The Melanie Klein Trust - Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963

About the Author

Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882, the youngest of four children. At about fourteen, she decided to study medicine. With her brothers help she learnt enough Greek and Latin to pass into the Gymnasium. But her early engagement and subsequent marriage in 1903 brought a halt to her plans. Years later, discovering a booklet on dreams by Freud, she turned her attention to psycho-analysis. At this time she was living in Budapest and began her own analysis with Ferenczi, who encouraged her interest in the analysis of children. In 1921 she moved to Berlin to continue her work with children, supported by Dr Karl Abraham. In 1926 she moved to London where she worked and lived until her death in 1960.

BY MELANIE KLEIN

And Other Works 1946-1963

Melanie Klein

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Hanna Segal

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The papers in this volume contain Melanie Kleins work from 1946 up to her death in 1960. It includes unfinished work published posthumously in 1963. The later papers of Volume I, A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States (1935), Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States (1942), and The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties (1945), introduce the concept of the depressive position and mark a new development in Melanie Kleins thinking.

The first paper in the present volume, Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946), introduces a further development, the paranoid/schizoid position. In her early work with children, Melanie Klein described the childs relationships to part objects primarily the breast and the penis. She observed and analysed persecutory feelings and splitting between highly idealised and persecutory objects. She also saw a constant interplay between projection and introjection. But she did not quite see those features as conjoined phenomena; in Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms she sees these various features as interrelated parts of a recurring constellation. In 1936 when she had described the depressive position, she also stated that before the onset of this position, the predominant anxieties are of a paranoid nature. She occasionally referred to a paranoid position. To begin with she used the term position rather loosely, speaking, for instance, of a manic position when describing manic defences or even an obsessional position in relation to obsessional defences. The 1946 paper firmly establishes the idea of two positions, two basic modes of psychic organisation. In this paper she investigates in considerable detail the anxieties and defences in earliest infancy the paranoid/schizoid position. She called it paranoid/schizoid because the prevalent anxiety is of a persecutory nature and the leading mental mechanism that of splitting. She describes persecutory anxieties and mental mechanisms, known to Freud but seen by her, as operating from earliest infancy and sees them as a system of anxieties and correlated defences. She also introduces a new mechanism of defence that of projective identification. In Kleins view more explicitly expounded by Susan Isaacs in The Nature and Function of Phantasy (1952) the term mechanism is a more abstract and generalised description of an unconscious phantasy. A phantasy is the mental content of the mechanism.

The phantasy or mechanism of projective identification has been foreshadowed in Kleins earlier work. In her paper, The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego (1930), she describes how the psychotic little boy in his phantasy splits off the bad part of himself, which he identifies with his urine, faeces and even penis and which he then projects into his mothers body so that her body is perceived as filled with bad objects. In the present paper she describes this as one of the earliest and fundamental phantasies and mechanisms. The infant splits off and projects into his mother intolerable parts of himself. These parts are phantasied as having taken possession of mothers body and she becomes identified with them. In certain situations, good parts of the self may be projected in a similar way, leading to an impoverishment of the ego characteristic of the schizoid personality. Considering its importance, the paper is surprisingly short. The description of projective identification occupies little more than two paragraphs, and yet it is one of the most seminal papers she has written. It has opened the way to understanding schizophrenia and schizoid patients hitherto considered unreachable by analysis. It gave an impetus to pioneering work in the psychoanalysis of psychotics and its publication was soon followed by important papers by people who used these new insights in their clinical work with psychotic patients.

This paper on schizoid mechanisms completes a new metapsychological theory. Klein posits that from the start the infant has an ego capable of experiencing anxiety, forming relationships and using mechanisms of defence. This ego is not only largely unintegrated but it is also subject to being split by powerful splitting mechanisms and, under the spur of anxiety, fragmented. The infant relates to part objects. Because of splitting and projections, these objects become highly idealised or very persecutory. Feelings of persecution, mechanisms of splitting, projective identification and, at times of intense anxiety, fragmentation characterise the paranoid/schizoid position which is a point of fixation of the schizophrenic group of illnesses. The persistence of some of these features, in children who only partly reached and worked through the depressive position, is the background to paranoid, narcissistic and schizoid personalities even if they are not overtly psychotic.

As the infant begins to integrate his or her picture of his/her object as a whole person there is a fundamental change in the integration of the ego, the nature of the object relationships and the nature of anxiety. The infant and the child become capable of feelings of guilt and concern for the object. Klein first described this in two major papers on the depressive position (1935, 1940). In the two papers following the 1946 one, On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt (1948) and Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant (1952), she explores in detail the implications of the changes occurring in the move from the paranoid/schizoid to the depressive position and the fluctuations to which this process is subject, as the depressive pain over and over again leads to some regression to paranoid and schizoid defences. One of Mrs Kleins contemporaries reports that when she was asked what she considered her most important discovery she said that it was the discovery of the paranoid defences against guilt.