Picture credit: Douglas Glass - https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0018518.html archive, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33597446
BIOGRAPHY
Melanie Klein was a psychotherapist who was born in Vienna in 1882 but who undertook most of her significant work in London, the city to which she moved in the 1920s. While she had and continues to have her detractors, her influence is still felt today, particularly in the field of child analysis. Her theories can offer us an insight not only into the development of children’s inner worlds, but also into how we relate both to ourselves and to those around us.
Melanie Klein did not have an easy childhood, and the many losses she suffered in her family life had a significant impact on the development of her theories. Her mother Libussa, who told the young Melanie that she had been a mistake, was an expert in manipulation who ensured that she remained the central emotional and practical focus of what became a rather neurotic family. Despite the early rejection she suffered, and in spite of her jealousy of her parents’ love for her older siblings, Klein was persuaded to see her mother as loving and self-sacrificing, and sought to mirror her mother’s love for her elder brother Emanuel. In fact, Emanuel became a key influence in the young Klein’s life, a substitute father figure who encouraged her learning. However, Klein lost her brother when he was in his early twenties. Afflicted with tuberculosis, he left the family home and began a kind of dissolute Grand Tour of Europe, funded by Libussa, which ended with his death from the combined effects of drug addiction, alcoholism and tuberculosis in Italy in 1902.
Devastated at the loss of her beloved brother, and aware of the financial difficulties her family now faced – her father had died two years prior to Emanuel – Melanie married Arthur Klein, a chemical engineer, in 1903. Prior to his death, Emanuel had encouraged the liaison between the two and perhaps the grieving Melanie hoped to find some solace in the attentions of another man. However, while the couple had three children, the marriage was joyless. Melanie sank into a depression and Libussa stepped in, sending her away for numerous cures and holidays. In her absence, her mother assumed the maternal role within the family, and often encouraged her daughter to stay away for longer that she might otherwise have wanted to.
When her mother passed away, Klein began seeing a psychoanalyst. By this stage, Freud – also based in Vienna - had been developing the practice of psychoanalysis for around twenty years. Psychoanalysis is predicated on the belief that a person’s development is determined by often forgotten events in early childhood. Our behaviour and how we think are largely determined by instinctual drives that that are rooted in the unconscious. If we try to develop awareness of those drives, we often then put defence mechanisms in place, in an attempt to protect ourselves. An example of a defence mechanism might be a situation in which we are angry at our parents, but in which it feels safer to turn that anger on ourselves, on a friend or even a pet. Displacement is another example of a defence mechanism we might deploy; we might accuse our partner of cheating on us because we have thought about cheating ourselves. This process of attributing our feelings to someone else is called projection. If there is a significant conflict or difference between what we think and feel unconsciously, and what we allow ourselves to be aware of, this can lead to mental disturbances such as neurosis, neurotic traits, anxiety or depression. Freud believed that unconscious material can be found in dreams and unintentional acts, including mannerisms and slips of the tongue; it literally slips out! The aim of psychotherapy is to free the patient from the negative effects of the unconscious, by using the therapy room and the relationship between the therapist and the patient to bring this material into the conscious mind, so it can be considered, questioned, and perhaps resolved.
Despite the fact that she had no formal medical training, Melanie Klein eventually made the transition from seeing a psychoanalyst to working in psychoanalysis herself. She developed a particular interest in working with children. At the time, psychoanalysts believed that children could not be analysed, but Klein was determined to challenge this belief. She did not want simply to apply adult views of childhood to the children that she saw. Rather, she used play as a way to engage with her very young patients. She gave each child a set of toys and materials to play with, and a personal locker in which to keep them. She could analyse even children who couldn’t speak by observing the way in which they interacted with these toys. When she then talked to a child about his or her play, she would relate it to what she thought were the deeper unconscious meanings in the child’s mind.
Klein pursued her work despite considerable resistance to her ideas. People were alarmed by the direct way in which she analysed and talked about children’s anxieties, and even suggested that this could drive children mad. Austrian and German psychoanalysts did not much care for Klein. They were opposed not only to her techniques but also to what they perceived to be an unacceptable encroachment on their field of expertise by a female, uneducated, by-then divorced, woman from a Polish-Jewish background. Her supporters encouraged her to move to London. Yet while her work flourished there, she was drawn into yet another conflict; this time with Freud’s daughter, Anna, who was also in London and who was developing her own very different approach to child analysis. British psychoanalysts felt that they had to take sides in the conflict; they were either for Klein or against her. Most distressingly, Klein’s own daughter, whom she had analysed as part of her early research, led the opposition to her theories.
Melanie Klein’s life was marked by emotional and practical challenges, depression, the impact of her destructive relationship with her mother and by a huge amount of loss and bereavement. Nevertheless, she had a significant impact on the field of psychoanalysis and in particular on the development of the way in which analysts, therapists and others in the caring professions worked with and continue to work with young children. While it would be impossible to give a detailed account of all of Klein’s theories in this article, I hope it provides a brief introduction to the aspects of her thinking that I believe remain most relevant today.
THEORY: PHANTASY
Klein used the term phantasy to refer to unconscious mental activity. In her 1932 book The Psychoanalysis of Children, she gives the example of her treatment of Ruth, a distressed and anxious four year old, to illustrate the way in which she could identify this unconscious mental activity through a child’s play and then interpret how the child was feeling to help him or her move forward. At first, Ruth was reluctant to interact with Klein, and was very preoccupied with her elder sister. Klein describes a breakthrough she made while observing Ruth at play:
• One day while Ruth was once again devoting her attention exclusively to her sister, she drew a picture of a tumbler with some small round balls inside and a kind of lid on top. I asked her what the lid was for, but she would not answer me. On her sister repeating the question, she said it was 'to prevent the balls from rolling out'. Before this, she had gone through her sister's bag and then shut it tightly 'so that nothing should fall out of it'. She had done the same with the purse inside the bag so as to keep the coins safely shut up ... I now made a venture and told Ruth that the balls in the tumbler, the coins in the purse and the contents of the bag all meant children in her Mummy's inside, and that she wanted to keep them safely shut up so as not to have any more brothers and sisters. The effect of my interpretation was astonishing. For the first time Ruth turned her attention to me and began to play in a different, less constrained way. (Klein, 1932, pp. 26-7)
Klein was able to interpret the anxieties present in Ruth’s play, who then felt a sense of relief and freedom once her feelings had been explained to her. Klein’s approach continues to influence the way that psychologists work with young children, to help them understand and cope with their feelings, anxieties, or any traumas they may have suffered.
INTERNAL OBJECTS
Another significant aspect of Klein’s theory is the concept of Internal Objects. As with many other areas of her work, the origins of this concept lay in the work she did with young children. While observing them, she noticed that they were really concerned with what went on inside themselves, and their experience of the people in the world around them. These insights informed the development of her theory of Internal Objects. An internal object is the term Klein used to describe an inner mental and emotional image of an external figure, also known as an external object, together with the experience of that figure. An example may help to clarify what Klein meant. Think about one of your parents, let’s say your mum. You have an image of her in your mind. You know lots of things about her, and she also makes you feel a particular way, which is unique to your experience of her. So, while it may be that other people see your mum as very intimidating because she is really good at her job, you see her as warm and beautiful, because of the way she interacts with you and the way she makes you feel. The external figure of your mother, combined with your experience of her, creates your own, unique internal object. Klein said that our inner world is full of them.
These internal objects, these inner representations of people in our lives, may be more or less ‘real’ – more or less accurate representations of other people. Going back to your mum, she may not be warmer than anyone else. She might even be quite distant and professional at work, efficient but not particularly personable. I don’t know. She might just be a generally nice person. But of course, her love for you and how much you appreciate her affects how you see her. You might find it really hard to see her the way others do. Let’s say your older brother argues with her a lot. He sees her warmth as interference, or as a failure to recognise he is now an adult in his own right. You will find it hard to understand his position, since you have an internal object that represents your mum that is very different to his. As an added complication, internal objects can also be affected by aspects of the self that have been projected into them. If you were particularly insecure, the reassurance provided by your mum’s love and support could further reinforce the positive aspects of your internal object of her. Conversely, if your brother were particularly insecure, your mum’s apparent need to nurture him might reinforce his underlying feelings of inadequacy and therefore serve to make his internal object of the same person even more negative.
Melanie Klein said that internal objects can be categorised as good or bad. Good objects are those that satisfy our needs and desires, and so are loved. A bad object is one that frustrates or otherwise does not support our needs and desire and is therefore hated. Sometimes objects can be good and then bad. For example, a baby sees her mother’s breast as a good object when the mother is feeding her, but then as a bad object when the mother is busy with siblings or making the dinner. Of course, this breast belongs to the mother, so we might actually see our mother as good or bad. This is particularly the case in early infancy, since babies tend to see the world around them in a very black and white way, in which everything is either a source of love or a source of hatred.
The concept of internal objects is quite hard to grasp, and it can also be challenging to understand firstly how their nature shifts and changes as we interact with the real people that they represent, and also how this can affect how we feel about those people, and by extension about ourselves. I read an article recently whose author sought to explain internal objects through the metaphor of an actor on a stage, which I will paraphrase here. He asked the reader to imagine a figure, Robert, whose ego was on stage in a large amphitheatre. The backdrop to this amphitheatre is the real world, in which he interacts with other people. The audience is full of people with whom he has interacted in the past – or rather, his representations (internal objects) of those people. For example, his first primary school teacher may have cared for him and been a really good teacher. However, Robert found her frightening and hard to please. Therefore, his representation of her is frightening.
To the left of the audience are the warm people from whom Robert gets guidance and support. On the right are people he experiences as harsh or critical. To make things more complicated, the same person may have multiple representations. Robert's mother can be seated on the left based on the time when she calmed him after a nightmare. But she can also occupy a seat on the right, due to a time she wrongly accused him of stealing an ice-cream from his sister and punished him, to his mind, unjustly.
The audience may shift, according to Robert’s interactions with the real world. Some people may move from left to right, some from the right side of the audience to the left, and some may even leave the theatre. The arrangement of the audience also influences the way that Robert continues to interact with the real world – for example, according to whether he finds it particularly supportive, or particularly threatening – and the way that he stores new memories of these interactions. At times, the audience can be polite and doesn’t interrupt Robert. In these moments, none of his internal objects get in the way of how he is living his life. (So his dad doesn’t criticise him for rushing through tasks, which often happens, as for once he is on top of things.) But at other times, the audience becomes more intrusive. It criticises him so harshly that it interrupts his dealings with the outside world. Sometimes, the audience may even start arguing amongst themselves!
Some audience members have features that are not quite fully developed, since Robert only knows one side of them. These people can often make Robert feel confused or lacking in control. The audience also includes some blob-like creatures, who represent Robert’s earliest infant experiences. At times they are frightening, at times captivating. But even a captivating bomb poses a risk; the risk that you will be subsumed into their gooey mess. (Think about a time when you were really stressed and just wanted to crawl under the duvet, back into the womb like a baby, rejecting all adult responsibilities and hoping others would take care of you: that is the gooey mess.)
According to this metaphor, the more Roger matures psychologically, the more human the audience will appear. Rather than grappling with multiple representations of significant people in his life, he will manage to integrate them into a more coherent whole. While Robert remains more psychologically immature, the audience are more likely to resemble those gooey blobs of his early childhood, and he is more likely to have to contend with multiple, separate representations of the same person.
I think this metaphor is really helpful in helping us to understand Melanie Klein’s concept of Internal Objects and the control they can potentially exert over our psychological functioning. (I only wish I could find the original website article, to credit the author.) As far as the concept itself is concerned, I think its value lies in the way it can help us to understand that we all store versions of people that may be different from those held by others. In the same way that we may experience events in very different ways, the same is true of how we experience people. If we are more aware of this, we can develop a greater understanding of different perspectives. It can also be helpful have a greater awareness of the way that we create our own versions of other people, and that what those versions look like can depend on how we are feeling. If I am feeling depressed, my internal objects of my friends might not be able to see the positives in me, they might share in my negative views of myself and even reinforce them. This can happen even if the real people I am interacting with are being much more positive and reassuring. This in turn can help me understand why it is so hard to take on board the positive affirmation other people might give me. If I am more aware of my internal objects, I can try to look beyond them and interact with the real person rather than the version of them I have stored. Let’s say my best friend told me I was thoughtless in an argument we had ten years ago. I allow the internal object that I created of her at the time too much space, and it gets in the way of how I interact with her in the present. She, of course, has completely forgotten the conversation and doesn’t think I am a thoughtless person at all. However, I have clung onto that internal object and beat myself up with it when I am feeling low. If I can get past it and interact with my actual friend, my internal object will likely become quieter, or even merge with my more positive internal object of my friend; someone who loves me but who also sees that I have my faults, and who can point them out to me when she needs to.
SPLITTING AND PROJECTION
Another aspect of Melanie Klein’s work that can give us a helpful insight into our own psychology is the dual concept of splitting and projection. As has previously been discussed, babies see the world around them in black and white. They split objects into good objects and bad objects. Klein said that when a baby is hungry, and has a physical sensation linked to this hunger, for example in her stomach, she attributes this discomfort to a bad object attacking her from inside. In the baby’s experience, since she houses a bad object, by extension she must be a bad baby. She therefore projects good objects (sensations, attributes, behaviours) onto other people, thus protecting them from the bad baby. Conversely, she may also project bad objects onto other people, to ensure that they do not remain part of her.
I will consider the implications of these processes of splitting and projection for our adult relationships, but first it is interesting to look at when Melanie Klein says that they are most likely to be brought into play. She says that we can occupy two psychological ‘positions’, or two ways of interacting with the world around us. According to Klein, splitting and projection belong to the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. This is how babies interact with the world and is a position we ordinarily grow out of as we mature. As adults, we are more likely to occupy what Klein calls the depressive position, in which we are better able to integrate the positive and negative aspects of ourselves, others and our experiences. However, even as adults, we may revert to a more paranoid-schizoid mode of functioning. This is particularly the case when we are stressed or under the impact of trauma. Think about a time when you have been really anxious. When we are struggling with anxiety, everything that is not really good is really bad, and we anticipate disasters or failures. Consider a time when you didn’t do as well as you would have hoped in a test, an exam, or with an important professional task. Did you decide you were a complete failure? Did you then apply this sense of failure to other aspects of your life? I know this is something I have certainly done. When we are under pressure, we are more likely to catastrophise, and to see everything in a negative light. Yet if we can understand why we do this, and catch ourselves doing it, we can often approach the situation in a more rational way. If we can allow ourselves space to realise that we don’t live in a world of extremes, we may then be able to adopt a less anxious and more measured approach. Of course, this is easier said than done, particularly in periods of depression when we are more likely to adopt this more extreme position, unable to see the positives in anything, including ourselves.
In terms of our adult, emotional life, an understanding of how we may use splitting as a defence mechanism can helps us develop a greater understanding of how our relationships may work and how our sense of self within them can have an impact. Just as the baby does when she feels she harbours a bad object, we can use splitting to get rid of unwanted characteristics. We create a nice, lovable self that we want to hang on to, and an unpleasant self that we want to reject. We may then use projection to displace our negative qualities onto other people. This allows us to criticise and attempt to manage those characteristics in someone else. On one hand, this process of projection may give us a sense of safety, since the negative can be dismissed as comfortably extraneous to our own psychological make-up. On the other hand, it can prevent us from developing the emotional and interpersonal skills that we need for the real world, and can prevent us from seeing and addressing our own destructive behaviours.
So what does splitting and projecting look like in your relationships? Think about the people with whom you have any kind of relationship. Is there someone you view as overconfident and opinionated? Is it possible that you are actually critical of him or her because you would like to be more confident yourself? Or perhaps you are really opinionated but feel unable to express your opinions in quite as direct a way as the person you criticise for doing just that.
I will give you an example from my life. I was very insecure and emotionally withdrawn as a teenager, and didn’t really have a close group of friends at school until the 6th form, when I found a wonderful group of girls who are still my closest friends today. Ella joined as a new student in the 6th form and we immediately clicked. Initially I felt excited by this new friendship, but I then became increasingly resistant to her attempts to establish greater intimacy. Eventually, I reached a point where I couldn’t understand why everyone else liked her. I felt suspicious, convinced that she was somehow ‘faking’ how nice she was, and how much she liked me, and confused that no one else could see it. I withdrew from the friendship and at times was actively unpleasant towards her. (Though I am happy to say that she stuck by me regardless, I apologised for my behaviour and we still enjoy a genuine friendship today.) Looking back, I can understand how my own insecurities affected my feelings towards Ella. My low self-esteem meant that I found it hard to accept that people could like me as much as she seemed to, and that I felt threatened when people got too close – fearful that she would see what I was really like. And so to protect myself, I projected my negative feelings about myself onto Ella, turning her into someone who didn’t real like me – much as she pretended to – and who was therefore not to be trusted.
SPLITTING IN GROUPS
Splitting can also happen in groups. As is the case on an individual basis, within a group people split off the aspects of themselves that they don’t want to acknowledge. However, it can often go beyond this. The members of the group unconsciously select the same central person onto whom to project those cast-off aspects. The people who are chosen sometimes also collude to take on these aspects. Various people in the group get cast in different roles. The person onto whom the groups projects their halos becomes a hero; they can do no wrong and can say what they like. Conversely, the person onto whom the group projects their shadows becomes the scapegoat; they might be ostracised or even thrown out of the group. Think about a group that you belong to. It might be a class at school, a team at work, a sports team or a group of friends. Have you individually or collectively assigned roles to people? Is someone “the leader” and is someone the person who will inevitably let you down? Is someone “the mature one”, and some else the person who will always ensure everyone has a great time, who will push limits and boundaries on your behalf? A group is inevitably made up of different types of people, and within it those people will instinctively assume different roles. However, we need to be aware of the risk that we might limit people through the roles to which we assign them, and of the negative impact that group dynamics can sometimes have.
Beyond the insight it might provide into our personal relationships, Klein’s concept of splitting and projection can also help us understand certain tendencies that we might see in society, and in particular within the political sphere. We use splitting to disown negative characteristics, which we then project onto other people. This enables us to reject any link between ourselves and the negative qualities that we see in others. The principle danger inherent in this process is that it creates an “other”, with whom we do not and indeed cannot identify - since to do so would be to accept that we share his negative characteristics. In the absence of any sense of connection, we have less motivation to protect, understand or support him. This becomes particularly relevant if we consider recent political campaigns in the light of this process: the focus on the threat of immigration for example, or the anti-European sentiment stoked by those behind the Leave campaign in the run up to the EU Referendum. While spin doctors and politicians may not be able to name it as such, they often apply the principles of splitting and projection to encourage the electorate to blame others for their own shortcomings, and for the shortcomings of society. At its most pernicious, splitting and projection can lead to the dehumanisation of the other, who is solely defined by his negative attributes. The Nazis’ anti-Semitism is the most infamous and tragic example of this in recent history.
CONCLUSION
Many of Melanie Klein’s theories are rooted in if not negative, then certainly complex and challenging psychological processes. It is clear that the difficulties in her own life had a significant influence on the direction of her work. Yet despite the challenges inherent in understanding and then choosing whether to accept the varied aspects of her theory – and there are many others that I have not discussed here – I believe Melanie Klein is worth the effort, for the insight she can afford us into our relationship with ourselves, with others, and into the way our inner life is challenged and modified as we move through our world.
If you would like to explore her work further, the Melanie Klein Trust https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/ is a fantastic source of information.
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