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klein-archive · 5 years ago

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Some notes on phantasy and environment, and male and female strivings

8th January 2020

There are some files in the Melanie Klein archive that are hard to categorise, as they appear to have been compiled from a miscellany of notes that do not always cohere. Perhaps they simply ended up, for one reason or another, in the same pile of papers in Klein’s office at the time of her death. Some pages are repeated several times, with or without editing. Such files can be frustrating to study and make sense of, yet they are often well worth the effort. PP/KLE/D.26 is one such file, and consists of 96 separate sheets (presented as numbered images in the Wellcome Library’s digital file). The time of creation is not clear, but in image 1 there is a reference to ‘post war’, suggesting that at least some of the pages were written after 1945.

In the Wellcome catalogue, file D.26 is part of a series (D.23-27) entitled ‘Notes for possible books or papers’. This is not exactly specific, and the individual heading for D.26 is equally general: ‘Notes on various topics (older versions of paper) Extra Material. Lecture 11 Early Situation. Lecture 1 Internalisation. Mother and Baby Situation. Love and Reparation.’

Some of the papers mentioned in this rather unwieldy heading probably formed part of a lecture series on child analysis, which was given to training candidates at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Also in this file are extracts from the first of Klein’s ‘Lectures on Technique’ (these can be found in full in files C.52 and C.53, and were published by John Steiner in 2017).

I have honed in on two themes from this disparate collection that I think are worth noting: first, Klein’s emphasis on the importance of the interaction of innate unconscious phantasy with actual experience of the external world (the environment), beginning in earliest infancy. There are many other examples of this throughout Klein’s work, noted by Elizabeth Bott Spillius and colleagues in The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought under: ‘External world/environment’.

Second, I have extracted passages in which Klein describes what she perceives as the different strivings of men and women, based on differing unconscious preoccupations. Her emphasis in these notes is mostly on women.

Although little, if any, of the material here is newly discovered (or rediscovered), it is always stimulating to read through Klein’s rough notes, before they were edited and polished into complete papers.

(The following notes are found online as Wellcome image numbers 42-43, followed by 46. These are typed pages with corrections and additions in Klein’s handwriting.)

The interaction of unconscious phantasy with the infant’s experience.

The environmental influence – to begin with the attitude of the mother and the detailed ways in which she nurses the baby and looks after him – is of great importance for the building up of his phantasies, and thus also for his present and future object relations. Her love and care will from the very beginning help him to develop towards phantasies of a pleasant kind and to the development of more good and helpful images, and also give him more support against his early anxiety situations. Lack of understanding on the part of mother or nurse on the other hand will work in the opposite direction and reinforce the development of persecution phantasies. But to a certain though varying degree, persecution phantasies will be experienced by the infant and dangerous internal and external objects will become active in his mind, even if the mother is perfectly loving. Sadistic phantasies and impulses and the anxieties to which they give rise spring from intrapsychic sources. They are influenced by the environmental factor but can never be eliminated. Also, no matter how loving the mother is, frustrations there are and must be from the moment of delivery from the womb, and they all go towards the development of aggressive phantasies and the building up of persecuting imagos, as do the various bodily sensations and unpleasant internal and external stimuli which the baby experiences from birth onwards. But if we could imagine for a moment a child without aggressive phantasies, and thus also without persecution phantasies, we should soon realise that the aggressive impulses, and even anxieties of various kinds, are not only of high importance for the whole of development, but even stimulate and promote it if they are not too strong. Needless to say the less anxiety a child goes through the better. There is always enough, (I daresay too much) to stimulate the development.

Summing up, I should say that phantastic imagos are the result of the child’s phantasy life and instinctual urges, on the one hand, and of internal and external stimuli and real frustrations and deprivations and the people in the child’s environment on the other. One can be sure that in every case all these elements come into play in varying degrees. The point I want to stress here is, that there exists in the infant, side by side with his relations to real objects – but on a different plane as it were – relations to his phantastic imagos. These two kinds of object relations intermingle and colour each other in the course of development, and the first steps in this direction occur when the child gets to know his mother as a whole and loved person, which is roughly between the ages of three to five months.

The partial realisation that the loved objects and the hated ones, the real people and the imaginary figures, both external and internal, are somehow bound up with each other, compels the ego to unify its imagos to some extent. Having made these crucial and extremely painful steps, and having then arrived at a plane nearer to reality, the ego takes at once recourse to some mechanisms which are of fundamental importance for the relation to our objects and for mental economy in general. The ego splits again its imagos into loved and hated, i.e. into good and dangerous ones, at the same time projecting its internalized objects into the external world, and thus distributing both its anxiety and its libido again onto real objects. By attaching his hate and anxiety to some people and his love to others the child is able to gain more trust in some people. Since at the time he introjects these good objects, also his belief in the figures he feels to be inside him becomes strengthened. A successful interplay of these processes leads to a mitigation of the dangerousness of the imagos, which in turn enables the ego to make further steps towards their unification. But this unification is always bound to certain limits. Even in the normal grown up mind there remain operative, to a certain extent, internal and external objects which have, as it were, an independent existence of their own, and which become active as soon as hate is [the sentence is interrupted here and the rest is found in image 82, as follows:] stirred up by frustrations and anxiety is increased for internal or external reasons.

Notes on female and male strivings

[Image 1: this is written in pencil by Klein on a fragment of paper]

The selfish relation of the mother to her children. Also protection in another sense by satisfying her vanity, possessions etc.

[Image 10: typed; begins mid-sentence and seems to be a continuation from a previous lost page]

mother – in which means having one’s desires and needs satisfied and receiving protection – persists too strongly into adult life, then the woman’s relation to the man will also have something of this character. This kind of relationship in which love mainly consists in receiving love, satisfaction, admiration and protection from the man is by no means rare nowadays, although, owing to the alterations in social and economic conditions it is less obvious than in pre-war days.

[Image 11: typed]

Capacity to detach oneself sufficiently from the early ties has the effect of allowing one to grow up, because then new relationships will not simply be built on the pattern of the old one – which implies that the feelings of guilt towards the parents are not so strong. E.g. if a daughter develops to her husband a relationship which is not just a repetition of the one she wanted to have with her father she will feel that she has not just taken away her mother’s husband, she can feel equal to her mother, the childish situation diminishes, and gives way to a situation of equality which is adequate for a grown- up relation.

[Image 15: typed with Klein’s annotations in pencil]

Notes.

Any work which gives satisfaction

For the woman, any work which has to do with the house, with the garden, with writing a book, - all that has to do with reparation of mother’s body, creation of babies etc.

Activity of men – all things connected with penis

Feminine in man and masculine in woman.

Relation to external – work with other people, and doing something which is felt to be good for the whole organisation

[Images 17-18: typed with Klein’s corrections and annotations]

The woman’s feelings of love and her urge to make restoration play an important part in her sublimations and activities. Her interests, in her domestic life, or in creative work of any kind, though this may be undertaken for loved people and will have their real values, are largely influenced by her urge to produce babies, to take care of them and thus also to restore what in her phantasies she has injured.

In her phantasies, the house, with all its details, the garden, with the flowers she grows, or a book she might write stand also for her own body and her mother’s body, and her activity and creativeness are thus influenced by her wish to make restoration, which, as we know, is partly due to an interaction between love and hate.

The interests and the creativeness of the man find expression, as we know, in somewhat different ways. They are directed mainly towards the external world, although of course there are similarities between his and the woman’s type of productiveness in so far as he has feminine traits. The fact that his activities and interests are in general more concerned with external things has to do with the part he plays in procreation, in which he gives out what the woman takes in.

Now in his phantasies which originate in early childhood, and in which the interactions of feelings of love and hate and the urge to restore play an important part, his genital comes to stand for all creative power, and becomes linked up with all constructive tendencies and capacities.

What I have just said is of course not an attempt at an explanation of the most complex phenomena of the work and sublimations of [stops abruptly here]

[Images 26-28: typed with Klein’s handwritten corrections and additions]

The importance of this world established inside the self is much greater with the woman than with the man, for the very reason that it is inside her body that the important reproductive processes go on by which the child is received and developed. In the little girl’s phantasies…the inside of her body is full of people and things and feelings of a good and of a destructive kind, and she is unconsciously deeply concerned with the state of this world… Babies play a most important part in this phantasy world. In the little girl’s phantasies her mother’s inside is full of babies, put into it by the father’s penis. But since phantasies are felt to be real to the child, she also possesses babies inside her, and they are the babies which she wants to receive from her father, and thus in her phantasy has actually received. She cherishes these babies as the very best things in her inside, and thus become for her the proof of goodness and value in herself. This of course can only be explained by the fact that the woman’s unconscious relation to the inside of her body is of this very special kind that I have described.

The great importance that women attach to their bodies is in this way misleading. Their deepest unconscious interests, their concern, their love and anxiety are focussed on the world inside themselves, and particularly on the baby which they contain – first it is in phantasy and then in reality. These factors contribute greatly to the strength of the feelings the woman has towards the child growing inside her and to the baby to which she has given birth. Besides all the things which I have already mentioned, the fact that this baby stands as a test for the goodness of her internal world has a fundamental influence on her relation to her actual child.

It is well known that as soon as a mother has given suck to her child her feelings towards it deepen. Because out of her body she produces the very good stuff which is essential for the child’s needs and gratification and which provides the means of its growth… But in giving suck she also plays as it were her mother’s part, who is now in her phantasy again having a child to love and to take care of and she thus recreates the old family situation. In this way she makes reparation in her mind for her past aggressive and jealous phantasies in which she robbed her mother of children. But in addition to this she shares her child’s pleasure, by returning in phantasy back to her own babyhood. She thus reverses the relationship of mother and child and experiences a happy renewal of her early attachment to her mother and improves on it.

[Image 30: extract]

The woman has desired a baby from her very earliest days, and the gratification of at last having it relieves the pain of the old frustrations and of the old grievance that she has been denied it. This tends to reduce her aggressive impulses, and thus allows her more possibilities for loving her child.

[Image 31: extract]

…all the mother’s good and constructive tendencies now have scope. The gratification of being able to love, which is closely connected with the relief of the sense of guilt, [stops abruptly here]

[Image 33]

I mentioned before that in a way the woman is recreating the old family situation, but is recreating it in a happy way. Thus she is making up to her mother for having injured or robbed her of her babies out of jealousy and envy; and since the child also stands for the woman’s own brothers and sisters, which as a child she had also attacked in her aggressive phantasies, the brothers and sisters also, when she loves her baby and takes care of it, are restored and put right.

References

Spillius, E. Bott et al (2011) The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Routledge. (See entry entitled, ‘External world/environment’.)

Steiner, J. (2017) Lectures on Technique by Melanie Klein. London: Routledge.

#melanie klein #child analysis #psychoanalysis #psychological development #unconscious phantasy #motherhood #infancy #oedipus complex #imagos #object relations

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