Mike Becker 12/22/24 Mike Becker 12/22/24

Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) (V)

From Sadism to Anxiety (II)

We have been considering the connection, for Klein, between aggression and anxiety. In particular, we have attempted to grasp her claim that the infant’s inborn aggression necessarily generates anxiety in it.

As we have seen, this aggression — more specifically an “excess of sadism” — causes the infant anxiety in several ways. On the one hand — [1] — the infant (putatively) experiences its own sadism as dangerous, and in two respects:

[1a] As I interpreted Klein, the infant is made anxious by its own aggressive impulses once these are linked in its mind to an “object” that will retaliate for that aggression.

[1b] The infant experiences the instruments or “weapons” of its sadism — its bodily excreta — as dangerous. Perhaps they are liable to be mishandled and thus injure their handler. Or perhaps, beyond this, the retaliatory “object” may appropriate these weapons and redirect them against the sadistic infant.

Yet on the other hand, as I indicated in the last entry, it is the second “source of danger” or catalyst for anxiety — [2] — that is more immediately comprehensible and, beyond this, more closely associated with Kleinian thinking in general. This is the persecutory object and anxiety that suffuse the “paranoid schizoid position,” a term Klein hadn’t yet introduced when “Symbol-Formation” was published in 1930. In “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), though, this is plainly the central, if not the sole “form” that anxiety assumes for the infant, regardless of its original catalyst. In this later piece, Klein writes:

“I hold that anxiety arises from the operation of the death instinct within the organism, is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of persecution. The fear of the destructive impulse seems to attach itself at once to an object — or rather it is experienced as the fear of an uncontrollable overpowering object. Other important sources of primary anxiety are the trauma of birth (separation anxiety) and frustration of bodily needs; and these experiences too are from the beginning felt as being caused by objects. Even if these objects are felt to be external, they become through introjection internal persecutors and thus reinforce the fear of the destructive impulse within.” (4-5)

It appears that, for Klein, at least initially, nothing (negative) emerges “internally” for the infant that isn’t perforce ejected outward and, moreover, isn’t attributed as a quality (property, motivation, attitude, action) to that primary “object” through which all its experience is invariably filtered. In fact, every one of the infant’s feelings — positive or negative — bears some necessary “reference” to this object and is “intelligible” to the infant only in terms of the latter. This, as I understand it, is one leitmotif of the object-relations tradition — perhaps its core — and it is reflected in Klein’s words from Envy and Gratitude: “From the beginning, all emotions attach themselves to the first object” (234).

Moreover, in the passage above, Klein effectively distinguishes between the source, the object, and the outcome of anxiety. (Freud famously distinguishes the different aspects of a “drive.”) So, while the major source of anxiety, and certainly the one that preoccupies her in these essays, is the infant’s own, endogenous death drive, this does not exclude “other important sources of primary anxiety.” Yet no matter the source, which is variable, Klein’s words here suggest that both the “object” and the “outcome” are unitary: the catastrophe this anxiety ultimately intimates is “annihilation (death),” a fate ascribed to “an uncontrollable overpowering object.” Whatever its source, the infant’s anxiety is experienced as “fear of persecution.” So, while Klein does recognize distinct sources of anxiety that are not reducible to the “operation of the death instinct” — for instance, “the trauma of birth (separation anxiety) and the frustration of bodily needs” — these mental states, too, are “felt as being caused by objects,” that is, are experienced in the final analysis as persecutory.

For the purposes of our commentary on “Symbol-Formation,” this digression provides an interesting caveat to our account. While the death drive suffices all on its own to cause the infant’s anxiety (through the channels we are now examining), it might not be necessary —at least in the first instance — for doing so. Anxiety is also brought about from other quarters (separation, frustration), even if these, too, are immediately drawn into the experiential vortex of aggression and persecution by an “object.” But this means that, even where the death drive is not the proximate source of anxiety, it nevertheless inexorably overlays, contours, and defines that anxiety in its characteristic way.

But there is a complication in this account, which I’d like briefly to discuss. As I’ve suggested, Klein appears to conceive the infant as an instinctive anthropomorphizer. Particularly with regard to its aggression — though applying more broadly to all feeling-states — the infant can experience feelings only in connection with its object, where this latter is both (a) the necessary recipient of that feeling (“I am angry at the mother-breast for withholding its feeding from me”) and also (b) as the bearer and agent of that feeling, via projection or ascription (“the mother-breast is angry at me, is attacking and persecuting me”). Both of these, I think, are contained in the line from Envy and Gratitude quoted above: “From the beginning, all emotions attach themselves to the first object.”

Now in the last entry I observed a certain “intermingling” in Klein’s account of aggression, anxiety, and defense — and this conception seems to be a case in point. For while the rough order of explanation leads from (a) aggression, to (b) the anxiety it stimulates, to (c) the defenses required to manage that anxiety, these comments about projection scramble the sequence. The infant has no experience of either aggression or anxiety that is unmediated by its “object.” Yet the entirety of the infant’s contact with this object seems premised on the mechanism of projection — the “violent defense” which we suppose only emerges in response to aggression-induced anxiety. Again: “The fear of the destructive impulse seems to attach itself at once to an object — or rather it is experienced as the fear of an uncontrollable overpowering object.” In other words, the defense of projection antecedes any experience of that very anxiety which (ostensibly) calls it into action.

Mike Becker 12/15/24 Mike Becker 12/15/24

Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) (IV)

From Sadism to Anxiety (I)

What exactly is the link between the infant’s aggression and its anxiety? I suggested in the last entry that, for Klein, this link is neither arbitrary nor avoidable. In every imaginable scenario, it seems, the infant’s inborn aggression will generate some, and probably a great deal of anxiety.

Why does Klein take this position?

Let us return to the passage quoted in the last entries, this time excising Klein’s ideas about “defense” and preserving only those lines that concern the connection between sadism and anxiety:

“The excess of sadism gives rise to anxiety…According to what I have found in analysis…[for the infant there are] two sources of danger: [1] the subject's own sadism and [2] the object which is attacked…The sadism becomes a source of danger because it [1a] offers an occasion for the liberation of anxiety and also because [1b] the weapons employed to destroy the object are felt by the subject to be leveled at his own person also. [2] The object of the attack becomes a source of danger because the subject fears similar, retaliatory attacks from it” (220, bracketed numbers mine)

I have interpolated numbers that help us to clarify Klein’s view and its (asymmetrical) subdivisions. More precisely, Klein tells us here that the infant’s sadism elicits anxiety through two major routes, “two sources of danger,” [1] and [2]. Notably, one of these — [1] — itself resolves into two types, [1a] and [1b].

To take these in sequence: one generic “source of danger” is [1] “the subject's own sadism.” (This is, we might say, the way in which sadism causes anxiety directly, rather than indirectly.) And it does this, again, in two distinct ways:

“The sadism becomes a source of danger because it [1a] offers an occasion for the liberation of anxiety and also because [1b] the weapons employed to destroy the object are felt by the subject to be leveled at his own person also.”

What exactly does Klein have in mind with each of these? Unfortunately, as far as I can see, Klein’s assertion in [1a] — “sadism becomes a source of danger because it offers an occasion for the liberation of anxiety” — is either tautological, or else implicitly dependent on that “indirect” danger represented in [2].

On the one hand, Klein’s words at least have the sound of tautology, because “the liberation of anxiety” is surely synonymous with the apprehension of “danger.” Interpreted in this (uncharitable) way, Klein’s statement that sadism is “a source of danger” because it “offers an occasion for the liberation of anxiety” is rather like saying: sadism is a source of danger because it is a source of danger. But our puzzle is precisely why the infant experiences its own aggression as “dangerous,” or why it elicits “anxiety” at all.

On the other hand: the more promising interpretation of [1a] is that this claim ultimately depends on [2]. To briefly look ahead, Klein will momentarily tell us that, “The object of the attack becomes a source of danger because the subject fears similar, retaliatory attacks from it.” In other words, the infant’s sadism gives rise to persecutory anxiety. My more charitable reading of [1a], then, is something like: once the “object” is established as a retaliatory persecutor, then the infant’s own aggression will cause the infant anxiety. For at this point, as Klein puts it, sadism indeed “offers an occasion for the liberation of anxiety” — is experienced by the infant as dangerous — because it believes this sadism will incur a reciprocal attack by the “object” toward which it is directed.

In fact, I submit that only [1b] offers a plausible basis for sadism’s production of anxiety in the infant, though it has a speculative flavor to it. Again: another reason that the “subject’s own sadism” appears to it as a “source of danger” is because “the weapons employed to destroy the object are felt by the subject to be leveled at his own person also.” Here we will observe that, strictly speaking, it is not the sadism itself that is immediately apprehended as dangerous, but rather those “weapons” which serve the infant’s sadistic ends, or which have been invested with sadistic significance. The weapons are those “excreta” named in the previous paragraph: specifically the infant’s “wetting” and “faecal mass.” (The particular value of these objects as weapons — whether as something used to “stab” and “drown,” or as a “missile” or “poisonous substance” — is fixed by the infant’s psychosexual stage of development.)

Yet even here it may seem like Klein’s “explanation” begs the major question. I at least would like to know why these weapons “are felt by the subject to be leveled at his own self as well.” Let us assume that the infant does experience its excreta in the way Klein describes, that is, as dangerous. Must an infant experience any weapon — even one over which it has control, and one directed outwardly — as dangerous to itself? Or is the danger, hence the anxiety, a product of the infant’s sense that these weapons are not entirely under its control, that they might be mishandled and “backfire” from this mishandling? Indeed: does the infant have some dim apprehension, even at this early stage, that the object will wrest these weapons away and turn them against him or her?

These last reflections open the door, once again, to the suspicion that proposition [1] — this time [1b] — implicitly depends upon [2]. I will continue with this idea in the next entry.

Mike Becker 12/8/24 Mike Becker 12/8/24

Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) (III)

We concluded the last entry with several questions, together with a passage from Klein’s piece that seems to provide answers to them. Among these questions are the following:

What is the origin of the infant’s anxiety?
What is the connection between this anxiety and the infant’s “defenses”?
Where does aggression fit into this picture?

And here, again, is the passage:

“The excess of sadism gives rise to anxiety and sets in motion the ego's earliest modes of defense. Freud writes: ‘It may well be that, before ego and id have become sharply differentiated and before a super-ego has been developed, the mental apparatus employs different modes of defense from those which it practices after these levels of organization have been reached.’ According to what I have found in analysis the earliest defense set up by the ego has reference to two sources of danger: the subject's own sadism and the object which is attacked. This defense, in conformity with the degree of the sadism, is of a violent character and differs fundamentally from the later mechanism of repression. In relation to the subject's own sadism the defense implies expulsion, whereas in relation to the object it implies destruction. The sadism becomes a source of danger because it offers an occasion for the liberation of anxiety and also because the weapons employed to destroy the object are felt by the subject to be leveled at his own person also. The object of the attack becomes a source of danger because the subject fears similar, retaliatory attacks from it. Thus, the wholly undeveloped ego is faced with a task which at this stage is quite beyond it — the task of mastering the severest anxiety” (220)

We will notice two general ideas in this passage, which initially — for clarity’s sake — we might like to address separately. These ideas concern:

The relation between sadism and anxiety
The relation between anxiety and defense

In fact, the items in Klein’s account appear to constitute a simple syllogism, of the form

A > B

B > C

∴ A > C

where, “A” is some irreducible and ineradicable quantum of sadism (a drive); “B” is the anxiety this sadism stirs up, by various routes; and “C” is the defense or defenses this anxiety then necessarily activates. (We will additionally notice a quantitative element to Klein’s position: the greater the sadism, the greater is the anxiety it occasions, and thus the stronger — more “violent,” as Klein puts things — are the defenses brought into operation to manage it.) In summary, then, Klein implies that, beginning with the premise of infantile sadism, one may derive both anxiety and, secondarily, the assorted defenses.

We will admittedly perceive a certain intermingling and interdependence in Klein’s presentation of these ideas. Nonetheless, I will put C aside for now, to some extent, and focus on the first “plank” of her argument, A > B. (For the time being, that is, we can only anticipate some version of B > C: the infant’s anxiety is going to activate some defense or defenses.) I will take this up in detail in the next entry.

For the moment, though, I want to emphasize a couple of points, by way of framing and motivating our question. On Klein’s view, the death drive, together with the “aggression” that evinces it, are as much a brute datum of infantile experience as one is likely to encounter. As I suggested in the last entry, she sees as little need to “derive” the infant’s aggression as she would its hunger, libido, or any other inborn “drive.”

So we will grant this initial assumption. Our question then is: why exactly should this aggression — particularly an “excess of sadism” — create anxiety in the infant? The answer to this question is perhaps less obvious than it appears. Let us recall that, for Freud, a drive — an inner excitation — can only have one “aim”: discharge, hence some pleasurable release of tension. (To be sure, this story is subjected to scrutiny and revision in Freud’s later writings.) In this light — and our moral scruples notwithstanding — it is difficult to see why the successful discharge of aggression should incur an essentially un-pleasurable sensation, such as anxiety. Indeed, accounting for such a paradoxical outcome, for a drive’s unexpected behaviors, is the task of “Drives and Their Fates,” and — in a sense — the entire Freudian edifice.

Yet for Klein the link between aggression and anxiety is neither arbitrary nor avoidable. On the evidence, it is impossible even to imagine a situation, even the most ideal, wherein anxiety fails to issue from the infant’s own aggression. In the next entry, we will consider her reasons for taking this position.

Mike Becker 12/1/24 Mike Becker 12/1/24

Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) (II)

In the last entry, I discussed the Verfremdungseffekt of reading Klein’s “Symbol-Formation,” and a particular example of it, namely: her radical time-scale compression of the infant’s psychosexual stages, as well as a substantial “blurring” of the lines putatively separating these stages.

But Klein’s greater innovation, of course, concerns the pressures, aims, dynamics, and general psychological “mood” of these stages — all of which deviate from the conventional Freudian picture. In fact, the central innovation of “Symbol-Formation” arguably transcends any of these revisions. It touches on the most fundamental questions of metapsychology. For in the course of introducing her position, Klein appears to both appropriate and transfigure Freud’s account in “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” — an operation which Klein carries out, as usual, with a bare minimum of acknowledgment. This, in any case, is the argument I will try to develop in the following entries.

First, however, let me rehearse some of the orienting ideas of “Symbol-Formation." For Klein, the infant’s inborn “death drive” is expressed in its sadism — itself organized around the nodal points of the erogenous zones. Further, the infant spontaneously shapes this sadism (together with its anxiety and defenses against it) into a set of universal “phantasies.” I like to imagine that these phantasies are compounded of

a metaphysic — a universe of “things” that include, Klein tells us, the mother’s breast, the father’s penis, urine, exrement, and babies; and, after a fashion,
a theology — including such sadistic “ends" as possession and destruction, and the (annihilatory and persecutory) anxiety stirred up by the pursuit of those ends

Again, the nature of this sadism (its mode of expression) and its object (the target of sadistic attack) varies according to the psychosexual stage — hence erogenous zone — the infant has reached. Oral sadism, for example, quintessentially involves (phantastically-elaborated) activities of biting and devouring, naturally indexed to the breast as their “object.” But other phantasies soon overlay this one, according to the stage in question. The following lines convey the flavor of infantile experience during this sadistic era:

“It is my experience that in the phantasied attack on the mother's body a considerable part is played by the urethral and anal sadism which is very soon added to the oral and muscular sadism. In phantasy the excreta are transformed into dangerous weapons: wetting is regarded as cutting, stabbing, burning, drowning, while the faecal mass is equated with weapons and missiles. At a later stage of the phase which I have described, these violent modes of attack give place to hidden assaults by the most refined methods which sadism can devise, and the excreta are equated with poisonous substances.” (219-220)

Now, while Klein recognizes the reality and significance of both the life and death drives — of libidinal and destructive motivations — the focus of her reflections here and elsewhere is unmistakably the latter. This emphasis is hardly arbitrary, since for Klein the most important tasks (and hazards) of psychological development, healthy and unhealthy, originate precisely here: sadistic impulse and object, the anxiety that immediately surrounds both, the primitive mental strategies — defenses — deployed to manage that anxiety, and those universal phantasies in which all these elements are collected, with which the infant makes intelligible sense of its experience.

Notably, Klein does not supply much in the way of either explanation or justification here. Partly, no doubt, this is because her conjectures rest on observations and arguments developed in other writings. But partly, I suppose, in the nature of things little “justification” is demanded or even possible. The sadism and its object, the resulting anxiety, the defenses, and the phantasies that absorb and narrate these items — all appear as brute, irreducible facts of infantile mental life (and adult mental life, too, as something built on this substructure). The infant’s aggression admits of “derivation” just as little as its hunger or libido. And once we allow Klein’s additional premises — that

the infant is object-related from the earliest moments of life, hence that
the infant construes all its emotional states with reference to that object

— then everything else more or less falls into place. For it follows that the infant’s “satisfaction” is necessarily linked in its mind to a satisfying object, just as its “dissatisfaction” is inseparable for it from that same object, now experienced as withholding. An object experienced in this way, finally, must perforce become a target of anger, expressed in whatever mode, with whatever instruments, a given psychosexual stage makes available to the infant.

(Evidently, the Kleinian infant is an instinctive anthropomorphizer: no sooner does it experience some feeling than it ascribes that feeling to an “object” as its cause, together with some motivation for doing so. This motive-ascription appears to bear a a proto-moral value: the infant conceives the object as responsible; that latter is credited or debited with bringing about its feeling-state.)

How and why does anxiety appear in the infant’s experience? — What, for that matter, is the connection between this (internally-differentiated) anxiety and the “defensive” strategies pursued by the infant? Klein provides schematic answers to these questions in the following, dense paragraph:

I will comment on this paragraph in the next entry.

Mike Becker 11/24/24 Mike Becker 11/24/24

Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) (I)

Reading Klein’s 1930 piece, I have the impression of someone quietly but radically revising Freud’s concepts and claims — nearly to the point of inverting their meanings. It is a Verfremdungseffekt — estrangement effect — in which familiar psychoanalytic tropes (drive, object, superego, anxiety, phantasy, reality) suddenly appear unfamiliar.

The effect is all the stronger as Klein generally provides no acknowledgement that she has deviated even an inch from Freudian orthodoxy. (Indeed, she occasionally indicates her positions can be grounded in that orthodoxy.) The first paragraph illustrates one aspect — far from the most extreme — of what I have in mind:

“My argument in this paper is based on the assumption that there is an early stage of mental development at which sadism becomes active at all the various sources of libidinal pleasure. In my experience sadism reaches its zenith in this phase, which is ushered in by the oral-sadistic desire to devour the mother's breast (or the mother herself) and passes away with the earlier anal stage. At the period of which I am speaking, the subject's dominant aim is to possess himself of the contents of the mother's body and to destroy her by means of every weapon which sadism can command. At the same time this phase forms the introduction to the Oedipus conflict. The genital is beginning to exercise an influence, but this is as yet not evident, for the pregenital impulses hold the field. My whole argument depends on the fact that the Oedipus conflict begins at a period when sadism predominates” (219)

The paragraph brims with words and phrases that either designate Freud’s psychosexual stages or are associated with them — oral, anal, phallic — and in a rough way Klein preserves their order and “themes.” But we will notice striking differences, as well. On the one hand, she contracts the time-scale of these stages — almost to the point of simultaneity. On the other hand, she alters their psychological coloring: they are now dominated by concerns (motivations, aims, and obstacles) that eclipse in importance much of what Freud himself accentuates. (I will take up the latter in the next entries.)

To focus here on the question of time-contraction: what chronological “range” — months and years — does “early stage of mental development” circumscribe in this paragraph, even approximately? If during this phase “sadism becomes active at all the various sources of libidinal pleasure,” then, assuming a Freudian schema, we might suppose that Klein’s hypothetical infant is rather far along in its development. That is: if all the erogenous zones — the various sources of libidinal pleasure — have been activated, then the infant has entered the phallic stage, at which the third and final zone affords its possessor pleasure. Only then, and no sooner, would it make sense to a Freudian to say that “all” sources of libidinal pleasure are relevant. And this means that our child is, on the standard model, somewhere between two and six years old.

But immediately Klein both foreshortens the time-scale in which the stages elapse and blurs the edges separating these stages. Indeed, at times Klein’s words create the paradoxical impression of a single “stage” that (somehow) both precedes and follows another.

Let us take Klein’s specifications piece by piece. The “phase” in question, Klein begins, “is ushered in” by an “oral-sadistic desire” — hence it seems to originate, at least, during the oral phase. And it “passes away with the earlier anal stage.” So — on the evidence — it outlasts the decline of the oral phase, but not by long. Very well: the sadistic phenomena depicted in the essay belong with the “oral” and “anal” phases, and to some extent bridge them. (In fact, they only barely enter the anal phase.) If we wished to plot this phase along a simple Freudian diagram, it would appear as follows:

This would all be entirely cogent, albeit novel, if Klein concluded her periodizing here. A sentence later, however, she continues:

“At the same time this phase forms the introduction to the Oedipus conflict. The genital is beginning to exercise an influence, but this is as yet not evident, for the pregenital impulses hold the field. My whole argument depends on the fact that the Oedipus conflict begins at a period when sadism predominates.”

Now, on the standard model, the Oedipus constellation, with its assorted dynamics, basically coincides with the phallic stage. It has essentially to do — certainly in the case of males — with the infant’s libidinal center of gravity shifting to the genitals, a preoccupation with the pleasure afforded by them, as well as imagined threats (castration) directed toward them. And while the edges separating a psychosexual stage from its successor stage are hardly “tidy,” there is still — naturally — enough differentiation to warrants speaking of stages at all.

But to return to Klein’s words: the infantile sadism she is describing, which according to our diagram (and Klein herself) “passes away with the earlier anal stage,” also purportedly “forms the introduction to the Oedipus conflict” — a conflict canonically activated, not merely after the “earlier anal stage,” but after the anal stage in its entirety.

Klein’s proposal here is hardly aberrant. The concluding paragraphs of “Symbol-Formation” essentially repeat her description and thus confirm her “scrambling” of the standard Freudian chronology:

“The early stages of the Oedipus conflict are dominated by sadism. They take place during a phase of development which is inaugurated by oral sadism (with which urethral, muscular and anal sadism associate themselves) and terminates when the ascendancy of anal sadism comes to an end” (231)

We will observe at least two types of deviation here. On the one hand, the time-scale of psychosexual development is for Klein strikingly compressed. On the other hand, the “boundaries” separating one phase from another, already porous in Freud, appear virtually to disappear in Klein. By the time of Envy and Gratitude (1957), many years later, Klein can write: “I have often contended that genital sensations and desires are possibly operative from birth onwards” (195). With such a hypothesis in place, it is less surprising when Klein continues that the Oedipus complex “normally arises concurrently with the depressive position in the second quarter of the first year” (196). That is: from an experience characteristic of children between the ages of two and six years old — Freud’s conception — the Oedipus complex is, at least in its origins, the psychological climate of infants between the ages of three and six months old.

So much, then, for this example of the Kleinian Verfremdungseffekt — in this case, one that we undergo while reading the essay’s first sentences. There are many others, and I will try to convey some of these in the following commentaries. In particular, I want to say something about Klein’s idiosyncratic appropriation and transformation of the picture found in Freud’s “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” — an operation which Klein carries out, again, with a bare minimum of acknowledgment.