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

Klein has until now restricted her comments to the place of aggression, anxiety, and defense during the “sadistic phase,” together with the (body-indexed) phantasies in which this constellation presents itself to the infant. Only in the next paragraph does Klein arrive explicitly at the nominal focus of her essay: the nature and function of “symbol formation.” (I say “explicitly” here, since some theory of symbols is arguably implicit already in her account of phantasy.)

The paragraph is a compressed rehearsal of three theoretical points of reference, in relation to which Klein will gradually articulate her own position. These points of reference include reflections on symbols by Sándor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, and Klein herself at an earlier stage of her thinking:

“[1] Ferenczi holds that identification, the forerunner of symbolism, arises out of the baby's endeavour to re-discover in every object his own organs and their functioning. [2] In Jones' view the pleasure-principle makes it possible for two quite different things to be equated because of a similarity marked by pleasure or interest. [3] Some years ago I wrote a paper, based on these statements, in which I drew the conclusion that symbolism is the foundation of all sublimation and of every talent, since it is by way of symbolic equation that things, activities and interests become the subject of libidinal phantasies.” (220, bracket brackets mine)

We will say something about each of these three points of reference, in turn. But first we we will make a general observation: while each of the three concerns symbolism, the “direction of explanation” shifts. According to the passage, Ferenczi and Jones are in their thinking concerned with symbolism’s conditions possibility, that is, the mechanisms which (genetically and logically) must be in place for symbolism to function. For Ferenczi, these conditions include the infant’s (antecedent) capacity for “identification”; for Jones, they include the infant’s “equating” activity (itself enabled by the pleasure principle).

By contrast, Klein’s thesis, at least as she paraphrases it here, concerns a consequence of symbolism, or the latter’s contribution to mental functioning. More specifically, she argues that symbolism is itself a condition of possibility — a mechanism that must be established — for such items as “sublimation” and “talent(s)” to develop at all.

This observation aside, let us consider the three conceptions of symbol-formation Klein names — [1] Ferenczi, in the remainder of this entry; [2] Jones and [3] Klein herself, in the following entry.

[1] “Ferenczi holds that identification, the forerunner of symbolism, arises out of the baby's endeavour to re-discover in every object his own organs and their functioning.” There are two claims here: first — stated as something essentially uncontroversial — that identification is a forerunner of symbolism; and second, that identification is itself the result of a specific infantile project, i.e. the rediscovery of itself (its organs) in objects.

Now, Klein does not include a reference to any particular source. And in fact it seems likely that Ferenczi developed these ideas in more than one place. Nonetheless, on the evidence, Klein probably has in mind his essay “Symbolism” (1912). Here we find several passages which illuminate Klein’s position. Ferenczi writes:

“…I have attempted to explain the origin of symbolism from the impulse to represent infantile wishes as being fulfilled, by means of the child's own body. The symbolic identification of external objects with bodily organs makes it possible to find again, on the one hand, all the wished-for objects of the world in the individual's body, on the other hand, the treasured organs of the individual's body in objects conceived in an animistic manner…I imagine that this symbolic equating of genital organs with other organs and with external objects originally happens only in a playful way, out of exuberance, so to speak. The equations thus arising, however, are secondarily made to serve repression, which seeks to weaken one member of the equation, while it symbolically over-emphasizes the other, more harmless one by the amount of the repressed affect.” (274-75)

And later:

“There can be no doubt that the child (like the unconscious) identifies two things on the basis of the slightest resemblance, displaces affects with ease from one to the other, and gives the same name to both…[S]imiles, allegories, metaphors, allusions, parables, emblems, and indirect representations of every sort might also in a certain sense be conceived as products of this lack of sharpness in distinction and definition, and yet they are not — in the psycho-analytical sense — symbols. Only such things (or ideas) are symbols in the sense of psycho-analysis as are invested in consciousness with a logically inexplicable and unfounded affect, and of which it may be analytically established that they owe this affective over-emphasis to unconscious identification with another thing (or idea), to which the surplus of affect really belongs. Not all similes, therefore, are symbols, but only those in which the one member of the equation is repressed into the unconscious.” (276-78)

Several aspects of Ferenczi’s ideas here stand out and complicate, or at least expand, the ones Klein attributes to him in “Symbol-Formation.” Naturally, this is also important context for grasping the meaning of Klein’s views in the remainder of her essay.

First, the “identification” that interests Ferenczi runs in two directions. This action consists, not only in the infant’s impulse to find, or re-find, its organs in the object, but also in its impulse to locate the object in itself, its own organs. Both constitute the general mechanism Ferenczi calls “identification.” Indeed, identification also embraces the infant’s activity of “equating…genital organs with other organs” — that is, a potentially internal or self-reflexive process.

Second, as this last quotation suggests, “identification” appears for Ferenczi to signify “equating” activities in a quite general sense. We might have imagined, by contrast, that identification included only that specific kind of equating activity that Freud designated by the term: the self’s efforts to “identify” with its (external) object, via patterns of mimicry and emulation, or incorporation, or “feeling oneself the same” as the object, and so on.

Third, it emerges that identification is the “forerunner” of symbols in a quite peculiar sense, and one that is hardly self-evident from Klein’s words in “Symbol-Formation.” Identification is initially both propelled by, and issues in, conscious fantasy.  The infant, as Ferenczi puts it, “identifies two things on the basis of the slightest resemblance, displaces affects with ease from one to the other, and gives the same name to both,” and, moreover, this “originally happens only in a playful way, out of exuberance, so to speak.” Only with the advent of “repression” do “symbols” proper appear, in the technical sense recognized by psychoanalysis. Again, “symbols” so conceived bear “a logically inexplicable and unfounded affect, and…owe this affective over-emphasis to unconscious identification with another thing (or idea), to which the surplus of affect really belongs.” So Ferenczi can conclude: “Not all similes…are symbols, but only those in which the one member of the equation is repressed into the unconscious.” Hence the activity of identification represents a mere “forerunner” of symbol-formation because, while it may equate one (primary) thing with another (secondary) thing, the latter is perhaps only a “simile” or “metaphor” unless and until repression allows (or demands) a form of unconscious equation. Only the latter generates a “symbol” laden with a quantity of affect that is intelligible only with reference to that repressed “thing” it unconsciously symbolizes.