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:

Psychosexual Stages

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.