Melanie Klein

1925: “She’s a dotty woman. But there’s no doubt whatever that her mind is stored with things of thrilling interest. And she’s a nice character.”¹ That was how Alix Strachey described Melanie Klein to her husband, James Strachey, who would become the celebrated editor and translator of the Standard Edition of Freud’s writings and who was one of the leaders of the acclaimed Bloomsbury group in London. While Alix and Melanie were in Berlin together, they were analyzed by Karl Abraham and spent their evenings dancing in “leftist” bars of a more or less popular vein.

1957: Three decades later, Melanie Klein had achieved international renown as the founding mother of child analysis and, as a reformer in the wake of Freud, of the psychoanalysis of adults, particularly psychotics. As she wrote in Envy and Gratitude:

My work has taught me that the first object to be envied is the feeding breast, for the infant feels that it possesses everything he desires and that it has an unlimited flow of milk, and love which the breast keeps for its own gratification. This feeling adds to his sense of grievance and hate, and the result is a disturbed relation to the mother. If envy is excessive, this, in my view, indicates that paranoid and schizoid features are abnormally strong and that such an infant can be regarded as ill…. [In its later forms,] envy is no longer focused on the breast but on the mother receiving the father’s penis, having babies inside her, giving birth to them, and being able to feed them.²

It is particularly creativeness which becomes the object of such attacks. Thus Spenser in “The Faerie Queene” describes envy as a ravenous wolf…. This theological idea seems to come down to us from St Augustine, who describes Life as a creative force opposed to Envy, a destructive force. In this connection, the First Letter to the Corinthians reads, “Love envieth not.”³

Melanie Klein has since become a major figure of indisputable worth—just like the psychoanalysis that she practiced so ingeniously.

At the dawn of the third millennium, the discovery of the unconscious—whether it is considered to be a magnificent experience that has permeated our culture or an insignificant misperception under savage attack in certain quarters—remains an enigma. A century after the term “unconscious” first appeared,⁴ we still have not fully absorbed the Copernican revolution launched by Sigmund Freud and his disciples. Psychoanalysis, which is a product of religion and philosophy as well as of late nineteenth-century medicine and psychiatry, has destroyed those disciplines only to rebuild them. In so doing, it has endorsed the idea that the human soul, which is bound up with the body and language, can not only be understood but, as a locus of pain that is vulnerable to destruction and even death, can become a privileged realm of rebirth as well.

With a passion typical of those who explore the unknown, the pioneers of this discovery made it the core of their very existence. In that spirit, they developed a new form of knowledge that reshaped classical rationality by expanding it to include the imaginary, which strengthens the bonds between two speaking beings. Although many people have been suspicious (and continue to be suspicious) of psychoanalysis—think of Heidegger and Nabokov, to name just the most outspoken critics—some of the most creative men and woman of the twentieth century—from Virginia Woolf to Georges Bataille, from André Breton to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Romain Rolland to Gustav Mahler, from André Gide to Emile Benveniste, and from Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock to Woody Allen—either have read Freud or have lain themselves down on the psychoanalytic couch so they might better understand—or at least experience—this innovative path to self-knowledge, one that is both the precursor of a new form of freedom and a turning point in the history of civilization.

The fratricidal and institutional rifts that have accompanied and disrupted the psychoanalytic movement from its earliest days—and, in fact, throughout all its early history—result from more than just psychotherapists’ close proximity to the very insanity that they endeavor to treat (which is what critics of psychoanalysis suggest). These rifts have not resulted solely from the truths that are often disclosed when powerful drives and words defy the conventions of civilized society. Rather, and more significantly, a more nuanced analysis reveals that the infighting within the analytic movement reflects the cruelty that is endemic to all of human culture precisely because innovations occur only at the outer bounds of possibility.

Mental illness, in fact, is what Freud and his “accomplices” considered to be the royal road toward understanding and liberating the human soul. Before Freud, many moralists and writers, particularly in France, took a first step down that path by describing the madness that lies at the heart of the human soul. Isn’t it true that these precursors to Freud proposed a way of thinking about excess that flies in the face of the doctors and psychiatrists who relegate such excess to the realm of pathology alone? In fact, what do we make of “madness” when it is seen through the civilized lens of a La Rochefoucauld who wrote, “He who lives without madness is not as wise as one might imagine” or through the infernal knowledge of a Rimbaud who proclaimed, “Unhappiness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud, and dried myself in the crime-infested air. And I played the fool to the point of madness.” Madness must not be ignored or brushed aside, but spoken, written, and thought: it is is a formidable transitory state, a tireless source of creativity.

An inherent paradox thus lies at the core of the incomprehension and resistance that psychoanalysis often inspires: How can pathology give voice to truth? By treating psychic malaise and by analyzing ill-being, psychoanalysis explores the logical processes underlying “normal” human experiences as well, and it thus learns to describe the conditions under which such processes degenerate into symptoms. From that perspective, the theory of the unconscious erases the boundary between the “normal” and the “pathological,” and, without ceasing to engage in the analytic cure, it makes itself available to each of us in the form of an intimate journey to the end of the night. A psychiatric lexicon unhappily creeps in here: although psychoanalysis is based in some respects on madness, it is simply not true that analysts apply that label to everyone in an effort to prove all of us crazy. Instead, psychoanalysis approaches madness as if it were a set of models or structures that quietly lurk inside us and that encourage excesses and limitations—but also innovations.

The notion that the life of the mind is rooted in sexuality was the Archimedean point that permitted Freudian psychoanalysis to redefine the boundaries between normalcy and pathology and to bring about one of the most radical dismantlings of metaphysics that our century has ever seen. Freud’s conception of sexuality, which he considered to be energy as well as meaning and biology and as a form of communication with the Other, does not transform the essence of man into something biological, which it has been accused of doing, but immediately incorporates animality into culture. To the extent that we are capable of symbolizing and sublimating, it is because we are endowed with a sexuality that inevitably fosters something that metaphysics considered to be a dualism: body and mind, drive and language. In truth, desire always comprises both energy and intention, and it is by observing the vagaries of sexuality that psychoanalysis appreciates the failures of desire—which are what generate ill-being. Before we could rid ourselves of the guilt surrounding sexuality in a way that once enabled a Viennese Jew to turn sexuality into an object of study and then into the core of psychic life, we first had to wade through our biblical heritage as well as the entire libertarian development of European culture, from the time of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment until the Belle Époque at the end of the nineteenth century. Various libertarian minds have not failed to appreciate this subversive action, but the reach of Freud’s discovery goes even further than that. Freud’s version of sexuality, which deems sex to be neither licentiousness nor a source of provocation, is a focal point for solidifying the “essence of man” into a desire that is so indissolubly energetic and laden with meaning that it is inscribed with both the fate that holds us in check and the uniqueness that grants us our freedom. Freud’s sexuality, indeed, is a desire that lies at the crossroads between the genetic and the subjective, between weightiness and grace.

In that sense, the soul, the descendant of what the ancients called a psyche, has become a “psychic apparatus” whose “topographies,” though malleable (unconscious/preconscious/conscious, and then id/ego/and superego), never stop infiltrating the various economies and figures of desire, which themselves are always already psychosomatic. Freud staked his reputation on the notion that this double-sided desire could be detected in a discourse addressed, through transference, toward the analyst-Other. Freud’s was a wager that brimmed with optimism—a wager that was not spared the most brutal disillusionment, that made the ear the most important organ, and that made textual analysis the ultimate Judeo-Christian reference point in this prolonged adventure.

The heterogeneity between mind and body that Freud believed was woven by sexuality can be heard in discourse only if it opens up its surface, which is mastered by the conscience—and only if it carves out a space for the breach of a different logical process. The entire edifice of the thinking subject, who inherits the history of metaphysics and who is sealed shut by the Cartesian cogito, is disrupted as a result. The Freudian unconscious, for its part, becomes the “other area”–-accessible through the conscious but irreducible to it—that opens itself up to the analytic ear. The unconscious is able to avoid this irrationality: far from being an irreducible chaos, the unconscious possesses a structure all its own, however different that structure may be from the structure of the conscious. By overcoming the psychological secret that harbors familial shame and social mores, the unconscious shapes me to an unimaginable degree without my knowing as much. Once I am able to access my unconscious, moreover, my unconscious spares me my own inhibitions by restoring my freedom. I am not responsible for my unconscious, but if I do not respond for it, I respond to it—by rethinking it and re-creating it.

From that vantage point, unconscious sexuality offers a new perspective on the traditional difference between the two sexes. It is not the least of the revelations introduced by the psychoanalytic revolution to have participated in and stimulated the modern overhaul of the relationship between the sexes. It was by listening to female hysteria that Freud fine-tuned his ear to the logic of the unconscious. A host of female “characters” or “case studies” supported Freud’s founding of psychoanalysis: think of Anna O., Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, and Elisabeth von R., not to mention Dora, the most famous of all, as well as many other women, some of them better known than others. Freud, who in no way considered this symptomatology to be the sole domain of women, caused much controversy by acknowledging the existence of male hysteria as well, which was one of the ways he questioned the traditional split between men and women. Psychoanalysis begins by recognizing the psychic bisexuality endemic to each of the two biologically constituted sexes, and it concludes by revealing the sexual uniqueness of us all. Thus, although most analytical schools of thought assert that the heterosexuality that founds the family is the only form of sexuality to guarantee the subjective individuation of children, psychoanalysis explores and recognizes a sexual polymorphism beneath all types of sexual identity, and it relies on that recognition when it holds itself out as an ethics of subjective emancipation.

This intellectual context made it easier for women to participate in psychoanalytic practice, a domain that capitalized on women’s talents more explicitly than did the other disciplines that reflected, to varying degrees, the social and political upheaval of the day. Despite the resistance and hostilities that such women faced in a male-dominated environment, and despite their exposure to the rigid and traditional hierarchies of the medical profession, many of them joined the psychoanalytic revolution, which later credited them for their contributions: think of Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sabina Spielrein, Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud, Joan Riviere, Susan Isaacs, Paula Heimann, Jeanne Lampl-De Groot, Marie Bonaparte, and especially Melanie Klein, just to name a few of Freud’s female contemporaries.

Worshiped to the point of dogmatic fanaticism by her disciples—and held in utter contempt by her detractors, some of whom did not hesitate to deny her the analyst title—Melanie Klein (1882–1960) wasted little time in becoming the most original innovator, male or female, in the psychoanalytic arena. Klein successfully introduced a new approach to the theory and practice of the unconscious without ever abandoning the fundamental principles of Freudianism (which distinguishes her from Jung and from the other “dissidents”). Klein’s clinical and theoretical writings amount less to a canonical text than to the development of a potent practical intuition that, on the heels of many painful controversies, inspired the productive work so highly prized by modern psychoanalysis today, particularly in Great Britain.

Without Klein’s innovation, the clinical practice that focuses on children as well on psychosis and autism, a practice dominated by such names as W. R. Bion, D. W. Winnicott, and Frances Tustin, would never have come to pass. We will see how this woman—an unhappy wife and a depressed mother who began an analysis with Ferenczi that she completed with Abraham and who was neither a physician nor a holder of any advanced degree—completed her first study on the psychoanalysis of young children in 1919 by relying on the analyses of her own children, and who then became a psychoanalyst herself in 1922 at the age of forty. In 1926 Klein moved to London and rose to meteoric fame with the 1932 publication of her collected essays The Psychoanalysis of Children. The differences of opinion she had with Freud and the disputes she had with Anna Freud, which culminated in the Great Controversial Discussions of the British Psycho-Analytical Society between 1941 and 1944, diminished neither her influence nor her resolve. In fact, Klein’s direct and indirect influence has not stopped growing since her death, particularly in England and Latin American but also in France, and she has left her mark not only on clinical psychoanalysts but on sociologists and feminists as well.

Klein’s major divergences with Freud have been well documented. Those differences were never styled as a true rejection of his thinking, however, but as a way to complete his theory of the unconscious. While the Freudian unconscious is structured by desire and repression, Melanie Klein focused on the newborn’s psychic pain, on his splitting processes, and on his early capacity for a rather limited form of sublimation. The Freudian drive has a source and an aim, but no object, while in Klein’s view, the newborn’s drives are directed from the outset toward an object (the breast or the mother). In Klein’s world the Other is always already there, and the dramas of the early bond between the object and an ego—with its just as early superego, which is generated by an extremely early Oedipus complex—unfold with the horror and the sublimity of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Freud oriented the psychic life of the subject around the castration ordeal and the function of the father; Melanie Klein, who did not ignore these realities, buttressed them with a maternal function that was missing from the founding father of psychoanalysis’s theories. As a result, Klein ran the risk of reducing the oedipal triangle into a dyad (although the couple was always present in her theory in the primary form of a “combined” parental object). At the same time, her efforts to privilege the mother in such a way hardly amount to raising the mother into some sort of cult, as Klein’s adversaries have been so quick to accuse her of doing. In truth, matricide, which Klein was the first to have the courage to consider, is, along with envy and gratitude, at the origin of our capacity to think. Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis was based on transference love, although he never completely theorized it; Klein, for her part, analyzed the maternal transference that her young patients directed toward the analyst-maternal substitute that she was, and she lent her ear to the fantasies that emerge when children play and that generate countertransference (as Klein’s disciples pointed out) in the analyst herself. Dreams and language for Freud, the fantasy that permeates play for Klein: it was not only the young age of Klein’s patients, who had not yet acquired language and who had not yet experienced roadblocks to speech, that demanded this new development in analytic technique. The Kleinian fantasy is at the heart of psychoanalysis for both the analyst and the patient; it is even more heterogeneous than is the Freudian fantasy, which itself is made up of both disparate conscious and unconscious elements and which the founder of psychoanalysis defined as being of “mixed blood.” The Kleinian phantasy (as the Kleinians spell the word), which consists of drives, sensations, and acts as well as words, and that is manifested just as much in a child at play as in an adult who describes his drives and sensations from the analytic couch using a discourse bereft of any motor manifestations, is a veritable incarnation, a carnal metaphor, what Proust would call a transubstantiation.

This conceptual complexity is not unique to the Kleinian fantasy. As we will see, all of our author’s notions prove to be ambiguous, ambivalent, and reflective of logical processes that are more circular than dialectical. Does this mean that our theorist was weak-minded? Or, on the other hand, does it vindicate the analytic insight that, by seizing upon regression, does not even require the notion of the “archaic” in order to make repression act as a repetition or a reduplication, or even as a subtle link between the substance and the meaning that dominate our thoughts and behavior in the same way as the major signs of the unconscious?

Once Klein’s thought was consolidated into a veritable school of thought, it claimed to understand the unconscious, whose inner workings it often oversimplified. Klein’s detractors, in fact, went so far as to accuse her of thinking that she herself was the unconscious! And yet, if we follow the development of Klein’s theories and the alchemy of her “case studies” along with the evolution of her notions, we will be amazed to discover a permanent opening of the analyst’s unconscious that emerged alongside the unconscious of her patients. The relationship that ensues is one of “at-one-ment,” to use the term that W. R. Bion, one of Klein’s most original followers, invented based on the notion of “to be at one with.” Such a relationship is not too far removed from the pain that precedes the capacity to symbolize that same pain in order to get beyond it and to re-create that infinite fantasy known as life.

Because Klein understood anxiety, that conduit of pleasure, more deeply than did anyone else, she turned psychoanalysis into the art of caring for the capacity for thought. Attentive to the death drive that Freud had already incorporated into psychic life in his “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Klein considered the death drive to be the primary agent for our distress, but also—and especially—for our capacity to become creatures of symbols. Freud essentially taught us that the repression of pleasure generates anxiety and the symptom. Under what conditions are the anxieties that tear us apart amenable to symbolization? That is the question that Klein uses as she reformulates the analytic problem, a question that places her work—unwittingly so since she was most notably a courageous clinician and in no way a “master of thought”—at the heart of humanity and the modern crisis of culture.

Yet beneath the apparent self-assurance of this woman, who became the leader of a school of thought, lay an exceptionally close relationship with anxiety, both in other people and in herself. Her cohabitation with anxiety, which was symbolized and thus made tolerable because it came to be superseded by thought, gave her the impetus and the strength she needed to avoid retreating from psychosis. On the contrary, in fact, Klein was more concerned with psychotic states than was Freud. Erasmus had already written his In Praise of Folly (1511) to communicate to Renaissance humanity that freedom is rooted in borderline experiences. When Freud, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), taught us that our dreams represent our private madness, he was not denying illness as such but, rather, sketching out a fuller understanding of illness as being our own “uncanniness” and associating it with care as much as with benevolence. By detecting in the newborn a “paranoid-schizoid” ego or by pointing out that the “depressive position” is a precondition for language acquisition, Klein familiarized us with madness and exposed us to its inner workings.

Although Klein was moved by the dramatic history of the European continent, which culminated in the delirium of the Nazis, she did not focus on the political aspects of the madness that tainted the twentieth century. At the same time, even if she shielded herself from the horrors that surrounded her, Klein’s analysis of private psychosis, whether in children or in adults, helps us identify the most deep-seated mechanisms that—along with economic and ideological influences—paved the way for the destruction of psychic space and the annihilation of the life of the mind that has threatened the modern era. Madness will prove to be the most pressing political characteristic of our day, and we would be well served to remember that psychoanalysis has been its contemporary—not because psychoanalysis has participated in a version of nihilism contemporaneous with secularization and that generated at once the death of God, totalitarian regimes, and “sexual liberation,” but because, in the context of the deconstruction of metaphysics that we experience through varying degrees of pleasures and dangers, it has led us to the heart of the human psyche and has allowed us to see its madness, which is both its driving force and its most fundamental limitation. Melanie Klein ranks among those who have done the most to further our understanding of our being as an endemic state of ill-being in all its diverse manifestations: schizophrenia, psychosis, depression, mania, autism, delays and inhibitions, catastrophic anxiety, fragmentation of the ego, and so forth. Although Klein’s work does not give us a ready-made fix to avoid such ill-being, she helps us adorn it with an optimal support system and an opportunity for change with a view toward a possible rebirth.

Even at this early stage, if we look past the particular destinies and differences between Hannah Arendt’s and Melanie Klein’s work, we can detect some similarities between their respective geniuses. Both women were interested in the object and the social bond, were drawn to the destruction of thought (“evil” for Arendt and “psychosis” for Klein), and resisted linear modes of reasoning. To those similarities were added some existential parallels: the two intellectuals, both of whom emerged from secular Jewish worlds, appropriated Christian philosophy, Enlightenment humanism, and contemporary science in a uniquely critical and highly personal way. In so doing, they endeavored to develop a certain freedom of behavior and thinking that is truly exceptional as compared with the existence of the other women and men of their day. Arendt and Klein, who were dissidents in their respective professional environments and who were subject to hostility from conformist factions even though they were also capable of fighting to the death to develop and defend their innovative ideas, were rebels whose very genius was rooted in the fact that they ventured to think.

I will attempt now to follow more methodically the evolution and the crystallization of the unique qualities that made Melanie Klein the boldest reformer in the history of modern psychoanalysis.