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

From Sadism to Anxiety (II)

We have been considering the connection, for Klein, between aggression and anxiety. In particular, we have attempted to grasp her claim that the infant’s inborn aggression necessarily generates anxiety in it.

As we have seen, this aggression — more specifically an “excess of sadism” — causes the infant anxiety in several ways. On the one hand — [1] — the infant (putatively) experiences its own sadism as dangerous, and in two respects:

[1a] As I interpreted Klein, the infant is made anxious by its own aggressive impulses once these are linked in its mind to an “object” that will retaliate for that aggression.

[1b] The infant experiences the instruments or “weapons” of its sadism — its bodily excreta — as dangerous. Perhaps they are liable to be mishandled and thus injure their handler. Or perhaps, beyond this, the retaliatory “object” may appropriate these weapons and redirect them against the sadistic infant.

Yet on the other hand, as I indicated in the last entry, it is the second “source of danger” or catalyst for anxiety — [2] — that is more immediately comprehensible and, beyond this, more closely associated with Kleinian thinking in general. This is the persecutory object and anxiety that suffuse the “paranoid schizoid position,” a term Klein hadn’t yet introduced when “Symbol-Formation” was published in 1930. In “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), though, this is plainly the central, if not the sole “form” that anxiety assumes for the infant, regardless of its original catalyst. In this later piece, Klein writes:

“I hold that anxiety arises from the operation of the death instinct within the organism, is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of persecution. The fear of the destructive impulse seems to attach itself at once to an object — or rather it is experienced as the fear of an uncontrollable overpowering object. Other important sources of primary anxiety are the trauma of birth (separation anxiety) and frustration of bodily needs; and these experiences too are from the beginning felt as being caused by objects. Even if these objects are felt to be external, they become through introjection internal persecutors and thus reinforce the fear of the destructive impulse within.” (4-5)

It appears that, for Klein, at least initially, nothing (negative) emerges “internally” for the infant that isn’t perforce ejected outward and, moreover, isn’t attributed as a quality (property, motivation, attitude, action) to that primary “object” through which all its experience is invariably filtered. In fact, every one of the infant’s feelings — positive or negative — bears some necessary “reference” to this object and is “intelligible” to the infant only in terms of the latter. This, as I understand it, is one leitmotif of the object-relations tradition — perhaps its core — and it is reflected in Klein’s words from Envy and Gratitude: “From the beginning, all emotions attach themselves to the first object” (234).

Moreover, in the passage above, Klein effectively distinguishes between the source, the object, and the outcome of anxiety. (Freud famously distinguishes the different aspects of a “drive.”) So, while the major source of anxiety, and certainly the one that preoccupies her in these essays, is the infant’s own, endogenous death drive, this does not exclude “other important sources of primary anxiety.” Yet no matter the source, which is variable, Klein’s words here suggest that both the “object” and the “outcome” are unitary: the catastrophe this anxiety ultimately intimates is “annihilation (death),” a fate ascribed to “an uncontrollable overpowering object.” Whatever its source, the infant’s anxiety is experienced as “fear of persecution.” So, while Klein does recognize distinct sources of anxiety that are not reducible to the “operation of the death instinct” — for instance, “the trauma of birth (separation anxiety) and the frustration of bodily needs” — these mental states, too, are “felt as being caused by objects,” that is, are experienced in the final analysis as persecutory.

For the purposes of our commentary on “Symbol-Formation,” this digression provides an interesting caveat to our account. While the death drive suffices all on its own to cause the infant’s anxiety (through the channels we are now examining), it might not be necessary —at least in the first instance — for doing so. Anxiety is also brought about from other quarters (separation, frustration), even if these, too, are immediately drawn into the experiential vortex of aggression and persecution by an “object.” But this means that, even where the death drive is not the proximate source of anxiety, it nevertheless inexorably overlays, contours, and defines that anxiety in its characteristic way.

But there is a complication in this account, which I’d like briefly to discuss. As I’ve suggested, Klein appears to conceive the infant as an instinctive anthropomorphizer. Particularly with regard to its aggression — though applying more broadly to all feeling-states — the infant can experience feelings only in connection with its object, where this latter is both (a) the necessary recipient of that feeling (“I am angry at the mother-breast for withholding its feeding from me”) and also (b) as the bearer and agent of that feeling, via projection or ascription (“the mother-breast is angry at me, is attacking and persecuting me”). Both of these, I think, are contained in the line from Envy and Gratitude quoted above: “From the beginning, all emotions attach themselves to the first object.”

Now in the last entry I observed a certain “intermingling” in Klein’s account of aggression, anxiety, and defense — and this conception seems to be a case in point. For while the rough order of explanation leads from (a) aggression, to (b) the anxiety it stimulates, to (c) the defenses required to manage that anxiety, these comments about projection scramble the sequence. The infant has no experience of either aggression or anxiety that is unmediated by its “object.” Yet the entirety of the infant’s contact with this object seems premised on the mechanism of projection — the “violent defense” which we suppose only emerges in response to aggression-induced anxiety. Again: “The fear of the destructive impulse seems to attach itself at once to an object — or rather it is experienced as the fear of an uncontrollable overpowering object.” In other words, the defense of projection antecedes any experience of that very anxiety which (ostensibly) calls it into action.