Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) (VIII)
From Anxiety to Defense (III)
In the last entries, I tried to clarify some of the general connections between aggression, anxiety and defense, emphasizing especially those qualities of the infant’s mental functioning that may be called “primitive.” During the sadistic phase that preoccupies Klein in “Symbol-Formation,” both (a) the defense and (b) the impulse upon which this defense operates are “violent.” By contrast, neither the later defense of repression, nor the libidinal impulse against which it operates, really qualify for this descriptor.
In this entry, I’d like to examine more concretely the particular defense Klein introduces in the opening sections of this essay. There are two aspects to this “earliest defense,” namely, “expulsion” and “destruction”:
“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.” (220, my italics)
Klein’s way of phrasing things here (“This defense…”) suggests that expulsion and destruction are, not two discrete defenses, but rather two ways of conceiving a single defense. So while I will consider these two items in sequence, we should keep their inseparability in mind. I will return to this issue presently.
Expulsion
My first hunch is that “expulsion” here must mean something like projection or ascription. (The infant imagines: ‘This sadism — this drive to attack and persecute — belongs, not to me, but to the object.’) Moreover, in "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” Klein describes this early defensive or “deflecting” strategy explicitly as one of “projection”: “The destructive impulse is partly projected outwards (deflection of the death instinct) and, I think, attaches itself to the first external object, the mother’s breast” (4-5). It would therefore seem unlikely that expulsion should additionally mean simple discharge — for surely the latter signifies, not a defense against one’s sadism, but a fairly unmediated expression of it.
Yet this might be precisely what Klein has in mind, which introduces a conceptual difficulty that is worth contemplating. Under what conditions is the infant’s effort to discharge its sadism — to phantastically attack the object of frustration — simultaneously a defense against that very sadism?
It seems that expulsion can denote the simple discharge of sadism, but only if by “sadism” Klein understands an item felt by the infant as in the first instance turned against itself — such that venting it upon the object is itself a defensive alternative for the infant. Yet this means that all those behaviors which a layperson might perceive as self-evident expressions of sadism are for Klein, paradoxically, ways for the infant to manage and defend against its internally self-directed sadism.
In one respect, of course, this conclusion should not surprise Klein’s readers. She certainly will depict the death drive along these lines. In Envy and Gratitude, for instance, she writes that the infant’s “primordial anxiety” is “engendered by the threat of the death instinct within” (215-16). And again later: “destructive impulses, the expression of the death instinct, are first of all felt to be directed against the ego” (223).
Nevertheless, the following considerations make this claim counter-intuitive:
In “Symbol-Formation” itself, Klein does not claim explicitly that the infant’s aggression is in the first instance self-directed, hence in need of defensive discharge outwardly. Only in other texts is this more clear.
Indeed, given the opportunity in the passage under review to explain why “the subject's own sadism” is felt by the infant as “a source of danger,” Klein simply introduces the (tautological-sounding) suggestion that this sadism “offers an occasion for the liberation of anxiety.” (This was the position I took in a previous entry, in which I considered these lines in detail.)
Surely the language of “sadism” suggests to our minds something inherently other- or object-directed. When self-directed, we’d naturally prefer to call this aggression — derivative of the death drive — masochistic.
Destruction
The second side of this early defense — or, perhaps more precisely, the second way of viewing this defense — is designated destruction. Together with our last considerations, this seems like conclusive evidence that expulsion does mean (in addition to ascription) something like discharge. For what is it, after all, to discharge one’s inner aggression (sadism) upon an object? For Klein, it is to shape this drive into phantasies of attacking and destroying that object. Hence, to put a point on our interpretation, “expulsion” (of the sadistic impulse) and “destruction” (of the object) are simply two names for one and the same action.
I have already written at some length about these destructive phantasies, and won’t spend much more time on them here. Indeed, the better part of Klein’s descriptions in the essay’s opening paragraphs elucidate and illustrate what she means.
However, I would like to emphasize— lest our emphasis on the action of “discharge” eclipses our initial reaction to Klein’s words — that “ascription,” too, must play a significant role in the infant’s expulsion of aggressive impulses (hence the destructive phantasy that this expulsion entails). What I mean is this: it appears to belong to Klein’s view of this sadistic phase that the infant can discharge and vent its aggression upon the object, phantasically attack and annihilate it — thereby managing its anxiety — only on the condition of ascribing this aggression to the object. The infant attacks the object because, from its own standpoint, the object is attacking it.
Of course, this defense is ultimately self-sabotaging, for it ensnares the infant in a vicious spiral of an “expulsive destruction” that promotes anxiety, which itself promotes more aggression, and so on. (This is not a critique of Klein; it is an anticipation of her own argument.) But for the moment this may suffice as a clarification of the “earliest defense” Klein attributes to the infant.
In the next entry, I will begin to discuss Klein’s understanding of symbolism, in light of the sadistic phase we’ve just reconstructed.