Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) (VII)
From Anxiety to Defense (II)
After considering the paths by which the infant’s aggression causes it anxiety, we began in the last entry to examine the mechanisms — the “earliest defense” — by means of which the infant can diminish it. I made several observations regarding Klein’s description:
This defense, while having essentially to do with the infant’s intolerable anxiety, only works directly upon its aggression. Evidently the infant instinctively construes this aggression — discerned both in itself and (ascriptively) in its “persecuting” object — as the cause of its anxiety.
This early defense is “violent,” a predicate that matches the “violence” of the aggression or “excess of sadism” it confronts. Indeed, the defense is perhaps itself a manifestation of this same sadism. I would add that this sort of reflexive turn is familiar from Freuds structural model, which likewise involves an agency, the super-ego, split off from the id yet channeling id-aggression and, what is more, cruelly punishing the self for harboring that self-same aggression.
Klein is knowingly filling in a blank spot left behind — just as knowingly — by Freud. She quotes from the latter’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) to this effect: “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’” (220). Yet we might like to enter a caveat: though Freud indeed hypothesizes the existence of primitive defenses that precede “repression” — so opening the door to Klein’s “earliest defense” — he does not suggest here that such defenses would address aggression, rather than libidinal impulses.
In summary, then: both the object of defense and the defense itself have “primitive” qualities that distinguish Klein’s sadistic phase from subsequent phases.
So, on the one hand, Klein tells us that the direct or immediate object of defense is at the earliest stages, not libido, the life-drive, but the death drive, aggression. On the other hand, Klein insists that this more fundamental object of defense demands and activates more fundamental, primitive means of defense.
Excursus on Anxiety
I want to reiterate at greater length something I have already mentioned a number of times: the underlying reason for defense is, not aggression in itself, but rather the anxiety this aggression stirs up. Occasionally, Klein’s emphasis on aggression obscures this fact that it is not aggression per se which causes trouble to the infant, but only aggression as an engine of anxiety. The latter is clearer in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), where Klein writes:
“We are, I think, justified in assuming that some of the functions which we know from the later ego are there at the beginning. Prominent amongst these functions is that of dealing with anxiety. The vital need to deal with anxiety forces the early ego to develop fundamental mechanisms and defenses.” (4-5)
Even more so, Envy and Gratitude (1957) contains what is presumably Klein’s considered statement on this question. Indeed, in the following passage, the ego is approximately synonymous with its anxiety-reducing function, hence verging on something like Harry Stack Sullivan’s “self-system”:
“[F]rom the very beginning, anxieties cannot be encountered without the defenses against them…[T]he first and foremost function of the ego is to deal with anxiety. I even think it is likely that the primordial anxiety, engendered by the threat of the death instinct within, might be the explanation why the ego is brought into activity from birth onwards. The ego is constantly protecting itself against the pain and tension to which anxiety gives rise, and therefore makes use of defenses from the beginning of post-natal life” (215-16)
Again, though, at this earliest stage the infant’s defenses directly manage internal aggression as the major source of its anxiety. Only later in its development must the infant similarly master its own libido — particularly by means of repression — and once again owing to the anxiety this libido now excites.
Twenty years after “Symbol-Formation,” Klein cites the same conjecture of Freud’s quoted earlier, once more in Envy and Gratitude:
“In the earliest stages splitting and other defense mechanisms are always paramount. Already, in Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud had suggested that there may be methods of defense earlier than repression.” (231)
Again Klein suggests that only later on, and in conjunction with the anxiety surrounding libidinal impulses, does the infant make use of the relatively sophisticated defense of “repression” — and only if that infant is fortunate, and its development has not been derailed by an “excessive” reliance on more primitive defenses. Hence what in Freud generally appears as the ur-defense, repression, upon whose foundation others are subsequently established, is for Klein a relatively late marker of psychological maturity. (I should probably soften this contrast somewhat. For not only, as Klein reminds us, does the Freud of Inhibitions clear space for such a hypothetical possibility. My understanding is that in his last works — “Fetishism,” the unpublished “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense” — Freud puts names to such defenses: “disavowal,” “denial.”)
In any event, the passages quoted in this entry underscore our view, to belabor the point a moment longer, that for Klein it is from anxiety that the infant essentially requires protection. If the defense(s) Klein itemizes — expulsion, destruction, splitting, denial, omnipotence — all lay hold of impulses (initially aggressive impulses, later on libidinal ones), nevertheless this action is intelligible only as part of an overarching strategy of anxiety-reduction. Not the impulse, then, but the impulse’s byproduct, anxiety, puts the ego to work.