Klein and the Problems of Contemporary Culture
Melanie Klein has long been a blind spot in my understanding of the development of psychoanalytic thinking. Though, as I understand it, still popular in British training settings, her influence has seemingly waned stateside. This could largely just be a question of geography and the ways in which psychoanalytic lineage and genealogy influence the ways in which certain ideas are carried to other areas, further influencing how people are trained in, and subsequently write about, psychoanalytic theory. From an object-relations perspective, Winnicott’s acolytes may just be a bit more well-traveled and or were more effectively integrated within the ego psychology, interpersonal, and relational schools that developed in the US. It may also be the case (though Mitchell and Greenberg contend this is a mischaracterization) that given her catalogues fascination with aggression, envy, psychosis, and other more “negatively” valent phenomena, her work felt less compatible to an American ideological framework that has a strong basis in pragmatism, positivism, and a kind of optimistic self-reliance. That said, as I’ve reflected on two phenomena over the past weeks (the current American political landscape and the influence of social media—and all media more broadly—on people’s daily lives), I have found my mind incessantly wandering towards ideas related to envy and aggression, and have experienced myself wondering if, at least from a personal standpoint, a reevaluation and revisiting of the work of Melanie Klein is warranted.
Klein’s work has largely contributed to psychoanalytic perspectives on aggression, as the infant’s innate aggression was the focus of a considerable portion of her output. Far more so than sexual libidinal impulses and their respective defenses, Klein saw in the clients she worked with far more evidence of the need to defend against feelings of greed, envy, and destructiveness, particularly through the oral lens. Admittedly, I would be hesitant to say that I see much of this actual presentation in much of the work I do now, suggesting either a developmental relevance that is not at this point showing up in the work that I do, a lack of an ability to discern it on my part, or perhaps simply points to the fact that many of my clients are too well-mannered (which in itself is I suppose a developmental consideration) to be willing to indulge such paranoid positions very often with regards to our therapeutic relationship.
Klein was especially involved in the development of projective identification as a concept, observing ways in which individuals take that in themselves which is least desirable and place it into others to be able to respond to and manipulate it in some way. Via this process, the infant discharges their own negative and sadistic impulses into the other, in order to then be able to fantasize about their destruction. It is the way in which the infant deals with an underdeveloped ego that, at this point in development, lacks the constitution and awareness to hold and tolerate the anxiety of one’s own destructive impulses.
Klein further posits that we do the same with our good objects in the form of envy. For Klein, this kind of envy is a consequence of some failure in the process of splitting, wherein good objects are supposed to be split off from, and therefore protected from, bad objects and these destructive impulses. In the failure of this development, Klein posits a tendency to want to “spoil” the good object, due to our incapacity to tolerate the anxiety evoked by their possession of the “goodness” we desire. As Klein writes in her paper Envy and Gratitude, “Jealousy fears to lose what it has; envy is pained at seeing another have what it wants for itself”. This tendency to want to eradicate the good object subsequently leaves us with no good object and, in its wake, also destroys the possibility for hope.
Mitchell and Greenberg posit three-factors that can influence the arrival of envy in the infant. I want to take these three factors in turn with regards to my previously indicated concerns about how these phenomena may be playing out in the broader US political landscape and how that overlaps with our exposure to and reliance on media and social media platforms as people’s primary form of entertainment. The three are 1.) the frustration of the child’s intense and greedy needfulness (a needfulness which can never be satisfied); 2.) the frequent presence of intense anxiety or inconsistency in the mothering figures; 3.) the primitive nature of the child’s cognitive capabilities (what they describe as the child’s living a “moment-to-moment sensory motor existence”).
Beginning with the first point outlined above, it appears to be that there is a significant degree of disaffectedness and disappointment for many, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 shutdowns and the protracted period of intense inflation that followed the reopening of temporarily closed off forms of commerce. Few people feel like they have what they want or deserve. For many this is a genuine concern, though it is also rooted in some psychologically fixed notion of what the other (the maternal breast in Klein, the economy in this context) is and ought to be able to provide. It seems that it is not merely the understanding of many that they don’t have, but is in fact that they are being deprived of by the greedy and withholding institutions. These qualities are seen as largely the responsibility and doing of the Democratic party, given their penchant for politicking on what are often, correctly or not, labeled as comparatively “Big Government” style policy positions (disregard for the moment, if you will, whether or not this is in fact what is really happening, bearing in mind that this is a structural argument on the psychic level, not the societal/political one). As Klein notes “deprivation increases greed and persecutory anxiety”. It would be reasonable to assume that, framed by the fear many are likely experiencing with regards to difficulty making ends meet, while also having media systems constantly feeding them the idea that certain others are thriving, current patterns of deprivation induce these persecutory and paranoid states, leading to the inevitable labeling of the other as “bad object”.
As pertains to extreme anxiety or inconsistency in the mothering figure, this bit seems to be constructed of equal parts projective identification of that anxiety, as well as a probably literal anxiousness in the (m)other. As noted above, the kind of deprivation and uncertainty we are talking about is a known contributor to intense feelings of worry and anxiety. One often adhered to way of discharging or resolving that anxiety is by putting the burden of responsibility of that deprivation into the other in the sense of: “It is not that I don’t have because of a series of complex interactive systems that carry inequality and imbalance as an implicit quality, but because the ones that have are cruelly withholding it from me.” (Disregard whether or not this is actually true. I think it was Lacan who said something to the effect that a man who fantasizes his wife is cheating on him, even if she is in fact cheating on him, is still fantasizing about it.). This leads to a position of detecting the anxiety in the other that “we” are on to “them” and that the worry and handwringing being detected is confirmation of the conceptual understanding of what is at play. I also wonder if there is some degree to which Democrats and the few remaining traditional conservative Republicans have come to represent, rightly or wrongly (probably mostly wrongly), the party of anxious worry, with the Republicans seen as that of staid stoicism and resolve (again almost definitely wrongly). So much of this position seems to be a projection of what those who take up this position “want” these respective entities to be. And right-wing media outlets, as well as right-wing adjacent entertainment outlets, are quick to label progressive policies and/or progressive responses to “conservative” policies as erratic, unstable, incoherent, dangerous, etc. It is also probably right to suspect there are layers of gendered and racial biases playing out in these perceptions.
To the third point, about cognitive limitations and being profoundly rooted in a narrow framework of conceptual understanding, I want to try to approach that without being insulting or pejorative. I think one way into that is through the economic argument. I recognize this is coming from a place of personal bias on my end. Most people’s financial situations feel incredibly difficult right now, and it is easy to feel hopeless about the current condition of things. But it is not a fabrication to say that most major voices in the realm of economics were clear in their assessment of which candidate/party’s economic agenda would yield the most favorable outcomes for the most people. Additionally, no one who has been paying attention to the global economic picture and the longer multi-year narrative of expectations for the American economy following COVID could possibly think the Biden administration executed something that was completely botched. One may not have liked the individual policies themselves, but most economic voices on either side were ready to tell you that the idea that we would not be navigating a major financial recession at some point following the pandemic was all but inconceivable a couple of years ago. It’s obviously a lot more complex than this (I’m summarizing in the context of a single paragraph), but I think that part of the problem was not just that one party struggled to communicate it’s economic agenda and what had actually been going well economically, but that people had a skewed impression of what it means to “be informed” and whose responsibility it is to do the work of obtaining that information.
I know I said social media was going to be a part of this argument. And I don’t think it cannot be. To my thinking, there has been no invention in the history of humankind that has done a more effective job at immediately infantilizing its consumers than social media has. One of the major arguments against the use of social media by young people is that it has a pernicious tendency to curb or negatively impact various aspects of development. I think it would do a great more deal of service to acknowledge that not only does it inhibit aspects of emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal development, it also seems to cause significant levels of regression. Social media, by my observation, seems to engender illusions of omnipotence, amplify feelings of grandiosity and narcissistic identification, cultivate a community of part of objects and thinly contextualized others, and predominantly triggers and/or targets drives and impulses based on some of the basest human emotions (sexual urges, aggression, envy, rage, etc). These spaces do nothing to approrpiately frustrate and challenge folks. It simply satisfies and indulges unmet infantile needs and desires, with seemingly most having no recourse towards having any awareness of this fact or spaces to interrogate it.
I suppose my point is, so long as this continues to be the case, I don’t know that the political gets any better. In Australia, they recently passed a law prohibiting the use of social media by people under the age of 16. Most people would tell you that this is a good thing (or are at least pro finding ways to limit kids’ reliance on and use of social media platforms), while having no sense of wanting to reflect on or address their own social media consumption or usage in the process. And there’s a pretty good chance that none of this is new, that these are the kinds of psychological and experiential adjustments that come along with the introduction or influx of any kind of technology that drastically shifts the ways in which the world is mediated to and consumed by people. One could get on a soap box and tout the possible benefits of solutions that promote intentional long-term therapy, contemplative practices, consuming of long-form physical media that requires some intellectual labor, increasing the ways in which people get involved in local communities and politics. Probably all for naught.
“The repeated attempts that have been made to improve humanity - in particular to make it more peaceable - have failed, because nobody has understood the full depth and vigour of the instincts of aggression innate in each individual. Such efforts do not seek to do more than encourage the positive, well-wishing impulses of the person while denying or suppressing his aggressive ones. And so, they have been doomed to failure from the beginning.” That was Klein writing in 1933. Nearly a century later, I think it’s fair to say, we still have our work cut out for us.
