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:
“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)
I will comment on this paragraph in the next entry.