A somewhat questionable introduction to Melanie Klein
On my Masters course (I studied consulting and leading in organisations using psychodynamic and systemic approaches at the Tavistock in London), we studied a little known post-Freudian psychoanalyst called Melanie Klein. Anna Freud is very well known; Klein was one of her contemporaries. Where Anna Freud was very true to her father’s work, Klein took many of Freud’s ideas and developed them.
A lot of Klein’s methods and ideas have been heavily criticised – she psychoanalysed her own children, which probably wasn’t the greatest idea of all time – but there’s some seriously good ideas in her body of work. This post is neither an accurate nor a reliable account of Klein’s teachings. I have a shocking memory and haven’t consulted a single document, webpage or academic reference, but today, I thought it could be interesting to share a brief overview of a few of Klein’s key concepts (highlighted in italics) and how they are relevant to the bloody mental times we are living in.
In future i’ll write some more accurate pieces with dates, quotes and hopefully some sort of credibility to them. This is my, shall we say, “unique” take on her work. Ahem.
Melanie Klein studied infants and young children, and was the first thinker in the field of psychoanalysis to develop a comprehensive theory of infant psychology. Essentially, she posited that babies have a rich psychological life from birth. At first of course, this is very primitive; the baby cannot think, but it does feel and it does have consciousness, which somehow interprets those feelings and experiences and gives them meaning, initially in a very black and white way.
Things that feel bad are bad, and things that feel good are good. The infant is incapable, Klein suggests, of comprehending wholeness yet, so instead she splits the world into good and bad objects. The mother (or primary carer) is not a whole person; instead, she is parts. Breast, finger, mouth, voice, hand, and so on. Klein even says that the infant identifies one breast as ‘good’ and the other as ‘bad’ (and gosh, we did a LOT of talking about the ‘good breast’ and ‘bad breast’ on my course. Also, for now, let’s put all the complexities of modern day baby-raising to one side. I know many babies don’t breastfeed and many primary carers don’t have breasts, but for the sake of the theory, we will persevere with this pretty linear interpretation).
Klein’s cheery term for this point of view is the paranoid-schizoid position. Told you that what I’d been studying was pretty bleak, didn’t I?! Positive psychology this is not. I think the paranoid part refers to the idea that the baby often feels persecuted by the outside world, interpreting things that happen as being directly targeted at her (ahem… Can anyone relate?!). The schizoid part refers to the extreme swinging back and forth from one interpretation to another. ‘The breast is good! No, it’s bad! I feel good! Now I don’t!’
As the infant grows and develops, she begins to understand its primary caregiver as a person, not just as an array of objects. This then leads to a rather depressing realisation, which is that the source of comfort is also, sometimes, the source of pain. The breast that provides nourishment is also the breast that sometimes causes discomfort, or gets taken away - and they both belong to to the same person! Argh!
Sometimes, our hypothetical baby realises that the origin of pain is internal – within her, coming from her unpleasant thoughts or desires. Try as she might to project all that is bad ‘out there’, blaming whoever or whatever shows up as a suitable target, the baby now moves into a new developmental stage and begins to realise that just as mummy and daddy have both good and bad in them, so too does she herself. Previously, this realisation was unbearable, hence the need to split the world into good and bad. But now, hypothetical baby is growing and can begin to tolerate more uncomfortable truths. Klein called this a shift into the depressive position, presenting us with another irrepressibly uplifting term!
Importantly, Klein emphasised, these two positions (paranoid-schizoid and depressive) are not stages. We don’t pass through them sequentially and then move on to happier psychological ground. Rather, she called them positions: they are a vantage point, each offering a particular point of view of the world, and we continue to oscillate (or is it vacillate? I never remember the difference) between them for the rest of our lives.
It’s not just babies therefore who experience the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. It’s all of us. We are all susceptible to regressing to the less mature paranoid-schizoid (PS) position, and we are all capable of shifting into the more mature depressive position. Both are uncomfortable, but for different reasons: the first because you do walk around feeling like the world is out to get you, and because splitting means that you really can’t hold any kind of mature line of thought without needing to make it either this or that; the latter is unbearable at times because it means accepting that it’s not just those people out there who are racist/bigots/selfish/mean/etc. We have those qualities and propensities within us, too.
The final point I’d like to make today is key: The developmental task anytime we are in the rigid, black-and-white, either/or, “You’re-bad-and-I’m-good” space – the paranoid-schizoid position – is to shift into the more mature, complex, ambiguous space – the depressive position – in which we can accept contradiction, be with nuance and subtleties and move away from rigid opinions and world views.
While I don’t subscribe to Klein’s philosophy in any kind of comprehensive way, I have spent two years exploring and applying her theories and I think they have a lot of value to add. As I look around us at the world today, I see the paranoid-schizoid position everywhere. I see that our collective developmental task is to move into the depressive position over and over again. This, I think, is a lot of what the climate change movement is about – accepting the reality of just how terrible things are, not manically denying it or dreaming of a utopian miracle cure. If we can do that, we might just stand a chance of working together to find, perhaps not solutions, but at the very least, less destructive ways of living in the world. And right now, with everything that’s going on, that’s got to be a good thing.