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.