termed, as part of an effective strategy, a “return to Freud.” That is, to a clearly refurbished Freud!

Melanie was not content with merely summarizing Freud’s views as a way to defend herself, for she also attacked those who did not read Freud as she did²⁵ and solidified her own ideas. It is not true, she said, that she denied the existence of the mother’s external reality, and to the extent that she believed that what is perceived is always “colored” by the fantasy, one has to concede “the vicissitudes of the relationships with internal objects” that are “fluid” and not established for once and for all.²⁶ It is true that the seeds of depressive feelings exist from the beginning of life, but they are limited to the time between the child’s third and fifth month during the depressive position. And the father is not present in the child’s fantasy before the fourth month.²⁷ And the love for the mother is not merely libido, but a veritable form of gratitude toward the person whom the child himself dreams of feeding,²⁸ an emotion that is already highly complex before the depressive position even though it is entirely manifested only with that position.²⁹ And an immediate sublimation is formed within the relation to the breast, which is a true “bridge” between the infant’s paranoid omnipotence and his adaptation to reality.³⁰

Klein the theoretician built her castle while Klein the politician maneuvered with great skill, particularly with respect to Strachey’s preliminary report on the training of psychoanalysts. As Melanie was not a physician herself, she fought against the discrimination visited upon psychoanalysts who were not doctors, and she advocated a training in psychoanalysis alone as she believed medical training was of no help in understanding mental disorders. To Strachey, she declared her wish to remain “behind the scenes,” although she very tactfully suggested that it would be inadvisable to “penalize originality”—the subtext being that the “originality,” her own, was on the verge of prevailing. At the same time, she told her cohorts the following:

We must, of course, avoid giving any ground to feel that we are triumphing and I feel that I can now keep on for a time bearing the situation in which my work is at the same time being appreciated and depreciated, sometimes in one breath by the same people.³¹

The war among the ladies wound up being a peace among the ladies. Several of them had a change of heart: some of the loyalists—Marjorie Brierley, Barbara Low, Ella Sharpe, and Adrian and Karin Stephen (who supported Klein from the beginning)—turned against Melanie with hostility. At the same time, Sylvia Payne, who, along with W. H. Gillespie, had declared herself an “Independent” and who had endorsed Susan Isaacs’s work on the phantasy, became disappointed with Glover and abandoned Melanie’s adversary for good. Payne was elected president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1944. Klein’s theories held their own, even among her adversaries: although Anna Freud did not adopt the depressive position, didn’t she begin to speak of “grief in infancy?”³² Miss Freud resigned from the Training Committee in 1944 and abstained—as did Glover, the Schmidebergs, and the Viennese—from participating in any way in the second series of Controversial Discussions. As a result, “power” reverted de facto to the prewar members of the society.³³ Following a series of theoretical and administrative negotiations, a compromise was struck. These ladies—and these gentlemen—subscribed to the principles of democratic cohabitation. For institutional purposes, the society approved two parallel courses of psychoanalytic training in order to satisfy both the Kleinians and the Anna Freudians. This did not prevent many clinicians—and some of the best ones at that—from feeling a mix of irritation and admiration for Melanie, as did R. D. Laing, Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott, and Sylvia Payne.

One of the important benefits of these skirmishes among the various psychoanalytic factions was to facilitate a close analysis of the tyrannical logic underlying groups—all groups. One could hypothesize, in fact, that the sectarian functioning and exclusivity that characterized the Kleinians (they were caricatured as “the Ebenezer Church”)³⁴ served as a laboratory for Bion—one that complemented his experience as an military psychiatrist who was the officer-in-charge responsible for rehabilitating victims of shell shock—when he offered a scathing analysis of group functioning.³⁵ Although his book was based on Kleinian principles, it did not find favor with Melanie, who was analyzing Bion when he wrote it—and her reaction was well founded!

Bion’s book incorporates his belief that a group is an entity unto itself and not simply a conglomeration of individuals with which one has a relationship comparable to the infant’s relation to the breast (or to the part object). The failure to respond effectively to the demands of this relationship is experienced as an intolerable frustration, which is manifested in the paranoid-schizoid regression that characterizes the members of the group. Although the family grouping, with its oedipal libido, largely remains, as Freud believed, the prototype of the group bond, Bion wisely modified that analysis and contended that group dynamics reflect far more primitive mechanisms, as manifested, in Klein’s view, by the depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions. It is true that groups in any form (the religious ones based on a hypothesis of dependence, the aristocratic ones based on coupling for the aristocratic ones, and the military ones based on fight-or-flight) conceal not only psychotic anxiety but defensive reactions against such anxiety as well. The inability to form symbols is not the sole province of isolated cases, as Klein showed with Dick, but “[extends] to include all individuals in their functions as members of the basic-assumption group.”³⁶

The Controversial Discussions clearly reflected such paranoid-schizoid regressions, and Melanie’s personality no doubt reinforced the imago of the fascinating and persecuting breast.³⁷ But Klein also encouraged, as she did with Bion, the analysis of this phenomenon in the etymological sense of the word: its decomposition through genuine analytic work of an unprecedented depth and clarity, one that applies to the interpretation of all groups, whether they be psychoanalytic, political, religious, or otherwise.

In the end the most important consequence of this “peace among the ladies” was nothing more than to preserve the spirit of inquiry. In addition to forming the group known as the “Independents” (Jones, Sharpe, Flugel, Payne, Rickman, Strachey, Brierley, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Balint, Kluber, Khan, and Bolby³⁸), the British analysts sustained an ecumenical movement of substantial psychoanalytic investigation. Since that time this broadening of the mind and this taste for confrontation have been appreciated by all those who consider psychoanalysis to be an active quest. Even more intimately, finally, the upshot of all this has been described by Winnicott, who, in a parallel to Bion’s dissection of the group, endorsed a more sober, essentially analytic, alternative: “The Capacity to Be Alone”³⁹ as the foundation of creativity, and creativity in psychoanalysis in particular. Melanie responded with her own “On the Sense of Loneliness,” in which she elaborated upon the benefits of feeling lonely.⁴⁰ It is as if she were showing us the way there!⁴¹

The first time Lacan referred to Klein in writing was in his essay on aggressivity, which he delivered in May 1948 as a speech to the Congrès des Psychanalystes de Langue Française in Brussels.⁴² He likened his own notion of the “imagos of the fragmented body” to Melanie’s notion of the “internal objects” of archaic fantasies, and he paid tribute to the aspects of “the phenomenology of the Kleinian experience” that consist of the “fantasies of what is termed the paranoid stage.”⁴³ In appropriating Klein’s notion of the paranoid position, Lacan augmented it, defining the ego as an instance of imaginary méconnaissance built upon a paranoid structure. The negative transference emphasized by Klein helped Lacan understand treatment to be a controlled paranoia that serves to remedy the ignorance of the ego: psychoanalysis “induce[s] in the subject a controlled paranoia” that is tantamount to the “the projection of what Melanie Klein calls bad internal objects, a paranoiac mechanism … filtered, as it were, and properly checked” by the analyst.⁴⁴ With a great deal of loyalty to Klein, Lacan traces his concept of the “imaginary,” which he was still forming in 1948, to Melanie’s own writings: he speaks of “the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother’s body.”⁴⁵ He also appears amenable to the idea of an archaic superego, though he is less interested in the biological prematurity that supports it than in its cultural dimension as a “signifier.” The “persistence in the imaginary of good and bad objects” generates the notion of an early superego, which has a “generic” meaning for the subject; the same applies to the infantile dependence associated with the baby’s “physiological misery” but inseparable from his “relationship to his human surroundings.” The superego is thus an instance laden with meaning that lies at the “crossroads between nature and culture.”⁴⁶

In August 1949 Lacan returned to many of these themes during the Sixteenth Congress of the International Association of Psychoanalysis in Zurich, where he delivered a paper entitled “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.”⁴⁷ The emphasis that Lacan, beginning with this paper, placed on the visual realm as a signifying organizer of the other sensations in the structure of the subject appears to be inconsistent with Klein’s theories.⁴⁸ Lacan’s piece also pays substantial tribute to Anna Freud, a move that has often been interpreted as part of his political strategy to link himself with the daughter of the “founder.” Although Lacan had at least two irons in the fire of international psychoanalysis, one could see this reference to Anna as a way for him to disassociate himself from the outer limits of a Kleinianism preoccupied with the primitive ego. Lacan was seeking a focal point for his own non-Freudian theory of the subject, and he abandoned Melanie while flirting with Anna Freud’s surprisingly empirical and restrictive propositions concerning the ego’s secondary or defensive mechanisms. In the end, though, Lacan associated both women with the “structures of systematic méconnaissance”⁴⁹ in which Miss Freud’s ego defenses join the Kleinian phantasy.

While courting Anna, Lacan was also contacting Melanie and even suggesting to her that “the progressive point of view in psycho-analysis,”⁵⁰ which Melanie believed belonged to him in the eyes of the French, should have been represented during the first World Congress of Psychiatry not by Anna Freud but by the Kleinians themselves.⁵¹

Seduction, approbation, and abandonment: was this a game, an ambiguous one to say the least, destined to become a “Freudian slip” … or was it a true act of sabotage? René Diatkine, who was in analysis with Lacan, translated from the German the first part of The Psychoanalysis of Children, and he entrusted his translation to Lacan. Françoise Girard, an analyst also being treated by Lacan who married the Canadian analyst Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, obtained Melanie’s approval to translate Love, Guilt, and Reparation. Melanie learned from Diatkine that one half of The Psychoanalysis of Children had been translated, but that Lacan was not the author of that version. And yet Lacan told the Boulangers otherwise when he offered them the chance to translate the second half of Klein’s work. The first part of the translation, the one that Diatkine handed over to Lacan, is nowhere to be found! Lacan never formally admitted that he had lost it, and Diatkine did not keep a duplicate for himself ! In January 1952 the Boulangers had lunch with Melanie and recounted the whole sorry tale to her. Lacan lost all credibility in her mind, and she subsequently aligned herself with Daniel Lagache.⁵²

In the meantime the anthology Developments in Psycho-Analysis, edited by Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and Joan Riviere, was published in 1952—and for Melanie’s seventieth birthday, Roger Money-Kyrle put together a Festschrift. This tribute was eventually published in the form of a special issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis that was edited by Paula Heimann and Roger Money-Kyrle and that included work by fourteen contributors.⁵³ These publications recapture and elaborate upon the essential features of Klein’s thought regarding the Controversial Discussions, and they clearly reflect her desire to renew psychoanalysis.

Two years later, in 1954, and during his Seminar on Freud’s Papers on Technique, Lacan returned to the “case of Dick” and offered his own reading of Freud’s “On Negation” in response to Jean Hyppolite.⁵⁴ As I have mentioned, Freud’s essay served as the Kleinians’ battle horse during the Controversies with the Anna Freudians, who proved themselves unfamiliar with the work.⁵⁵ Lacan thus employed the same strategy that the Kleinians did during their own attempt to recast psychoanalysis. But Lacan failed to credit his sources, and he declined to cite Klein in his discussion of Freudian negativity, except, perhaps, through his indirect reference to Kris and Melitta in the context of the case study of the Brain Man!

Lacan’s displacement, incidentally, is significant. The primacy of the signifier eradicates what I have termed Klein’s “incarnationism,” her ever heterogeneous conception of an imaginary that is at once a thing and an image, a sensation or an affect and representation.⁵⁶ Lacan saw himself apart from all this and laid out “developments” and “new directions” of his own—but he also forgot the women who inspired him and avoided confrontation as a result.

That did not keep him from occasionally referring to Klein’s work, usually with a respectful tone, as if he had gotten over envy without quite reaching gratitude, suggesting that he sensed deep affinities with Klein’s work, particularly with her conception of a primal paranoia and of an early fantasy that structures the ego. From that perspective, he likened Klein’s “depressive position” to his own “mirror stage” in the sense that both concepts attest to “the characteristically imaginary nature of the function of the Ego in the subject.”⁵⁷ And he also paid tribute to “Melanie Klein’s genius” in having “reconstructed” the “depressive core” that is ushered in by the death drive.⁵⁸

And yet Lacan pulled no punches when it came to indicating his fundamental disagreement with her, particularly with respect to her failure to acknowledge the paternal function or to create a theory of the subject, and he also objected to Klein’s reducing the penis to a role as a mere appendage in her hypostasis of the maternal imago that remained forever foreign to Lacan. In that spirit, he admonished Jones for having endorsed the “utter brutality” of Klein’s concepts and for having seen the penis only as a part object and not at all as “the phallus.” He also denounced Jones’s “failure … to include the most primal oedipal fantasies in the mother’s body and to account for their origin in the reality presumed by the Name-of-the-Father.”⁵⁹

Amid all this envy and ingratitude, “inspired gut butcher” appears to be the most gripping formula. Did I simply hear these words during one of Lacan’s seminars that has not yet been published? I was unable to track the phrase down in Lacan’s published writings. Is this undiscoverable quotation an indelible symptom of a Klein who eludes our grasp, a symptom that infects those who love her as well as those who hate her, as if she refused to be summed up in a carefully worded phrase (as we have seen, she was a founder without a text)—and was she perhaps satisfied with simply making others speak, dream, and associate? Was Klein an analyst, in sum, from whom Lacan built a little bridge that reached to the Brain Man, to that plagiarist who “borrowed” without acknowledging as much?

It turns out that the phrase can be found in an essay that Lacan devoted to none other than André Gide!⁶⁰ The phrase appears in the context of Gide’s “oddly unsustained attack” (in the words of Lacan himself, who nevertheless took it upon himself to remind us of it!) on Freud, whom the author of The Counterfeiters called a “brilliant imbecile.”⁶¹ After tracing, as does Jean Delay, the endless maze of Gide’s identifications, particularly his identifications with the discourse of a mother who “fills the gap through a passion for his governess,” Lacan addresses the writer’s bond with his cousin Madeleine, and eventually likens his imaginary to an “antique theater” replete with “shaking, slips, and repulsive figures,” “being shaken to the core of one’s being, a sea that enraptures everything.” This horrifying female imagery caused nightmares about a “creek that consumes” the young André, and love abruptly turned a corner into what lies beyond death, when it was not into laughter, until a vengeful Medusa, flanked by the Lady of the Troubadours and by Dante’s Beatrice, insinuated herself into Gide’s and Lacan’s visions of a “black hole.” It is in this very context that we find Lacan’s allusion to Melanie Klein, whose name has been effaced: “Indeed, the child filled this void with monsters—a crowd of monsters known to us, since a diviner with a child’s eyes, an inspired gut butcher, has catalogued them for us—projecting those monsters into the womb of the nursing mother.”⁶²

“Brilliant imbecile” (Freud according to Gide) and “inspired gut butcher” (Klein according to Lacan): therein lies a true “diviner” who speaks volumes about the phobic fantasies of the mother’s “guts” in Gide, as endorsed here by Lacan, which the man and the artist avoid through “inspiration”! But there is so very little on Melanie’s work itself ! Except, perhaps, when the psychoanalyst correctly points out that it is essential, in a clinical sense, to consider the degree to which the child’s primary fantasies originate with the mother herself. Lacan invites us to lend our ear to the child who was the mother, that is, to the child that always remains a mother when we analyze the child of the mother.

Klein is a truly paradoxical figure. On the one hand, the mechanical popularized view of Klein, which is oversimplified and which sometimes arises out of our author’s own writings, can come across as so many lessons drummed into students’ heads. The “positions” with the precepts of “reparation” and the “integration of the ego,” when reduced to the form of newspaper headlines, can resemble the sort of sensible advice that educational magazines offer to families. On the other hand, a restless dissidence, one that emerged during an era of conformity and of planned transgressions, reflects the sober vision of a human being governed by a death drive that is readily transformable into creativity as long as he or she is given a bit of innate luck, a capacity for love, and a “good enough mother” (as Winnicott puts it in an effort to counter Melanie’s grip over the “internal object”).

These two faces of Kleinianism have not failed to attract the attention of sociologists and other theoreticians in Great Britain—and they have interested American and British feminists as well. Melanie Klein is perhaps the only psychoanalyst who, without ever reflecting herself upon modern history and society in the way that a Freud and a Reich have done, has inspired political reflections that clearly exceed the immediate scope of her clinical conceptions. Her empiricism and her theoretical awkwardness give her work an intrinsically open and multilayered quality that invites expansive interpretations. But that alone is not enough to explain her success in the field of sociology, a success that seems due in part to the attraction that deep psychoanalysis has for our contemporary world, which cannot be fully understood through ideologies and the traditional philosophies.

For a nonconformist elite, psychoanalysis’s uniqueness in being at the crossroads between empirical utility and speculative daring destines it to become a new model for thinking about social relations, beyond the family or specific groups, while still respecting the alternative of being alone.⁶³ From the “socialist consideration” inspired by Kleinian psychoanalysis to the agenda of a “good society” attentive to the “inner world” and through a reconsideration of Rousseauism from the perspective of a social theory based on Klein’s writings,⁶⁴ the work on this subject has continued to grow in the past ten years or so. These reflections would have certainly surprised even the most ambitious dreams of a Melanie who was concerned about being useful to society, and they foreclose the most acerbic criticism from her contemporary detractors who have accused her of being oriented solely toward the inner world.

Two faces of Kleinianism thus emerge through the sociological extrapolations from her work. Some critics emphasize her theory of the negative and the importance of the death drive and of the disruptive forces that call to mind the image of the antiestablishmentarian and the rebel when they do not descend into the figures of the paranoid person or the quietly schizophrenic egotist. That sort of reading, which is informed by the French psychoanalysts’ interpretation of Klein, has recently come to the fore in writings by several British theorists.⁶⁵ Other critics during the past decade, on the other hand, pride themselves on discovering in Melanie Klein a foundation for the social bond by focusing on conciliation and by overplaying what even some Kleinian clinicians themselves have not refrained from exaggerating: reparation, the formation of an object relation and of symbolization to the detriment of violence and anxiety. It is important to note, however, that the supporters of this view run the risk of transforming psychoanalysis into a social safety net—even into a secular religion.

Such risks have not discouraged attempts to theorize a socialism attentive to the inner universe and the depressive self by drawing from Klein as a way to lessen the blows of the globalization we are currently experiencing.

Michael Rustin and Margaret Rustin, for example, believe that Melanie Klein expanded the scope of psychoanalysis by proposing a relational conception of human nature that, although consumed with destructiveness and greed, is profoundly moral. If socialism is to replace waning religions, such a vision could provide a viable starting point. A socialism conceived along those lines would consider modern men and women not as a simple source of comfort but as a clearheaded strain of humanism that is capable of reflecting upon death, destructive sexuality, the infantile realm, and innate differences. To exonerate the importance of the family, to revive emotion and feeling beyond the realm of abstract reason, and to make reparation to the ego’s lifelong relationship to a social community are only some of the premises of the vision of social democracy that the Rustins believe lies dormant in Kleinian psychoanalysis. The Rustins use her theory for inspiration as they advocate a sort of socialism in which individual needs are recognized as such and are not immediately subordinated to the demands of the group. With a more classically liberal approach, Roger Money-Kyrle, who also cites Melanie Klein, believes that a depressive morality based on love and a concern for others can be contrasted with totalitarianism and unbridled capitalism. The Rustins, for their part, present a model of democracy in which the state tends to social needs without hindering individual liberties in an effort to regulate an all-powerful liberalism. From that perspective, the authors draw the conclusion that Kleinian theory “provides one of the main theoretical bases for a better system of social provision, and also one of the main measures of their adequacy.”⁶⁶

Similarly, Fred C. Alford’s Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory attempts to develop a version of sociology that is capable of remedying the difficulties encountered when the Frankfurt School proposed a new concept of reason as part of its proponents’ effort to understand human relations. Alford suggests that Marcuse, by basing his notion of Eros on sexual drives and the Oedipus complex, needlessly contrasted it with a society founded on repression, with the result that the sociology that stems from this notion runs the risk of descending into a “selfish instrumentalism.”⁶⁷ A sociology derived from Kleinianism, on the other hand, could establish a social bond that is amenable to reparation and reconciliation.⁶⁸ Although Alford recognizes that his perspective “revises” Klein’s clinical practice, he does not hesitate to deem Klein a “social theorist”: by emphasizing the “passions” that are always linked to the other and adorned with a sense of direction and coherence more than are the “drives” that are more or less fragmenting and fragmented, Melanie Klein allows us to theorize a “reparative reason” and a “reparative individualism.” The concern for the other would be the defining feature of such a paradigm, as would the creation of a social bond that is not coercive and that is defined as a “supple and flexible social structure.” Such moral maturation directed toward reparation and reconciliation is possible with individuals and with small groups, whereas large groups, in contrast, defend themselves from anxiety through paranoid-schizoid mechanisms and thus impede the logical processes of a reparative individualism. The “instrumental reason” imposed by ultraliberalism, the speculations on the part of the financial markets, the unchecked exploitation of nature, and the wholesale mastery of society are rooted in a paranoid-schizoid position characterized by a tendency toward possession and domination. Reparative reason, on the other hand, reconciles and organizes a society that is founded more on the concern and respect for other people than on repression and instrumentalism. Melanie Klein’s work promotes such a vision of human nature, a vision founded on a primal morality. To a sociologist’s eyes, Klein appears less pessimistic than Freud, even though she was hardly unaware that destructive forces exist. The human being is not an isolated self but an eminently social self adorned with a “Eudaemonian ethic.” Put another way, the Kleinian ego believes it has a “need to make reparation and that doing so will make [it] happier.”⁶⁹ In summary, Alford reads Klein in a way that privileges the reparative thrust of her clinical approach at the cost of focusing on the more negative elements—the very ones that other people have been all too happy to emphasize.⁷⁰ Reparation aside, however, Alford is not unfamiliar with the tragic dimension of Klein’s thought, for avarice, envy, and hatred make the world a hostile and empty one, and in Klein’s view, the self encounters neither redemption nor complete salvation.⁷¹

Without renouncing the reparative fairy, it is important to note that Klein the wizard offers perspectives that are more disquieting that Alford’s and that, as a result, provide more fertile ground for exploring human and social darkness. I will thus briefly discuss here another social reading inspired by Klein’s clinical work.

It turns out that, long before the uprisings in May 1968 and the anarchist fugue attendant to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and right before the emergence of Lacan’s passion for female paranoia,⁷² Melanie envisioned the individual as an economy that is transformed by the death drive, is intrinsically paranoid-schizoid, and has little inclination to adapt to reality. The Anna Freudians criticized her for not paying attention to the real family and mother (not to mention the father) or to the burgeoning external reality, and for limiting herself instead to a world of sadistic fantasies, or at best essentially negative ones. This view is not really accurate, for the child’s psychic dynamic depends, as Klein believed, on the mother’s inner world—which the child deems to be an external object! It is true, however, that Klein did not believe in adaptation, and that she even thought it was not a psychoanalytic idea. As a result she rebuked Anna Freud for conducting herself like a schoolteacher in focusing exclusively on the ego’s defenses as they relate to the aims of adequate education.

Klein proclaimed that we are all paranoid-schizophrenics, which was enough to raise the eyebrows of antiauthoritarian types in Great Britain. Even worse, she believed that all forms of authority, and parental authority in particular, generate inhibition and anxiety: we recall Fritz’s atheist mother and believing father, who eventually let go of their hold on their son, per the analyst’s advice, and allowed him to think for himself.

Underneath the authority (an authority that others will deem “symbolic”) of the father, which she declines to discuss, Melanie diagnosed the power of the mother, which she believed provides the real support behind any law. Klein never defined femininity in terms of passivity, as Freud did. Rather, femininity in Klein unfolds into a form of receptiveness (the successor to the oral stage in both the girl and the boy, both of whom desire to incorporate the penis as well as the breast that contains it) and into a form of primordial terrifying maternal power, which is the backbone behind all tyrannical authority as well as the prototype (along with the father coupled with her) of the superego. For Klein, the law draws on this power of the “mother with a penis,” which she attempts to distinguish from Freud’s “mother phallic” because, in the Kleinian phantasy, the male organ is not a visible appendage but an internal supplement to the mother, more threatening than grotesque.

Although Klein revealed the base of phallic authority that consists of the mother-with-a-penis’s fantasy-like power, she did not endorse a rival power, even more well founded, that she believed in—in the same way that other people believe in the father. On the contrary, she attempted to figure out how to get rid of this final henchman of power, this infantile pivot for tyranny. The mother as an internal object is the “double” of the real mother, and this doubling, which engulfs the baby, enables the world to avoid both judgment and verification through sensory perception.⁷³ The real mother is but a “colored” screen that is produced by our fantasies and/or by projective identification. To learn to judge reality in a way that is not based on terror, we can certainly depend on the satisfying care given by our mothers, who, as luck would have it, are capable of doing so, but we are also invited to depend on analysis so we might have a chance to work through our fantasies of omnipotence, which in the end is a maternal omnipotence.

The reason Melanie shifted maternal power from reality alone to the ego’s fantasy was not to downplay either the real mother or the role of perception in children’s experience, as the Anna Freudians accused her of doing during the Controversial Discussions. On the contrary, Klein’s objective was to demystify the imaginary henchman of authority, whom we mistakenly believe to be real, and to moor analysis in the fantasy-like unconscious of the self he causes to suffer. Maternal power and paternal authority are thus remnants of a phyto- and ontogenetic memory made up of biology and representation, remnants that lurk inside us, as the subjects of psychoanalysis, and that we have the chance to deconstruct through the help of some mothers who are gratifying enough and distant enough—through the help, in the end, of analytic transference and interpretation.

To contend that what is truly taking place here is a never-ending attempt to settle scores with Libussa is less interesting, in the final analysis, than to understand how Melanie robs male authority, as well as its archaic maternal basis, of its power to encroach abusively upon our psychic lives. Bion and Winnicott would later develop this theme and would expand it into “the mother’s capacity for reverie”⁷⁴ (the positive, productive version of psychic life) and into “encroaching mothers” (the noxious version that dismantles the structure of the psyche). More than anarchism, what emerges from Melanie’s early writings, which deconstruct the imaginary power of the primitive mother, is a wholly genuine and sympathetic vision of the human experience. And her work continues to attract the attention of contemporary critics, particularly because, since the 1930s when Melanie first offered her hypotheses on tyrannical power, the world has only seen the worst in paranoid schizophrenia, abuse, and the collapse of authority.⁷⁵

At the same time, this pivotal collapse—at the core of the human being as well as of the social bond—is, in Klein’s view, of a destructive violence that proves to be no less saving. First, the masochistic anxiety-provoking drive, which breaks me up into bits until it disables or destroys my ability to think, possesses the unexpected virtue of being able to guide us toward the outside world and to take an object as its target. That object reverts back to me right away and takes refuge as an internal object so it can either gnaw at me from the inside (if it is a “bad” object) or become a stable focal point for my ego (it if is “good). For Klein, such reversions of the negative do in fact take into account reality (the parents, their care, their authority), but, in the end, they do so to a lesser degree than one might imagine. All that Melanie demands from the powers originating from the outside is that they exist as little as possible, that they do not encroach too much upon the adjustments made by internal objects bouncing between envy and gratitude.

As a result of this vision—one that I am just beginning to touch upon here—the Authority and the Real, the Law and the World can be kept as far apart as possible. The point is not to abolish them or ignore them, for Melanie is not a libertarian, nor is she a devotee of the Enlightenment who would deem the “social contract” a radical evil that must be destroyed, or at least ameliorated. Her tyrannical and retributive vision of Law and Authority sees the reality of the world as being essentially coercive. Even worse, this authority and this reality insinuate themselves in us from our birth, and even before, through the force of biological destiny; and they affect us from the inside in the form of a draconian superego that stems from the persecuting object, unless it is innate. The point, then, is not to deny authority, nor is it to adapt to reality in order to know it better: that authority and that reality are always already inside us, and we are what transports them. The only things that we can ever truly know are the violence of our death drive, the capacity for love that compensates for it, and the logic underlying our fantasies. This knowledge of the inner world makes it possible for us to approach reality, though in the form of a sporadic learning process. Bion’s and Winnicott’s subsequent developments regarding “learning by experience” and “transitional reality” are rooted in the negotiation of the death drive, as Klein would see it, as she reduced the fantasy as well as the coercive authority of the object in order to transform them gradually, after a great deal of work, into a reality susceptible to thought.

For Klein, there is no “real mother,” or she counts for very little, because the only mother who interests her is the mother who can be thought. And a mother can be thought only if my awareness of the deadly fantasy that consumes me can imprint the real object with a portion of an object I can think about: an object I can play with—symbol, in the end. The external mother can gratify me (or not), which amounts to saying that she displays (or fails to display) her ability to the internal world of my fantasies. Accordingly, she helps me adapt the inner world to a “reality” that, in this context, emerges only at the end of a learning process that is creative, and, ultimately, infinite.

The model of this perpetually renewed knowledge of reality is nothing less than the transference relationship. By respecting the fantasy and interpreting it, the analyst does not establish the reality to be known or the law to be followed, but gives the ego a chance to constantly create a reality that, while increasingly objective, is the only one that is thinkable for me, livable for me, and desirable for me.

A version of freedom can be inferred from Klein’s thought here, one that has proved to be particularly attractive to the British sociologists: a freedom based on a creativity that respects the self, one that is neither a normative adaptation nor a jubilant transgression of utopia in the antioedipal sense. Indeed, the balancing agent in this system of Kleinian self-regulation is nothing less than the experience of loss and its attendant depression, which arise when neurological maturation and the regulation of the two universes (the child’s fantasy and the mother’s fantasy and reality) allow for separation, which occurs in the realm of guilt and grief. Grief and guilt are the internal—and thus intrinsically psychosomatic—manifestations, like body-and-soul, of the severity of the law that shapes me in the form of a superego. At the end of this process, an optimal negotiation between internal violence and external authority successfully informs me that an Other exists and that this Other is both external (I learn to know my mother as a whole object, and all other forms of external reality thus become accessible to me) and internal (I am capable of symbols; “I think” after “I fantasize”).

This vision of freedom, one that remained empirical for Klein, was developed most exhaustively through the Protestant ethic of Winnicott.⁷⁶ Winnicott offered a notion of play that in some ways recalls that of Anna Freud in the sense that his is a conception in which sexuality is still latent: once the child is able to extricate himself from fantasy-like meaning, he plays in order to play (this train is a train, and not daddy’s penis, as Melanie would have it). It is through this absence of sexual meaning, as Klein understood it, that the child at play rediscovers the neutrality of the meanings he is supposed to re-create. Play comes to an end, on the other hand, with the first signs of sexual stimulation.⁷⁷ But isn’t it also true that this encounter with sexuality, its gradual fading and différance through the indifferent speech of a third party who nevertheless takes it into account and who begins to restore its traumatic underpinnings, that is the object, more so than the oversimplifications of her school of thought to which she is often reduced, of Klein’s own interpretation-in-the-context-of-play? In Miss Freud’s view, education must precede such relief. For Lacan, the paternal function will do. Every analyst should learn how to play, to play a game of playing with each analysand, as Winnicott suggests. More soberly and directly, Melanie allowed the distanced truth of interpretive speech to function alongside the patient’s projective identification, but alongside the analyst’s as well: If I were you, we would play together, and I would acknowledge as much. We engage in a back-and-forth process of sexual identifications, projections, and attempts to distance ourselves …

We would search Klein’s writings in vain to discover a focal point for these metamorphoses of the negative, although she does trace the creative and productive transformations of the underlying personal autonomy that so fascinates the English theoreticians. Lacan, for his part, had to fill in these gaps by situating the already-there of the Kleinian Oedipus complex and superego in the preexistence of the symbolic in human beings, as reflected by the Name-of-the-Father and the fecundity of the Phallus, whose paternal function is the conduit of the imaginary.

Klein, on the other hand, as if counterbalancing Lacan’s intellectualizing or Thomistic Christianity, appears at first to be merciful as well as sensitive to an unfathomable destructiveness.⁷⁸ In the latter half of her work, however, she introduced notions that reflect positive psychic processes: the capacity for reparation and love with gratitude, as opposed to sadism, the tyranny of the superego, and envy. As they are also part of the constitution of the drives, those sublimating positive forces that are either innate or enhanced through optimal care from the parents, have the advantage of freeing up the perpetually enigmatic interfaces between psychoanalysis and biology. But they leave us bereft of thought in the face of the psychosomatic basis of the Kleinian version of Eros that does not blossom into pleasure but is manifested from the beginning as something propelled by a tenderness toward the other and by an overwhelming nostalgia that arises out of the depressive position.

Is this a way of inhibiting the aim of the drive? Other female analysts have said as much about the early sublimation of the libido into tenderness.⁷⁹ But these analysts do not specify what makes it possible: is it once again an innate capacity, this time for inhibiting the aim of the drive? Or is it a shift to a symbolic third party, to the father or to a father figure, that diminishes the sadomasochism of the mother-child dyad and who helps the infans down the road to sublimation?

She did not reflect upon conversion hysteria or hysterical madness, for example. But isn’t the phobic anxiety that internal objects project inside us a form of psychic conversion?

She also underestimated the mother’s desire as well as her hatred, something that her successors, such as Kate Freidlander or D. W. Winnicott, addressed. But did she really underestimate it? Or was she simply engaging in a sort of rhetorical exaggeration that engages in distortion or hyperbole for persuasive effect alone? Perhaps she did so by putting herself in the place of the fragile ego (the baby, the child) rather than external reality (the mother, reality), so she could slowly construct this external reality, as well as the patient’s symbolic creativity, herself.

Klein avoided perversion by reproaching the unfaithful Don Juan for merely wishing to prove to himself that he does not love his mother (whose death he dreads because he loves her with a possessive and destructive feeling) without recognizing in the excess of perverse libido either the force of desire or the defiance of the father, and by seeing in it only a defense against painful dependence.⁸⁰ But isn’t the apparent denigration of desire really a thoughtful and serious reflection on what makes it a fatal wound? For Melanie, desire always bespeaks anxiety with much intensity: only in quieter times does it become a source of pleasure, in which case it is still prepared to seek delight through love and gratitude.

Klein never broached the subject of her impasse regarding the symbolic value of fatherhood. For proof of this, we need only reexamine the following reflection on the role of the father, which Klein likens to the role of a good mother:

The gratification which a man derives from giving a baby to his wife [makes] up for his sadistic wishes towards his mother and making restoration to her…. An additional source of pleasure is the gratification of his feminine wishes by his sharing the maternal pleasure of his wife.⁸¹

Although it is true that Klein acknowledges here the femininity of man, which others have chosen to ignore, it is also true that Melanie generally has little to say about men other than mentioning their dependence on the mother!⁸² In clinical practice, on the other hand, the impact of interpretation does in fact inscribe the paternal function. Through the relevance of what she says, Melanie endorses the role of the familial Other that is assumed by the father, and that the analyst describes through the understated truth of her words. By implicitly safeguarding the function of the father, Melanie thus holds herself out as an analyst and not as a provider of social or maternal assistance. At the same time, this implicit acknowledgment is accompanied by an unprecedented inquiry into the maternal function. The feminists have congratulated themselves on this alternative to Freudian male chauvinism and Lacanian phallocentrism. Other women, on the other hand, have expressed regret about what they consider to be Klein’s “normativism,” that is, her endorsement of the father-mother couple and of heterosexuality as preconditions for a creative development of the psyche.

From that perspective, such feminists as Nancy Chodorow,⁸³ Jessica Benjamin,⁸⁴ and Dorothy Dinnerstein⁸⁵ rely on Klein’s theory of the object relation to show that the Oedipus complex is not the subject’s only ordeal of autonomy, as was believed by Freud and Lacan, who are said to have used the primacy of Oedipus to suggest that woman exhibit inferior moral and libidinal development. But aren’t these theoreticians trying to replace the unconscious with the object relation and thus replace psychoanalysis with a preventative measure of mental well-being? A special issue of Women: A Cultural Review⁸⁶ responds to the excess of dogmatic Freudianism and Lacanianism by advocating a “turn to Klein.” The most important contribution made by this rereading of Klein is its exploration of the early relationship between mother and baby—a relationship that is preoedipal in Freud’s sense and part of an early Oedipus complex in Klein’s sense. The authors seek to clarify the role played by the father in the primary logic of the fantasy, one in which the drive is nevertheless articulated in the context of a primary oral identification with a father desired by the mother.⁸⁷

By focusing her inquiry on the mother (first on the mother’s hold on her child and then on the way the mother is put to death for the sake of symbolism), Melanie Klein the Oresteian situated herself, as I have said, at the heart of the crisis in modern values. Klein essentially contended that making reparation to the father and making restoration to our knowledge of reality are secondary goals of little concern because they have the potential for tyranny and cannot be actualized without the creation of a psychic life. No one has rejected more strongly than Melanie what Jean Gilbert has termed “the lowly desertion of the leader.” Lacking a leader, as the mother is not a leader but an object of fantasy-like power that is the keeper of anxiety, the Kleinian universe is, it turns out, a decentralized universe—the only caveat being that the self, as it loses the object of anxiety and works through that loss, is able to access the life of the mind that Winnicott called “transitionality.”

In order for there to be transitionality, the bond with the mother—not with a phallic mother but with a mother consumed with the desire for the father in the form of the penis—is essential. For Klein, this bond is a terrifying one, one that the inevitably phobic child learns to retreat from (Freud’s Little Hans is the prototype of this) with the help of symbolization. To accomplish this, the sadistic-phobic baby relies on both his own capacity to experience pleasure and delight and his mother’s response to his anxieties, as long as she remains sufficiently benevolent and distant.

Klein does not underplay desire; she demystifies it in parallel to her demystification of the death drive by showing that it can be thought—and is even a source of thought. The theoretical difficulties that the psychoanalyst encouraged along this path are metaphysical aporias that cannot be avoided by anyone familiar with the human being and its therapies. Such aporias enjoy the awesome privilege of placing us in the most withdrawn space we can imagine—a space that, when the promise of paternal protection that accompanies transcendental protection is taken away, the “thinking reed” that we are presumed to be must face the dramatic alternative that consists of the contemporary version of tragedy. This reduces us to wavering between a dissipation of the self and a contraction of identities, between schizophrenia and paranoia. And we can expect to be accompanied by a slew of paranoid, cruel, and fragile mothers. The analyst who presumes to lead us to the symbol is thus obliged to belong to it, to share this cruel and fragile paranoia in order to leave it behind more easily and, in this state of possession/dispossession, to constantly relive—and to make us relive—depression as a precondition for creativity: the analyst’s own creativity, and his or her patients’ creativity as well.

After joining Freud and Lacan in making eroticism our God and making the phallus the guarantor of identity, we are invited to join Klein as we return to the ambitions for freedom that lie within the coarsest and most archaic realms of our psyche, those in which the one (the identity) never manages to be. It is at this point that we realize that Melanie, despite her image as a matronly woman content to settle down in London to run her school, is our contemporary.

Consider the objects of the modern imaginary, the exhibitions or other events that are woven from the fabric of postcoital despair: is it not a bazaar of “internal objects” made up of breasts, milk, feces, and urine, objects underneath words and images of fantasies that are quite cruel and quite defensive, paranoid-schizoid-manic fantasies when they are not simply depressive? This reverses the symbolization process, not to mention the video games whose violence terrifies the associations of parents of school-age children—because such children “project” (and they do project!) themselves onto the video screen until they can longer distinguish between the image and reality—in a modern world that appears to be engulfed by the phantasy in Klein’s retributive and realist sense of the word. What’s different about Melanie’s conception, though, is that in Kleinian practice the analyst accompanies this fantasy, articulates it, and interprets it so it is open to thought—and only then does the analyst get beyond it: not to forbid it, and not to repress it. The consciousless killers from the American high schools, on the other hand, had only a television screen for a baby-sitter and, deprived of access to any speech that could have freed them from the grips of the imaginary, were the castaways of an incomplete depressive position, the classic victims of paranoid-schizoid regression. By predicting the emergence of such children before the Second World War, Melanie was neither snickering nor reveling, for she welcomed them with the compassion of an accomplice who makes us believe that it is not really so bad to play if playing is part of an effort to put the desire for death into words. She posited, however, that we can do so together, in an entirely different way.

Therein lies the true “politics” of Kleinianism, which still leaves unanswered a fundamental question of psychoanalysis: if it is so obvious that the implicit ideology in Klein’s observations provides a chapter of contemporary social philosophy, how does that inform the workings of her clinical practice? Has post-Kleinianism⁸⁸ not already done all that it can do? Current psychoanalytic research is characterized by an ecumenism that draws from various schools of thought (Freudian, Kleinian, Bionian, Winnicottian, Lacanian, and so forth) and refines the precise way of listening appropriate for each patient by remaining concerned about offering interpretations that are sensitive to the new maladies of the soul, and without trying to construct novel systems for untold battles to come. This retreat from militancy is not necessarily a lull, nor does it indicate that psychoanalysis has run its course.

Quite the contrary, in fact, psychoanalysis is being revived in two respects. First, it is exposing itself to other realms of human activity (society, art, literature, and philosophy) that it elucidates with an innovative mind-set, and it is thus expanding and unfolding the meaning of its own concepts outside the confines of clinical practice. Second, by honing in on specific symptoms, psychoanalysis is being stimulated and diversified, which improves its ability to understand and to care for each patient’s unique qualities while avoiding structural generalities—and which is pressing psychoanalytic intervention to the frontiers of signification and biology. As with many other domains, the era of “geniuses” and overarching systems has been replaced today with personal ventures and exchanges that form a network of ideas. Because of—and despite—Klein’s taste for power, which was encouraged by her era and her personal circumstances, at her core she was a forerunner of these two contemporary trends.

Klein believed that the inside of the mother (which is invisible but which is thought to be filled with threatening objects, beginning with the father’s penis) imposed upon both sexes the most archaic anxiety situations: castration anxiety is only a part, admittedly an important one, of the more generalized anxiety that arises from the inside of the body itself. Klein also suggested that “good” objects counterbalance “bad” ones. Finally, Klein contended that thought is what allows psychic interiority to take shape, a depth that is at first grieving, then relieving and joyful, and that it is only thing that can help us conquer our fear of this maternal interior.

From one interior to the next, and from anxiety to thought: the Kleinian topography is a sublimation of the cavity, a metamorphosis of the womb, and a variation on female receptivity. Klein transformed her closeness with an unnameable depth into a form of self-knowledge—before she persuaded us that this imaginary knowledge is viable for everyone, women as well as men. Through psychoanalytic interpretation, the incarnate fantasy of the maternal interior becomes a way of knowing the self: psychoanalysis, and no longer faith, provides the optimal path toward self-knowledge.

With Melanie Klein, the fantasy connected to the mother lies at the heart of human destiny. In our Judeo-Christian culture, this important revaluing of the mother should not be underestimated. The fertility of the Jewish mother was blessed by Jahwe but removed from the sacred space that harbors the meaning of speech. The Virgin Mother then became the empty core of the Holy Trinity. Two thousand years ago the Man of Sorrow, Christ, founded a new religion that lays claim to the father, without wishing to know what he shared in common with his mother. The Kleinian child, phobic and sadistic, is the inner double of this visible and crucified man, his painful inside that is consumed by the paranoid fantasy of an omnipotent mother. That fantasy is one of a killing mother who must be killed, of an incarnate representation of female paranoia in which we discovered the projected paranoid-schizophrenia of our primitive and feeble ego. The subject is nevertheless able to free himself from this mortifying depth, provided, that is, that he can work through it indefinitely until it becomes the only value we still have: the depth of thought.

Like the analyst, but unknowingly so, the mother accompanies her child in this working through that causes him to lose her—and then to use words and thoughts to make reparation to her. The maternal function takes refuge in the alchemy that relies on the loss of self and the Other to attain and to develop the meaning of mortifying desire, but only through the love and gratitude that actualizes the subject. The bond of love with the lost object that is the mother—the mother from whom “I” distance myself—replaces matricide and takes on the aura of thought. It is hardly the least striking example of Melanie Klein’s genius that she used the negative to link the fate of the female with the preservation of the mind and the spirit.