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Introduction:

After his discussion of Fairbairn, Jones, in chapter three, turns to Melanie Klein for additional ways to understand this psychological mechanism of splitting. Fairbairn shows us one strategy we might use to deal with the problem of badness and Klein offers us another. For Fairbairn the badness is first experienced outside the self and is then taken in as a way of dealing with it. For Klein the badness is perceived as being inside and is connected to the endogenously arising aggressive drive. In Klein’s system, badness is dealt with by evacuating and projecting it outside the self. Let’s see how she comes to her views

Melanie Klein:

Klein lived from 1882 to 1960 and became famous for her innovative and controversial work with very troubled children.

Click here for some basic information about Klein you might find helpful.

Klein retained Freud’s notion of the instinctual drives, but departed from Freud by seeing these drives as originally related to an object. In her view, the psychic world of young children, including infants, is teaming with murderous, cannibalistic, and erotic urges. Born into this psychic chaos, we organize our world, Klein believed, by creating good and bad objects corresponding to our experience of love and hate. The intense fears and feelings that mark the beginning of our lives resemble the world of adult psychotics, though Klein is careful to say that this state is normal for the infant, and only psychotic in an adult.

Freud understood human development as progressing through a series of psychosexual stages. Klein saw things differently and proposed instead that we move back and forth between two positions. Each captures a very different quality of experiencing and relating to internal and external objects. As you listen to Klein’s description you might find her language very far-fetched. Bear in mind, however, that she is trying to describe the experience, as she imagined it, of infants before they acquire language. It is therefore necessarily speculative and captures what she understood of human nature.

The first phase of development is what she calls the “paranoid-schizoid” position, which gets abbreviated as “PS.” Right from birth, the infant has complex feelings towards the breast on which it depends for survival. There is the confusing coexistence of love and hate, satisfaction and frustration. In this state, the infant fears her own innate aggressive and destructive impulses resulting from the pains of an empty belly and projects them into the mother, or more specifically into what Klein calls the “bad breast.” Now mother is seen as bad and persecuting, leaving the infant in a state of paranoid anxiety. The Kleinian infant deals with this problem of internal badness, now experienced as outside and persecuting, by becoming “schizoid,” that is, by splitting the mother into the good breast and the bad breast in order to simplify a very complex situation. The well-fed baby projects this good feeling back to the object and believes the breast is good. The baby also projects its frustration and hatred onto the depriving object which is now experienced as the bad breast.

The infant also introjects, that is, takes into herself things she perceives in the outside world. Klein thought the introjected good breast becomes the organizer of the psyche. She saw it as the earliest manifestation of the ego. The bad breast is introjected as an internalized persecuting object and is the earliest manifestation of the super-ego. Through this complex interplay of projection and introjection, the growing infant is eventually able to organize her perplexing inner ferocious and unconscious phantasies and anxieties. By splitting and projecting, the child is protected from her intense desires. Then by introjecting, the child takes in the objects so as to manage them and use them to form the inner psychic structures of the ego and the superego. The infant’s aggression is now safely contained in her relationship to the hated bad breast and is kept at a good distance from her relationship to the beloved good breast. In this first position, the infant achieves emotional equilibrium by keeping the good and the bad separate for if they should intermingle, the bad would destroy the good, leaving the infant undefended against the hostile and persecuting bad breast.

A second phase of development for Klein is the “depressive” position, abbreviated as “D,” and it typically starts to emerge in the 5th month of life. Klein called it the “depressive” position to account for the guilt and depression we feel when we realize we can hurt those we love. In the depressive position, the baby starts to see the mother as a real separate person. The infant recognizes her dependence on her and sees her as a human being in her own right. This position marks the shift away from the paranoid-schizoid position where everything is viewed as an extension of self to this new state of being able to relate to the other as a whole person with her own feelings and experiences. But as splitting and projecting decrease, the baby experiences acute ambivalence in that she now loves and hates the same person. The infant feels guilt and depression for her previous aggressiveness and now wants to care for the loved and needed object and repair the damage done. To sustain this view of her objects as whole, the child needs to believe that her love is stronger than her hate and that she can repair what she has destroyed. She can do this if she has had a sufficient number of good object experiences. Without this surplus of good experiences in childhood, the adult will be more likely to go through life using the defenses of splitting and projecting, wildly idealizing some things as good and keeping them from the contaminating influence of those things deemed as evil.

The depressive position is more advanced than the paranoid-schizoid position and gives the growing child a more realistic picture of the outside world. The ability to move from love and hate, to guilt and then reparation, gives the child and eventually the adult the hope of being able to relate to whole objects and trust her ability to repair things should she move from time to time back into the paranoid schizoid position. Klein felt that a normal healthy adult would move in and out of the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. This is why she called them positions and not stages. We do not leave the PS position once and for all and arrive safely into the maturity of the D position. Rather, we move back and forth, “PS <–> D” as it is sometimes abbreviated, and the maturity of the depressive position is continually gained, lost again, and regained. The maturity of the depressive position is the ability to recognize our projections and bear the guilt of taking them back. It also involves ability to repair what we have destroyed and tolerate the loss of the pseudo-security that splitting affords. Jones points out that for both Fairbairn and Klein the mark of maturity is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, to see things as both good and bad and to be able to avoid both over-idealizing and over-demonizing.

Is the depressive position really the best we can expect? Some have criticized Klein for offering a rather bleak view of human nature. This criticism of Klein is in part due to the fact that “depressive” is perhaps a poorly chosen term. Donald Winnicott, whose ideas we will study in a future Lesson, was not entirely happy with calling a normal process “depressive” and thought we instead should call this a state of “concern” or “ruth” (as opposed to the self-centered unconcern and ruthlessness of the PS position). Nevertheless, the term has remained (Winnicott 1954-5, 264-5). James Grotstein, a contemporary neo-Kleinian, proposes a third position, the “transcendent position,” which he describes as follows:

My conception of the transcendent position differs from that of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions insofar as it is even less time- or stage-bound than they are. Transcendent means having the ability to transcend our defensiveness, our pettiness, our guilt, our shame, our narcissism, our need for certainty, our strictures in order to achieve or to become…one with our aliveness. (Grotstein 2000, 300)

This notion of Grostein’s is at this point still undeveloped. It remains to be seen what he and other neo-Kleinians might do with this idea.

Before we turn to an application of Klein’s views to religion, I will introduce one more of Klein’s ideas. Late in her career Klein came up with another concept, which she called “projective identification,” to describe what she considered a very common experience by which we defensively project a disavowed part, that is a part we refuse to acknowledge as part of us, into another. But since this part of ourselves is now in another, we maintain a connection with and control over it through identification. Mitchell and Black offer some examples of this phenomenon:

Consider the following common types: the person who feels modern society is rife with sexuality, and devotes her life to the detection and obliteration of obscenity and the ferreting out and control of the promiscuous; the person who feels that violence in movies is the greatest plague in contemporary life, and cannot stop talking, often in bloodthirsty terms, about those who promulgate this vice; the person who is enormously attuned to the sufferings and needfulness of others and devotes his life to the relief of others’ afflictions. (Mitchell and Black 1995, 102)

In each example, the person disowns a part of themselves, (e.g, sexuality, aggression, or needfulness), yet stays connected to it and attempts to control it by an identification with those into whom this part is projected, (e.g., the promiscuous, violent movies, or the needy).

All of Klein’s ideas that we have looked at are put to use by Robert Young, an American Kleinian analyst living in England, in an essay on fundamentalism and terrorism written shortly after September 11, 2001. You will notice that he is particularly careful in this paper to point out to us that this mechanism of projective identification, which he uses to analyze these events, is universal and that normal and pathological projective identifications exist on a continuum. From a Kleinian perspective, both hating and idealizing involve the same psychological mechanism of projective identification. Let’s turn now to his essay and see how he uses these ideas both to describe the horrific events and propose a solution.

READ:

There are lengthy appendices at the end of this paper, one on fundamentalism and one on terrorism. Feel free to read them, but the paper is quite long on its own. I am only asking you to read the paper. You can refer to the appendices if you have time and interest.

At the conclusion of this paper, Young carefully spells out how he is using Klein’s ideas to understand fundamentalism and terrorism. Read this section closely. Notice at the end of the paper that he sees mutual projection going on and wonders if there is any room for the concern that can take us to the depressive position. He writes:

At the moment I see two sets of projections, mutual caricatures, mutual incomprehension and underlying fundamentalisms on both sides. Where is the capacity for concern, the ability to see things in mixed, pluralistic, tolerant terms?

You might find it interesting, in light of Young’s observation about mutual projection, to look at Rhetoric of Bush and Bin Laden by Bruce Lincoln. Then go to the “Note” at the top of the page and click on the names of Bush and Bin Laden to read their speeches.

Do you find in these speeches evidence of what Klein might call the “PS” position or the “D” position? Do you find evidence of what she might see as projective identification?

A Kleinian View of Mature Religion:

We’ve seen how both Fairbairn and Klein can help us understand the pathological splitting that sometimes can happen in religion. But are there ways of using any of these ideas to talk about more wholesome expressions of religion, ones that strive to heal such splits? Sophia Forster and Donald Carveth (a psychoanalyst living in Toronto who teaches at York University) have written a paper which shows how Klein’s ideas can be used to distinguish between immature and mature expressions of Christianity.

http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/klein.htm

 

 
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