Reviews for Introduction to the work of Melanie Klein

The average rating for Introduction to the work of Melanie Klein based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-03 00:00:00 Bob Blum “Melanie Klein? Ain’t she that Freudian wench?” “Psychoanalyst.” “The one who specialized in kids?” “Right.” “So what about her?” “As the Mother of Object Relations Theory, she’s hot.” “You mean as the Queen of Psychobabble.” “That, too.” “So what about her?” “By psychoanalyzing kids she learned a lot that Freud had overlooked.” “For example?” “She realized Freud’s approach to psychotherapy wouldn’t work with kids. Lying on a couch and free associating—no way that will work with kids. They won’t lie still for it.” “So to speak.” “Right.” “Okay—what did she do instead?” “She watched kids play.” “Very clever!” “She reckoned that kids’ play is symbolic—expresses their fantasy life. They play out their inner concerns and conflicts.” “What a mind-boggling insight!” “Games are little psychodramas. So Melanie did a lot of watching and asking, and based on her watching and asking, she did a passel of theorizing. She explained in detail how the Ego and Superego develop through interactions with objects (mainly other people), and she also discovered microphases within Freud’s Oral stage of development.” “Adding immeasurably, I have little doubt, to the vocabulary of psychobabble.” “Right. Notably, adding the so-called Paranoid-Schizoid Position and the Depressive Position.” “Jesus Christ on a crutch!” “Jesus? No, we’re talking about a disciple of Freud. You know, the Jewish guy who started out to be a Talmudic scholar and ended by writing his own Torah.” “His own Torah?” “The Interpretation of Dreams. But back to his disciple Melanie. Back to object relations. Back to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.” “Tell me about the positions—are we talking Kama Sutra?” “Melanie called them positions because they’re not simply stages of development that people slough off like snakeskins and leave behind, they’re personality attributes that cling to us for life. That we tend to exhibit when stressed.” “Regression.” “Right.” “I know I can’t stop you from defining the two positions. Go ahead and get it over with.” “With pleasure. First, the paranoid-schizoid position. It starts in the early months of life. What happens is this: at any given time the kid is either satisfied by the environment or he isn’t. He’s either getting the boob when he’s hungry and getting cleaned when he‘s pooped or peed—or he isn’t. If he is, he’s happy as a hooter. If he isn’t, he’s nasty as a rattlesnake. It doesn’t take him long to tell the “good” boob (full) from the “bad” boob (empty), or the “good” hands (gentle) from the “bad” hands (rough). He’s not identifying people yet—only parts of people (“part-objects”). And he splits the world into “good” parts versus “bad” parts—hence the word “schizoid,” which means split. The “good” parts are wonderful and he loves them, but the “bad” parts he hates because they persecute him (hence the word “paranoid”). To oversimplify a complicated theory, he not only identifies “good” and “bad” part-objects in the outside world, he incorporates them (actually, incorporates his fantasies of them) into his inchoate ego—in psychoanalytical jargon, he introjects the part-objects. So now he has identified “good” and “bad” aspects of both himself and external reality. With me so far?” “Hanging on by my fingernails.” “Want to hear more?” “Can’t hardly contain myself.” “Okay, but understand I’m simplifying. When our kid’s in a snit at a “bad” part-object (or over being neglected), in fantasy he disintegrates the baddie with his rage, shattering it into a zillion nasty little shards. But he also shatters the introjected baddie—and this threatens the infant himself with disintegration. Worse, he becomes anxious over the danger of throwing out the good with the bad—for example, nailing the “good” boob with his anger along with the “bad” boob. So now he lives in a world crackling with his own anxiety, a world in which there are persecutors inside and outside his nascent ego, a world in which he experiences his own scary rage, a world in which he has to defend himself against these forces with the mechanisms of splitting, projection and introjection. Now the question is, who cares? Why is all of this important?” “Damn good question.” “It’s important because if at this stage of development an infant has (as a rule of thumb) a preponderance of good experiences over bad, all will probably go well, but if he has a preponderance of bad experiences over good, he‘s in danger of fixating this stage and thereafter, when under pressure, will tend to regress to the infantile paranoid-schizoid position. Are you with me?” “Reluctantly.” “I’m grossly oversimplifying, of course. It’s actually much more complicated than this.” “Jesus!” “His message was simpler. Have you had enough?” “Just get on with it.” “Okay, now our infant progresses from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. How does this come about?” “I thought you’d never ask.” “The key to the rite of passage is this: our infant now starts to identify whole objects. Now it’s not just a boob or a pair of hands—by God, it’s Mommy! But this causes a crisis—because Mommy has both the good and the bad parts, and in fact Mommy herself is sometimes good (does exactly what I want) and sometimes bad (doesn’t do exactly what I want). How can this be? The world is no longer black-and-white; it’s become more complicated. Drat! Maybe even jeepers! Because now I become ambivalent—when I’m furious with Mommy and want to blast her apart with my rage, how do I avoid zapping the good Mommy along with the bad Mommy? Big concern. Major anxiety. And also, enter two new actors: Guilt and Depression. Why guilt? Because after blasting the bad Mommy with my rage, I feel rotten that I might have zapped the good Mommy also. Why depression? Because I’m coming to realize that Mommy and I are separate, that she’s a person in her own right like those other objects out there, and that she is not totally under my control (and believe me, I test the hell out of her to discover her exact limits). Egad—am I no longer omnipotent? How can I continue to be a tyrant? While all this is going on, I’m introjecting the good and bad whole Mommies into my ego, and in fact these fantasy-figures become central to my personality and my sense of self. And once again, if during this phase good experiences preponderate over bad ones, I’ll progress in a healthy way, my ego becoming stronger and more integrated over time, but if bad experiences preponderate, I will fixate this stage and thereafter, under stress, tend to retreat to the depressive position. Does all this make sense?” “You tell me.” “Any questions so far?” “Yes—you babble about the depressive position, but what about mania? As in manic-depressive?” “I’m glad you asked me that. According to Klein, mania is designed to counteract depression—that makes sense, doesn’t it?—but it doesn’t work for long because it’s based on denial. When we’re manic, we tend to deny the negative—everything’s hunky-dory—the world is wonderful—those problems we seem to have (as an outsider would see it) with the husband or wife or children are illusory. In mania, we project all the negative stuff onto folks less important to us, ones to whom we can feel superior. This happens to many of the folks in the helping professions, who deny the depression in their own lives by manically focusing on the problems of their less fortunate patients, to whom they (at least unconsciously) feel superior. The trouble is, mania never deals with the underlying problem and therefore tends to burn out after awhile, dropping us into the very depression we’ve been manically avoiding. Does that answer your question?” “More or less.” “Good. You’ll be happy to know we’re entering the home stretch.” “I’m trembling with anticipation.” “Now our kid realizes he’s not the only creature in the world. There are other people, and they’re separate. There are things, too—objects animate and inanimate. So he does a lot of testing, especially of how much control he has over this strange world. He tests his fantasies against that weird, fascinating, annoying reality out there. If all goes well, he soon realizes that after he blasts Mommy because she hasn’t fully catered to His Magnificence, and she takes off, he thinks he’s killed her and he gets scared and feels guilty and depressed and tries (through fantasy) to bring her back—and lo and behold, she comes back! Amazing! Klein calls this “reparation.” When this happens over and over again, the kid ‘s anxiety diminishes, he gradually realizes that his rage is not obliterating objects external or internal; his ego continues to develop healthily because during this process he develops more trust in both the real and the introjected Mommies, and he’s also learned how to be creative and how to sublimate. How creative? In an effort to bring Mommy back after blasting her he spins all kinds of fantasies—the initial source, according to Klein, of creativity in the infant—and these fantasies are no longer passive reactions but active constructions. This in turn signals the arrival of sublimation, in which the somatically-based “instincts” (such as rage) are at least partially transformed into creative fantasies which then become interesting and compelling in their own right. Does all that make sense?” “It’s one theory. Damn hard to verify, since it ain’t easy to enter the mind of an infant. But look: one thing bugs me about all this. With all this uncontrollable rage and blowing people to bits, you make it sound like all infants are fruitcakes.” “Exactly. Psychotic. Think about it. Before your ego develops, first of all you can’t tell the me from the rest of the universe, and then gradually you distinguish bits and pieces of the world as they relate to your comfort, and only very slowly do you learn to perceive wholes, and even after that it takes a long time to really sort objects out—if indeed you ever do. In that early phase the world is fragmented just like the world of the schizophrenic, and it’s full of persecutors just like the world of the paranoiac, and later it becomes depressive and manic like the world of the manic-depressive. And we all retain these “positions” for life and for some of us, when the going gets tough, we revert to them. The world according to Klein. I’ve oversimplified, of course, in the interest of— “My limited IQ.” “Exactly.” “And are you sure this whole theory isn’t a Kleinian fantasy?” “A wet dream? It could be. A lot of it seems to make sense, but it’s hard to verify—true of most Freudian stuff. Man is an interpreting animal. The clever ones can explain anything.” “Six ways from Sunday.” “Exactly.” “So I gather you take bits and pieces from here, and bits and pieces from there…” “Exactly.” “So what does she actually sound like?” “Klein?” “No, her disciple who wrote the book.” “Hanna Segal? Listen: The paranoid-schizoid position is characterized by the infant’s unawareness of “persons,” his relationships being part objects, and by the prevalence of splitting processes and paranoid anxiety. The beginning of the depressive position is marked by the recognition of the mother as a whole person and is characterized by a relationship to whole objects and by a prevalence of integration, ambivalence, depressive anxiety and guilt. But Melanie Klein chose the term “position” to emphasize the fact that the phenomenon she was describing was not simply a passing “stage” or a “phase” such as, for example, the oral phase; her term implies a specific configuration of object relations, anxieties and defenses which persist throughout life. The depressive position never fully supersedes the paranoid-schizoid position; the integration achieved is never complete…. The way in which the object relations are integrated in the depressive position remains the basis of the personality structure. What happens in later development is that depressive anxieties are modified and become gradually less severe.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-06 00:00:00 Paul J. Gonzales O livro traz um bom overview dos principais conceitos de MK, com a narrativa de vários casos clínicos vivenciados pela autora. No entanto, tive a impressão de ser um bom material para quem já acessou a teoria básica kleiniana (em textos mais descritivos ou aula teórica). Para mim, não serviria como guia inicial de estudo já que Segal apresenta os conceitos mais amarrados e relacionados entre si.