Freud was a restless thinker, always challenging established positions including those he himself established. Unlike with Wittgenstein, however, it is hard to break his work into clear periods, since he rarely abandoned his ideas entirely, generally preferring to modify elements of his theory rather than rebuild the edifice from the ground up. As a result, his work provides a rich body of ideas rather than a well-architected system. Melanie Klein was a very different kind of thinker. She developed her ideas very systematically with new ideas building naturally and easily on what had gone before. The result is a theoretical framework that combines simplicity, power and flexibility.
The framework starts with two contrasting pairs: the Subject and the Object, good feelings and bad feelings. At birth, the Subject is confronted with a much more powerful Object that is sometimes linked with good feelings (pleasure, satisfaction) but more generally with bad feelings (hunger, anxiety). This leads the Subject to split the not-self into a good Object (that generates the good feelings) and a bad Object (that generates the bad feelings). The Subject seeks to absorb the good Object so its good feelings will no longer be dependent on something beyond its control. It seeks to destroy the bad Object in order to stop experiencing bad feelings. But splitting the Object also splits the Subject. It is like what happened to Empedeclos, who wanted to align himself fully with Love only to discover that in hating Hate the enemy had crept into his own breast. In this case, the Subject discovers that part of its self is full of bad feelings and wants to do bad things. It seeks to get rid of the bad parts of its self and its bad feelings by projecting them onto the bad Object, making the bad Object even worse. Unfortunately, the Subject absorbs all Objects it comes into contact with, so it introjects bad Objects as well as good one. From a very simple starting point, we end up with a scenario full of possibilities – a world split into good and bad Objects and a Subject full of internal objects, some of which it is terrified of losing and the rest of which are constantly threatening to do bad things to it and to its good objects.
The basic elements of the framework are enriched by three further ideas. Firstly, internal objects are seen as dynamic and in a continuous two-way relationship with the Subject. So, the Subject can relate to (and be related to) by its internal (whole) objects in all the ways that two people can relate to each other. Secondly, the Subject’s projection of its bad self and its bad feelings is seen not just as an attempt to get rid of the bad elements but as an aggressive attempt to control the Object. So, now we have parts of the self inside the not-self as well as parts of the not-self inside the self (internal objects). Thirdly, internal objects are seen as reflecting the way we experience Objects. So, we introject not just whole living beings but also things or part objects.
Accordingly, our inner world is seen as containing not just the mother, but her breast, her body and the riches it contains including babies, the father’s phallus etc. Furthermore, since introjection is based on phantasy (how we experience the world), a range of bizarre internal objects can be generated, e.g. a combined parent internal object or an internal object made up of the breast and the phallus. At this point, we do indeed seem to have entered a mad world, but what I have been trying to emphasise is, firstly, the Bach-like manner in which a small number of ideas are used to build a complex model, and, secondly, the flexibility this model offers in terms of thinking about and exploring what might be going on between two people. The model may of be applied in a crude or in a sophisticated manner, but it is never going to leave you at a loss for potential hypotheses about what might be happening.
Kleinians put a huge emphasis on unconscious fantasy (or “phantasy”), but their phantases are not like normal fantasies. Many people are deluded about their driving skills – some openly proclaim that they are great drivers, while others may not say this but demonstrate through their actions that this is what they believe. When this unconscious fantasy is made conscious, what is revealed is a perfectly reasonable claim (“my driving skills put me in the top 10% of drivers in this country”) that is untrue. By contrast, Kleinian phantases would not constitute reasonable claims if they were openly and consciously made. If I told you that during the early part of my life, I absorbed my parents and they are now living inside me, you would think I had gone mad. This is not the sort of claim you can consciously or unconsciously believe to be true. It is a metaphor, a way of talking about the continuing impact my early interaction with my parents has on my life.
Kleinians would not like the suggestion that they are using a metaphor. They claim they are talking about how things really are for the individual – their formulations are the only way of capturing the individual’s actual experience. Their resistance to paraphrasing their claims may reflect the fear that their claims will be watered down. Their talk of internal parental objects doesn’t just mean that our experience of our parents shapes the whole of our lives (even after our parents are dead). It means more than that and what it means varies between people. Simplistic translations give a sense of what Kleinians want to talk about, but they do not provide a framework for exploring the complex experiences of individuals. In the view of Kleinians, we are better placed to explore the impact someone’s parents had on them, if we think of them as engaged in a life-long two-day relationship with their inner parents than if we focus on the truistic claim that parents play a key role in shaping the lives of their children.
The reluctance of Kleinians to acknowledge that their emphasis on internal objects is a metaphor sometimes leads them to make very strange statements. For example, one introductory text suggests that the mental processes of someone becoming an emotionally important figure for a baby (introjection) and of the baby trying to get rid of its bad feelings and the bad parts of its self (projection) are experienced as bodily processes because “at the youngest ages the processes in the body are not fully distinguished from the processes in the mind”1 . They are felt to be the same. This is strange. How can becoming attached to someone be felt to be the same as the physical process of sucking at the breast? As the milk moves from the baby’s mouth down its throat and into its stomach, this generates pleasant feelings of warmth in the different parts of the baby’s body. Does the baby similarly experience its growing attachment to its mother initially in the mouth, then in the throat and finally in the stomach? Surely not. The baby is simultaneously satisfying its hunger and developing a bond with its mother and it may not distinguish these two processes in the way that we as observers can, but it seems odd to suggest that it confuses them.
So, why do Kleinians make this sort of claim? The point they want to emphasise is that we experience our interaction with others in primitive, non-rational ways. We are not minds that happen to be attached to bodies, we are living entities whose different aspects (mind and body or mind, body and spirit or whatever) are intimately bound up with each other. After a haircut, I feel lighter and freer, but this is not because I confusedly think that the barber simultaneously trimmed back my over-long hair and my exaggerated worries. The point is that the state of our bodies and the state of our minds continually affect each other. It is therefore not surprising that we often think, feel and talk about our emotional states in concrete, physical terms. After eating too much, I may not just feel bloated but also have an increased sense of my rapaciousness (“all I do is stuff myself”). Conversely, after taking a dump, I may feel better in my body but also psychologically more positive (“maybe after all it is possible to get rid of some of the crap inside me”). When people (other than Kleinians) insist on the literal identity of mental and physical processes, we tend to treat them as mad, but what they do is related to what we all do and reflects fundamental aspects of what it is like to be the conscious embodied animals that we are.
The emphasis on internal objects can also lead to other strange-sounding statements. For example, when describing the impact on Melanie Klein of the death of her son, Hans, in a climbing accident, the book quoted above states: “Her loved son was dead, but the pain came from the experience that he was dead inside her as well” 2. This sounds as if it does not matter whether our loved ones are alive or dead, all that matters is whether they feel alive or dead to us. But, of course, what happens in the real world does matter – and Kleinians do not really deny this.
So, what difference does it make if we approach the impact on someone of the loss of a loved one in terms of the death inside them of an internal object? Freud’s account of mourning suggests that we become angry with the person who abandoned us by dying and then identify with them in an attempt to hold onto them and as a way of finding an outlet for our negative feelings. Klein builds on this by emphasising other (potential) impacts on our inner world. We may experience a reduction in our sense of ourselves as people who are capable of loving other people and capable of protecting those we love. Their death feels like the death of a part of us. Furthermore, since it is love that connects us to other people, our connectedness with others (and with the world) may feel reduced. We may feel dead inside and the world may feel dead to us. So, what sounds like a mad way of putting things may provide a useful framework for trying to understand the experiences someone who has lost a loved one may be going through.
Probably the biggest objection to Kleinianism is that it is unbalanced. If Freud is (allegedly) all about sex, Klein seems to be all about violence. The baby is seen as being full of intense negative feelings that lead to attacks on its self and on its mother/the world around it. The baby does not just hate the bad, it hates the good (which makes it feel inferior), and it wants to destroy both. In Freud, the death drive aims at returning to the tension-free state of inorganic existence. In Klein, it aims at universal destruction.
A different but not unrelated imbalance in Klein is that the baby is seen as the source of all problems, while the mother/primary caregiver (and the rest of the world) are not treated as making any contribution to the difficulties the baby may face. This reflects the framework’s origins in a Subject meets Object narrative that prioritises Subject-focussed explanations without any supporting assumptions or hypotheses about the Object. An explanation only “works” if it shows what the Subject gets out of it. In Freud, the Subject needs to satisfy its drives, and in Klein, the Subject needs to act to improve the state of its inner world. Both accounts have difficulty with altruism and empathy. If I want to help others, this must be because there is something in it for me. If I feel empathy with someone, this must be because I for some reason identify with them (i.e. fail to recognise that they are not me).
For Kleinians, the altruistic things we do have the (selfish or self-oriented) aim of repairing our internal objects. “Those people in the external world to whom one makes some caring reparation stand as substitutes for the internal objects who are believed to be damaged, suffering or dead ” 3. The same goes for working to improve the state of the planet, tackling climate change or taking up a caring profession such as psychoanalysis4. Genuine concern for others seems to be ruled out.
But what about gratitude – surely Klein talks about that as well as about envy? To some extent she does, but gratitude fits much less comfortably into her framework. Envy is easy to explain. The Subject experiences negative feelings towards the Good Object because it makes the Subject feel inferior and dependent, but how could it get to gratitude? The good Object generates good feelings in it, and it will want to protect the good Object and encourage it to continue generating those feelings, but it is not clear how you move from that to gratitude, i.e. a desire to do good to the Object purely for the Object’s sake. So, how might one try to avoid this insistence on all explanations being self-oriented? One way would be to put more focus on our social nature and to move away from the treatment of the individual as an isolate. But doing this would lead to a different kind of framework, one not based on a Subject-meets-Object narrative.
Wittgenstein and Freud 
Leave a comment