NP: A cliffnotes ramp-up on Melanie Klein

[Glenn Scheper]

    Terse Bio; fact 1.

Melanie Klein found that even though children do not have a sense of illness in 
the adult sense, they suffer from acute anxieties.
  -- http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/klein2.html
  Melanie Klein


    Good versus bad objects:

Perhaps the most fundamental of these processes were projection and 
introjection, which described the infant's first, primitive attempts to 
differentiate himself from the world, inside from outside, self from other, 
based on the prototype of oral incorporation (and spitting out) and the infant's 
relation to his first, nurturing/frustrating object, the mother's breast. The 
first objects were not the mature, "whole" objects of Oedipal development, but 
primitive "part" objects whose existence for the infant was determined solely by 
its function in the infant's world.

The early objects—beginning with the breast—were experienced alternately as 
"good" or "bad" according to whether they were perceived as nurturing or 
destructive; and again partly on the model of the breast, the infant took in 
(introjected) or dispelled (projected) them according to their relative safety 
or danger.

Deprivation, the experience of need, and frustration, even though emanating from 
the infant's own body, were perceived during this phase as persecutory, and the 
infant responded by putting them outside of himself, "projecting" or throwing 
them away.

Klein saw the infant's efforts to bind and modify persecutory and depressive 
anxieties as the central struggle in the infant's development, and as the 
essential precursor to all subsequent mental development. Through this 
progressive process, the anxieties were modified, structuralization increased, 
and the anxieties and impulses that gave rise to them were themselves 
diminished. She saw all defense as directed against these anxieties...
  -- http://science.jrank.org/pages/10906/Psychoanalysis-Melanie-Klein-Object-Relations.html
  Psychoanalysis - Melanie Klein And Object Relations


    Objects, Drives

The central thesis in Melanie Klein's object relations theory was that objects 
play a decisive role in the development of a subject and can be either 
part-objects or whole-objects, i.e. a single organ (a mother's breast) or a 
whole person (a mother). Consequently both a mother or just the mother's breast 
can be the locus of satisfaction for a drive. Furthermore, according to 
traditional psychoanalysis, there are at least two types of drives, the libido 
(mythical counterpart: Eros), and the death drive (mythical counterpart: 
Thanatos). Thus, the objects can be receivers of both love and hate, the 
affective effects of the libido and the death drive. Another use of part-object 
vs. whole-object relates to the inability of young children to conceive of an 
object which can be both 'good' and 'bad' (e.g., a loving yet 
sometimes-frustrating mother). Because of this inability, children view objects 
as either all-good or all-bad, thus only seeing a part of that object instead of 
the object's whole good/bad reality.
  -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_relations_theory
  Object relations theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


   Splitting! Love, guilt [of destructive fantasies], reparation, integration:

"The main processes which come into play in idealization are also operative in 
hallucinatory gratification, namely, splitting of the object and denial of both 
frustration and of persecution. The frustrating and persecuting object is kept 
widely apart from the idealized object. However, the bad object is denied, as is 
the whole situation of frustration and the bad feelings (pain) to which 
frustration gives rise. This is bound up with denial of psychic reality. The 
denial of psychic reality becomes possible only through strong feelings of 
omnipotence--an essential characteristic of early mentality. Omnipotent denial 
of the existence of the bad object and of the painful situation is in the 
unconscious equal to annihilation by the destructive impulse. it is, however, 
not only a situation and an object that are denied and annihilated--it is an 
object relation which suffers this fate, and therefore a part of the ego, from 
which the feelings towards the object emanate, is denied and annihilated as 
well."

"...feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby 
in response to the love and care of his mother. The power of love - which is the 
manifestation of the forces which tend to preserve life - is there in the baby 
as well as the destructive impulses, and finds its first fundamental expression 
in the baby's attachment to his mother's breast, which develops into love for 
her as a person. My psycho-analytic work has convinced me that when in the 
baby's mind the conflicts between love and hate arise, and the fears of losing 
the loved one become active, a very important step is made in development. These 
feelings of guilt and distress now enter as a new element into the emotion of 
love. They become an inherent part of love, and influence it profoundly both in 
quality and quantity."

"Reparation...is a wider concept than Freud's concepts of undoing in the 
obsessional neurosis and of reaction formation, for it includes the variety of 
processes by which the ego feels it undoes harm done in phantasy, restores, 
preserves, and revives objects.

"Mourning...involves the repetition of the emotional situation the infant 
experienced during the depressive position. For under the stress of fear of loss 
of the loved mother, the infant struggles with the task of establishing and 
integrating his inner world, of building up securely the good objects within 
himself."
  -- http://mythosandlogos.com/Klein.html
  Melanie Klein


    Terser Bio & Theory: these two, [& sexuality, envy]:

Paranoid Schizoid Position

Klein also wrote about the use of projective identification. In projective 
identification it was not the impulse only, but parts of the self and bodily 
products that were in fantasy projected into the object (Segal, 1980). When pain 
came, she said, one would put the pain on someone else. Then the other was the 
persecutor (Grosskurth, 1986). The aims of projective identification could be 
manifold: getting rid of an unwanted part of oneself, a greedy possession and 
scooping out of the object, control of the object, and so on. One of the results 
was identification of the object with the projected part of the self.

Depressive Position

A more evolved state was Klein's Depressive Position. According to Klein, one 
would realize that the mother that one hated was also the mother that one loved. 
The depressive position took place when one took in the mother as a whole 
object. One would inhibit the need to attack, and contain the feeling into 
oneself. This led to taking in and tolerating more pain. Klein's theory was also 
linked to ambivalence; one could love and hate the mother or any person and 
still have a relationship (Grosskurth, 1986).
  -- http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/klein.html
  Melanie Klein


    symbolism [& time/memory, loss/shadow , triangular space, envy, suicide]:

Klein's discussion of symbolization, integral to our understanding of creative 
process and representation and so important to theatricality, is connected to 
what she calls the depressive position. An illusion of unmediated union once 
existed between the child and his/her outside world (parents); however, when 
consciousness developed, an acute feeling of loss and guilt ensued. To 
reintegrate a sense of self with the outside world, the individual developed a 
pattern of substitution for this sense of loss. Substitution is phantasy and the 
symbol, disguised feelings or things.
  -- http://theliterarylink.com/klein.html
  Melanie Klein


    Got good-objects? [Mom, God, Oedipus]

The superego which attacks the very value of human understanding is like a 
fundamentalist God which demands total devotion . The story of Oedipus and his 
internal and external objects is revisited in a very original 'reconstructive' 
manner, as a narrative dominated by the allegiance to this God-like superego 
and the lack of human understanding.
  -- http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/brenmanintro.htm
  The Melanie Klein Trust: Introduction to Recovery of the Lost Good Object: Gigliola Fornari Spoto


    Glossary (Cram for your final exam):

CONTAINMENT. This a term employed by Wilfred Bion as the interaction between the 
mother and the infant. Bion believed all psychological, universally dissolve 
when the mind acts as receiver of communicative content which the mother does in 
the state of reverie by using her own alpha function. It connotes the capacity 
for transformation of the data of emotional experience into meaningful feelings 
and thoughts. The mother's capacity to withstand the child's anger, 
frustrations, and intolerable feelings, becomes the container for these affects. 
This can occur if the mother can sustain intolerable behaviors long enough to 
decode or detoxify painful feelings into a more digestible form.
  -- http://www.joanlachkarphd.com/asp/definitions.asp
  What is psychohistory? The V spot? Is there such a thing as self psychology? Definitions help.


    epistemology

It is important to recognise that the child’s use of external reality is never 
anything more than an attempt to better understand inner psychic reality. 
Reality is itself understood in terms of the doubling bifurcation of images. So 
there is, in effect, nothing but unconscious phantasy , on one hand, and the 
forms and images that flit across the perceptual screen, on the other.
...
Klein’s notion of truth at the very least puts the possibility of any objective 
truth in suspense.
  -- http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/klein.htm
  The Return to Melanie Klein: Acquiring Knowledge


   for extra credit

...the axis of existence, which con-sists of a Self that "stands out" and ex-ists 
in relation to an Otherness -- in both the individual unconscious and the bodies 
of society, law and religion.

The mother's job is to fail optimally at her job of primary preoccupation with 
the baby, by allowing non-destructive, non-retaliatory, frustration to 
contribute to the formation of inner imaginative experience in the gap between 
hallucination and gratification. This process of optimal failure and frustration 
is the facilitating environment.

The three dimensions of psychological space are the outline or the projection of 
a higher-dimensional structure into spacetime. The three axes are related as 
structuring polarities of Being -- Existence formed by the oppositions of self 
and other, Life formed by the opposition of future and past, and Experience 
formed by the opposition of sensation and perception. Linguistically: higher 
power, lower self, face the future, put the past behind you, you're left, I'm 
right. The center cannot hold.

Finally, we add the classical virtues and vices, known in our times as emotions, 
to our model....
  -- http://www.psyche.com/psyche/cube/cube_psyche.html
  Project for a Scientific Metapsychology: Cube of Psychological Space: Cognitive and Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Mappings:
An Intergrated Framework for the Metaphors of Embodied Experience


    Klein & Fritz: Hah! curiosity, learning, freedom

So Mrs. Klein began a psychoanalytic education with her son with the idea of 
enlightening him in what she called, "sexual matters." By answering any of his 
questions with honesty, she thought she could help him avoid the future of 
neurotic tendencies and also, "deprive sexuality at once of its mystery and of a 
great part of its danger"
  -- http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/britzman.htm
  The Return of "The Question Child": Reading Ma Vie en Rose through Melanie Klein, by Deborah P. Britzman


    Rounding it out: Oedipus, epistimophilia; Various advanced topics.

Integration of the depressive position -- which we can now see as resolution of 
the Oedipus complex -- is the sine qua non of the development of 'a capacity for 
symbol formation and rational thought'
If the link between the parents perceived in love and hate can be tolerated in 
the child's mind, it provides him with a prototype for an object relationship of 
a third kind in which he is a witness and not a participant. A third position 
then comes into existence from which object relationships can be observed. Given 
this, we can also envisage being observed. This provides us with a capacity for 
seeing ourselves in interaction with others and for entertaining another point 
of view whilst retaining our own, for reflecting on ourselves whilst being 
ourselves'

The most controversial issue is whether an external Other has to be involved in 
a projective identifications. Americans say yes; English Kleinians say no -- 
that one can project into parts of one's own mind.

The phantasied onslaughts on the mother follow two main lines: one is the 
predominantly oral impulse to suck dry, bite up, scoop out and rob the mother's 
body of its good contents... The other line of attack derives from the anal and 
urethral impulses and implies expelling dangerous substances (excrements) out of 
the self and into the mother. Together with these harmful excrements, expelled 
in hatred, split-off parts of the ego are also projected onto the mother or, as 
I would rather call it, into the mother. These excrements and bad parts of the 
self are meant not only to injure but also to control and to take possession of 
the object. In so far as the mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self, 
she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self.
  -- http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/pap128h.html
  MELANIE KLEIN II


    Part 1 of it: Flesh on the skeleton; Phantasies.

This general function for phantasy is repeated in Susan Isaacs' definition. The 
'"mental expression" of instinct is unconscious phantasy... There is no impulse, 
no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious 
phantasy' (Isaacs, 1952, p. 83). ?The first mental processes... are to be 
regarded as the earliest beginnings of phantasies. In the mental development of 
the infant, however, phantasy soon becomes also a means of defence against 
anxieties, a means of inhibiting and controlling instinctual urges and an 
expression of reparative wishes as well... All impulses, all feelings, all modes 
of defence are experienced in phantasies which give them mental life and show 
their direction and purpose' (ibid.).
  -- http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/pap127h.html
  MELANIE KLEIN I


    A paper lauded elsewhere. Death instinct, [P.I., containers, much more...]

For Klein, this fear of annihilation is the primary anxiety, more basic than 
birth anxiety, separation anxiety, castration anxiety. Where Freud attributes 
the deflection of the death instinct to 'the organism', Klein attributes it to 
the ego (1948, pp. 28-30; 1957, pp. 190-191; 1958, p. 237). Klein thinks that 
part of the death instinct is projected into the primal object, the breast, 
which thereby becomes a persecutor, while part is retained within the 
personality; some of this remaining internal death instinct is turned against 
the persecuting object as aggression (1946, pp. 4-5; 1958, p. 238n). Like Freud 
(1923, p. 54) she thinks that some of the internal death instinct is bound by 
libido, but she also thinks that some of it remains unfused and continues to be 
an active source of anxiety to the individual about being annihilated from 
within. Accompanying her reformulation of sadism and aggression in terms of 
their derivation from death instinct, Klein greatly increases her use of the 
idea of love, libido, and of the conception of the good object as the core of 
normal ego development.
  -- http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/ejb2003.htm
  The Melanie Klein Trust: Developments in Kleinian Thought: Overview and Personal View Elizabeth Bott Spillius

    =======

So, like Deleuze and Guatarri's machines, and Lakoff and Johnsons metaphors,
I find Melanie Klein another small threat to my faith: A fairly comphrehensive
humanist theory explaining good and bad, obviating a trancendent God or Law.
But I will continue to believe. Just call me narcissistic, in denial of bad.


Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.