Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930) (XI)
We’ve been discussing Klein’s (ambiguous) appropriation of ideas found in Ferenczi and Ernest Jones related to symbolism, and we’ve tried to clarify which elements of these ideas, exactly, form the basis of her argument in “Symbol-Formation.” These ideas explicitly concern “identification,” its motivational sources, and its anticipation of symbols proper (Ferenczi); and the pleasure principle (in this context, libidinal investment) as a condition of possibility for those “equations” that constitute symbols (Jones).
I tried especially to fill in an unspoken premise of Klein’s use of the term “symbol.” (It is at least something that receives no direct comment in the essay.) In its technical, psychoanalytic sense, a symbol involves an item that is unconsciously equated with another item — i.e. symbolizes it — which is itself repressed, but whose “affective charge” accrues to the symbol that replaces it. To turn now to Klein's third and final reference point:
“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)
It is here, as we saw in the last entry, that Klein’s editors refer us to her essay, “Infant Analysis,” from 1923. The early publication date itself helps explain several peculiarities of the essay — in any case, “peculiar” relative to the positions taken 1930’s “Symbol-Formation.” These include the following:
Klein is principally concerned in “Infant Analysis” with the question of “inhibitions” (neurotic and otherwise) — their origin, nature, and consequences. She is particularly interested in clarifying the relation of inhibitions to inter alia the mechanisms of repression, identification, sublimation, as well as cognate entities such as neurotic “symptoms.” The problem of anxiety, too, figures prominently in this account. And yet her conception of anxiety is essentially — albeit understandably — taken over from Freud’s treatment of it in the Introductory Lectures (1915–1917), “Repression” (1915), and “The Unconscious” (1915). In other words, “Infant Analysis” is grounded in Freud’s early concept of anxiety — libido, when obstructed by repression, is “transformed” into anxiety, as wine into vinegar — rather than his final theory, which is only articulated after Klein’s piece, in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926). Hence “Infant Analysis” contains nothing like the “signal anxiety” that soon becomes standard in psychoanalytic discussion — let alone those differentiated types of anxiety that have by “Symbol-Formation” become central to Klein’s whole conception of mental functioning: retaliatory, paranoid anxiety, annihilation anxiety, and the others we’ve already examined.
These last innovations in Kleins understanding of anxiety indicate another peculiarity of “Infant Analysis.” For by 1930 she will claim that the essential genesis of anxiety is in the infant’s own death drive. (We have already reviewed the ideas associated with this claim in considerable detail.) Yet not only is anything like inborn aggression or a “sadistic phase” absent from “Infant Analysis”; we will not even find something as tepid as “anger” in it. The reasons for this absence — so conspicuous in light of aggression’s (perhaps outsized) prominence in standard “Kleinian” thinking — are slightly less clear. Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, so the death drive would have been familiar to Klein by the time she wrote “Infant Analysis.” Nevertheless, we may hypothesize that psychoanalytic thinking required some time in order to assimilate this new “drive” into its model of mental functioning and development. So, we may recall that, for Freud, everything to do with neurosis centered on the repression of libidinal impulses. Hence neither the core defense nor the object of this defense seemed to concern the (not yet introduced) death drive. Yet by “Symbol-Formation,” both the defense (projection, destruction) and its object (sadistic impulses) are inseparable from the death drive.
In at least these respects, then, the position outlined in “Symbol-Formation” is distinct from — and arguably inconsistent with — the one defended in “Infant Analysis.” Both Klein's focus (theoretical and clinical), and her explanatory framework have developed. These caveats aside, though, Klein now reiterates a “conclusion” from the earlier essay, as a basis for further elaboration. Here again is the line:
“…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)
Here I will repeat something I’ve already emphasized: whereas, according to her paraphrases, Ferenczi and Jones have identified several of the preconditions of symbol-formation (identification, and an equating activity propelled by the pleasure principle), Klein's “conclusion” in “Infant Analysis” runs in the opposite direction. According to this account, symbolism is itself the precondition of additional capacities: namely, sublimation and talent.
What exactly does Klein have in mind, then, with this assertion? How are sublimation and talent “founded” in symbolism? And how might Klein intend to build upon this idea in the remainder of “Symbol-Formation”?
I will address these questions in the next entry.