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:

1. What is the origin of the infant’s anxiety?

2. What is the connection between this anxiety and the infant’s “defenses”?

3. 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:

1. The relation between sadism and anxiety

2. 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.