Klein started with the traditional idea of Subject meets Object, but she developed this idea very differently from philosophers, ending up making many strange, mad-sounding claims. Post-Kleinians used the flexibility of her framework to develop all sorts of new ideas, some of which seem at least as mad, if not madder. One of Klein’s early close followers, Wilfred Bion, challenged the idea that the subject is self-contained. In his early work, he treated groups as containers of proto-emotions that manifested themselves in the feelings of their members. As a Kleinian, he suggested that projective identification was initially (and perhaps primarily) about communication rather than control. Unable to cope with what it is experiencing, the baby screams, projecting what is happening into its mother. The mother processes this proto-experience and returns it to the baby in a form the baby can cope with. By processing what is going on inside the baby, she makes it possible for the baby to have experiences. The baby’s initial experiences (and their more complex successors) depend on the uncontained finding the right sort of container.
This may seem a contrived and pretentious re-description of a very ordinary event. A baby cries because it is hungry or because it is afraid. The mother recognises that her baby is distressed, works out what kind of distress it is experiencing and takes action to remove the distress and to reassure it. What is the point of Bion’s redescription? Well, it opens up the issue of how we come to have experiences. He suggests that the raw material of human experience is frighteningly inchoate – it needs to be processed, to be made sense of. This is what the mother does. Her actions (and her example, enable the baby to develop its own capacity to transform the raw material of (conscious) life into thoughts, feelings and experiences. The baby’s sense of self and its ability to have an indefinitely enrichable conscious life is based on its interaction with its mother (and later with other people). This suggestion fundamentally changes Klein’s framework, but the difference between Bion’s account and Klein’s seems less like a difference in scientific theories and more like a difference between ways of understanding the world. It is like the difference between Plato and Aristotle or the difference between Doestoevsky and Tolstoy.
Another British post-Kleinian, Donald Melzer, was an advocate of both Klein and Bion. He summarised the world views of his different psychoanalytic gurus as follows. “If Freud’s world is one of creatures seeking surcease from the constant bombardment of stimuli from inside and out, a world of higher animals, and Melanie Klein’s world is one of holy babies in holy families plagued by the devils of split-off death instinct, Bion’s world is one of the questing mind seeking absolute truth with inadequate equipment”1. Interestingly, all three psychoanalytic thinkers are seen as having decidedly tragic views of the world.
What Melzer liked about Klein was her focus on the inner world as a theatre for generating meaning with the individual’s understanding of the world shaping their behaviour. He characterised her system as “theological” because the individual’s internal objects act as their gods, providing them with an imperfect and but constantly improvable vision of what it means to be good. If the individual wishes to to improve their relationship with their internal objects, they need to acknowledge the bad feelings and bad parts of the self they projected into them. Re-absorbing what had been projected makes it possible for the individual to grow. It also gives them a more stable relation to the world (less splitting and projection) and means the infantile part of their self (their need to be looked after) is contained. The individual move from a paranoid-schizoid position that is all about the self to the depressive position where there is genuine concern for others.
The world conjured up by Klein is an unstable world. What destabilises it is the attribution to human beings of a drive towards destruction as well as a drive for growth. The death drive means the baby responds negatively as well as positively to the world. This internal conflict is projected onto the world. In this way, the baby’s destructive impulses split the object and then split the subject. Melzer, however, was uncomfortable with the idea of the death drive. Instead, he suggested that the destabilising factor is the limited nature of the baby’s capacities. More poetically, he saw the baby as overwhelmed by the impact of its mother’s beauty. It is unable to imagine the inner being that lies beyond its mother’s beautiful outward form. Giving up on the attempt to understand this superior being, the baby resorts to projective identification. Rather than acknowledging the riches of the (inner) mother, it projects itself into the object and seeks to understand its contents based on its own limited perceptions. The self becomes trapped in its own inner object, which leads to a claustrophobic sense of limitation and prevents the self from developing.
Melzer called this doubly-inner space the Claustrum. He distinguished three forms of intrusive projective identification, differentiated by the part of the mother’s body that the self is projected into – the rectum, the genital or the head/breast. This determines whether the Claustrum is experienced as a torture chamber, a hothouse of eroticism or a place of heavenly peace. Whatever the quality of the experience, projection into the Claustrum degrades everything and rules out any possibility of growth. Trapped in the head/breast, the search for wisdom is replaced by a delusion of insight, the aspiration to generosity by an insistence on quid pro quo. The dwellers of the upper Claustrum manifest themselves as selfish, superficial know-it-alls. The genital dwellers are different. They are dominated by a primitive priapic religion where the hope of love and work coming together in the service of creativity is replaced by a belief in the all-dominating power of the phallus. But the worst compartment of the Claustrum is the rectum. This is dominated by hierarchical structures that enforce submission through a constant threat of violence. The faecal penis tyrannises over its concentration-camp prisoners, replacing truth with propaganda, justice with arbitrary punishment and intimacy with emotional manipulation. In Melzer’s view, traditional Kleinian accounts do not fully capture how badly things can go wrong nor offer a sufficiently differentiated picture of what this involves.
Melzer saw Klein’s work as a significant advance on Freud, but he saw Bion as an advance on Klein. Following Bion, he saw human life as not just a battle between love and hate, but as a search for meaning. Klein did posit an epistemophilic instinct (a drive to explore the mother’s body/the world), but for Melzer (and Bion), the search for meaning is more than an instinct – it is the defining feature of human experience. Our lives are a never-ending attempt to make sense of our experience, but unfortunately this is a painful process. For Bion and Melzer, the schizoid-paranoid and the depressive positions recur in a potentially endless cycle. Overwhelmed by a new experience, we resort to the paranoid-schizoid position. Then, if we acknowledge the limitations of our old self, we can learn from the new experience and grow. But it is a struggle to escape the fixed patterns of the past (memory) and of the future (desire) and be brave enough to make contact with the real. When we do, we experience a momentary sense of harmony before we are overwhelmed. The aethetic experience is too hard for us to process and confronts us with the limited nature of our capacities, so we resort to defensive measures. The enemy is not narcissism, omnipotence or paranoia, but our difficulty in accepting the truth that is revealed in any encounter with the real. For Bion, we need a restoration of God (the mother as container) to help us cope and an evolution of God (the formless, the infinite) to help us continue to grow2.
So, what are we to make of all of this? It certainly brings out the extent to which different psychoanalytic theories involve different accounts of the human condition. Are we animals seeking to maximise our pleasures, or conscious beings tormented by our contradictory drives or weary pilgrims struggling to make progress on a never-ending quest? How do we choose between these visions, and does it make sense to ask which of them is true? I am not sure. All the theories were drawn from (and intended to contribute to) work with patients, so perhaps we should go back to the practical situation of the consulting room. Faced with the enigma of a struggling patient, our usual ways of understanding people may run dry and at that point creative and crazy-sounding approaches may be helpful. But it is not just a matter of what is or is not helpful. Ultimately, there is no avoiding the question of which approach (which account of the world) do we think makes most sense. Is it Freud or Klein or Bion or someone else entirely? Intellectually, I am impressed by the elegance and flexibility of Klein’s framework, but I don’t find the underlying view of the world that convincing – too negative a view of the baby and no exploration of the role of the mother (and the outside world). Similarly, while Melzer’s Claustrum seems a potentially interesting way of thinking about the different kinds of immaturity people can get trapped in, I don’t see it as revealing a deep truth about human development. As for Bion, his account is fascinating but rather dark. Is our life really the vale of tears his writings conjure up?
Wittgenstein and Freud 
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