Melanie Klein

So psychoanalysis has evolved a lot since its original Freudian development.

Some important people in that evolution have been Eric Erickson, Melanie Klein, Harry Steck Sullivan, Donald Winnicott, contemporary people in the relational movement like Stephen Mitchell, the self-psychology movement, which is very much about self-esteem by Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg's work, on internalized family dynamics in patients and psychoanalytic general technique has changed over time.

When I was first trained, some supervisors put a lot of emphasis on trying to be a blank screen because the idea was if you were not giving the patient much information about yourself, the transferences would be easier to see.

You know, if you said rather little and the patient immediately assumed you were critical, it would bring out the transference.

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Melanie Klein, for instance, certain psychoanalytic thinkers that, that think in that direction.

What, what does that drive, like, t-turn into when, when it's seen as self-sabotage and not just aggression? You see what I'm saying? Is, if aggression is take- is understood as an innate drive, a universal-

Yeah

So I was trained in the late 70s, early 80s here at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, trained largely in Freudian ego psychology.

Melanie Klein's work was really not taught in Toronto, unlike Montreal where expat Canadian Clifford Scott had gone to England and worked with Melanie Klein for many years.

He was president of the British Society and after his presidency he returned to Canada, not to Toronto, but to Montreal where he trained several generations, especially of child therapists, but adult analysts as well in Kleinian theory, but not in Toronto.

So I had this Freudian ego psychology training and I therefore thought of what I was doing as really attempting to help people make the unconscious conscious.

You know, it's the patient's session, but occasionally he will share with the patient something about his life or something that he has gone through or something this builds the connection it builds the attachment it builds trust it builds therapeutic alliance and patients benefit from this that is my belief so Call me a relational analyst.

I guess in terms of technique, that's what I am.

I'm a relational analyst who loves Freud and Melanie Klein.

Okay.

They did.

Melanie Klein, for instance, focused less on the lost object and more on the crushing weight of guilt and survivor dynamics.

Klein's work heavily explored the development of a highly punitive, sadistic superego.

She postulated that certain depressed patients are fundamentally terrified that their own innate destructive impulses will somehow damage the people they love.

Joseph also gives a tiny little bit of this theoretical background.

Um, she is a Kleinian.

You might have already heard that, you know, from keywords like reparation.

Her theoretical foundation of object relations is based on Klein.

That's the term Joseph uses.

If there's a happy baby, there's an ideal object, and if there's a frustrated baby, it relates to a dangerous object.

So that the one mother, that's one of, um, those, like, standard Kleinian assumptions, that the one mother actually becomes two in the baby's experience, and one is, like, the ideal mother that always satisfies me, and the other is the dangerous, frustrating, persecutory, uh, threatening mother.

And those feelings are, in her own words, split and absolute.

The therapist soon realized that Freud's map didn't adequately explain the raw chaotic terrors of severely disturbed children or issues that originate before a child even understands what society is.

That is the wall Melanie Klein hit.

Right.

So Klein takes us further back in time, away from the father's rules and into the absolute matriarchy of the very early mother-child relationship.

Kinnett emphasizes that Winnicott believed everyone has a capacity for creativity, characterized by the ego actively engaging with and symbolizing the objects around them.

Klein's idea, mentioned by Chowdhury, fits here too.

A key element is the capacity for symbolization.

And Klein's perspective adds another layer about the mother-child relationship.

Yes, Klein really focused on that very early bond.

She saw primary creativity right at its heart.

She believed that in the earliest stages, the baby experiences this sort of illusion of divine omnipotence.

Wow, that's a lot to wrap your head around, isn't it? Let's move on to K.

But he doesn't just calmly observe her because under extreme emotional pressure, the mind's ability to handle nuance just collapses.

This is a concept originally introduced by Melanie Klein and it's called splitting.

Splitting, okay.

The mind basically says, you know, this complexity, me being a capable person who is currently failing, it's just too painful.