This book contains lectures delivered in 1935 by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere—Kleinian statements about how deeply the earliest baby-object (especially baby-breast and baby-mother) interactions influence the development of the adult. Klein became known as the Mother of Object Relations Theory after extending psychoanalysis into the territory of infancy, about which Freud had said little. She retained Freud’s instinct theory (that people are motivated and shaped by the need to reduce the tension engendered by the basic instincts, sex and aggression), and this later caused a split with Object Relations theorists like Fairbairn and Winnicott who considered interpersonal relationships far more important to human development than instincts. The two groups sometimes feuded like (or as?) factions within a religious movement.
The Klein-Riviere lectures emphasize the essential love-hate ambivalence in all human beings, and explain how the adult is shaped by the way she reconciles these conflicting emotions—a conflict first experienced over the mother’s breast, the “good” breast that nurtures and soothes versus the “bad” breast that is withheld; a conflict that later extends to the “good” mother who responds instantly to the tyrannical demands of the infant, and the “bad” mother who either fails to respond—or responds negatively—to such demands. The infant is an extremist: loves unequivocally and hates with a murderous rage. And unfortunately, the baby takes its fantasies for reality: when he rages against the “bad” mother, he literally feels he has destroyed her—which engenders no little anxiety when the baby comes to recognize that good mother and bad mother are one and the same person. Suddenly he’s afraid of throwing out the good mother with the bathwater (sorry). So in his own mind he makes “reparation”—after his rage at the bad mother, he experiences guilt because he loves the good mother, and now realizing that the good and bad mothers are the same person, he wants to make it up to her. According to Klein, this rage-guilt-reparation cycle is a key to the later development of adult compassion and “humanity.”
Klein and Riviere elucidate many other ways in which infant perceptions and emotions later influence adult personality and behavior. Klein focuses on the positive emotions and Riviere on the negative; between them they tell the whole story. Here are some of their observations:
JOAN RIVIERE
This situation [infant’s needs not being met:] which we all were in as babies has enormous psychological consequences for our lives. It is our first experience of something like death, a recognition of non-existence of something, of an overwhelming loss, both in ourselves and in others…. And this experience brings an awareness of love (in the form of desire), and a recognition of dependence (in the form of need), at the same moment as, and inextricably bound up with, feelings and uncontrollable sensations of pain and threatened destruction within and without.
Projection is the baby’s first reaction to pain, and it probably remains the most spontaneous reaction in all of us to any painful feeling throughout or lives…. Hence good and bad states of feeling in the tiny child contribute largely to forming the foundation of its ideas of the world outside and of good and bad in that world.
It is probable that our need in babyhood to project our dangerous painful states of anger out of us into someone else and identify someone else with them, and ourselves only with our good states, is one of the main stimuli towards recognizing other people’s existence at all.
[The:] aim is that of dealing with and disposing of our dangerous and destructive feelings in such a way that we obtain the maximum security in life and pleasure too.
Most especially gregarious and ‘popular’ people are using love to avert hate and its dangers.
Those who seek most from others in fact seldom give much to others.
[The:] cardinal phantasy of an ever-bountiful never-failing breast is naturally the defense par excellence against the possibility of feelings either of destitution or destructiveness arising in oneself.
…the baby feels the difference between pleasant good states of well-being in itself and painful dangerous feelings and states. All comparisons began with that comparison. The immediate urge is to reinstate the condition of well-being.
[The:] unconscious feeling of our own utter worthlessness [in not having done more for the loved one:] is part of the experience of grief.
What we can’t tolerate in ourselves we are not likely to tolerate in others.
One way of reaching security is by aiming at omnipotent power in order to control all potentially painful conditions…. In phantasy, omnipotence shall bring security.
The need for power springs directly from an incapacity to tolerate either sacrifices for others or dependence on others.
When we [repeat our infantile experiences later in life:], it is for the same reason we behaved in that way in the first instance, and because, although we have grown older, we have not yet found a better way.
On Jealousy: When anyone—unconsciously—feels himself deficient in love and goodness, and fears that this deficiency may be discovered and exposed by his love-partner, or may hurt her, then he begins to be jealous and may look for lack of love in that partner, so as not to see it in himself, and to see wickedness in a rival instead of in himself.
I have tried to show that we spend our lives in the task of attempting to keep a sort of balance between the life-bringing and the destructive elements in ourselves.
The deepest reason why sexuality is so guilty is that our earliest sexual desires were in fact closely bound up with impulses of hate and destructiveness.
On Christianity: Self-deception and unwarranted self-satisfaction easily attend the search for inner goodness.
MELANIE KLEIN
…the baby feels that what he desires in his phantasies has really taken place; …he feels that he has really destroyed the object of his destructive impulses, and is going on destroying it: this has extremely important consequences for the development of his mind. The baby finds support against these fears in omnipotent phantasies of a restoring kind…
There exists a profound urge to make sacrifices, in order to help and put right loved people who in phantasy have been harmed or destroyed.
This making reparation is, in my view, a fundamental element in love and in all human relationships.
It is important to realize that the child’s development depends on, and is to a large extent formed by, his capacity to find the way to bear inevitable and necessary frustrations and the conflicts of love and hate which are in part caused by them…
[The child:] can be immensely helped in childhood by the love and understanding of those around him, but these deep problems [of inevitable frustration and love-hate conflict:] can neither be solved for him nor abolished.
It seems a paradoxical fact that, in a way, fulfillment of many infantile wishes is possible only when the individual has grown up.
A child who has been brought up by a mother who showers love on him and expects nothing in return often becomes a selfish person. Lack of capacity for love and consideration in a child is, to a certain extent, a cover for overstrong feelings of guilt.
The unconscious minds of children very often correspond to the mother’s unconscious mind, and whether or not they make much use of this store of love prepared for them, they often gain great inner support and comfort through the knowledge that this love exists.
On over-dependent people: The loved person, by signs and affection, must prove to them over and over again that they are not bad, not aggressive, and that their destructive impulses have not taken effect.
Unconscious death-wishes which the child bears towards her mother are carried over to her own children when she becomes a mother.
I have found that the typical Don Juan in the depths of his mind is haunted by the dread of the death of loved people.
In a successful love relationship, the unconscious minds of the love-partners correspond.
The child’s early attachment to his mother’s breast and to her milk is the foundation of all love relations in life.
If repression is too strong, if the phantasies and desires remain too deeply buried and can find no expression, this may not only have the effect of inhibiting strongly the working of his imagination (and with this of activities of all kinds), but also of seriously impeding the individual’s later sexual life.
School life also gives opportunity for a greater separation of hate from love than was possible in the small family circle.
But when [teenage:] hatred [of parents:] reaches such strength, the necessity to preserve goodness and love within and without becomes all the more urgent. The aggressive youth is therefore driven to find people whom he can look up to and idealize. And villains, real or literary, are especially hated.
The division between the loving and the hating attitude fosters the feeling that one can keep love unspoilt. The feeling of security that comes from being able to love is, in the unconscious mind, closely linked up with keeping loved people safe and undamaged.
In the last analysis the image of the loved parents is preserved in the unconscious mind as the most precious possession, for it guards its possessor against the pain of utter desolation.
A successful blending of the mother-attitude and a daughter-attitude seems to be one of the conditions for an emotionally rich feminine personality and for the capacity for friendship.
The child’s mental difficulties are often not in direct proportion to the unfavorable treatment he receives.
Our own hatred, fear and distrust tend to create in our unconscious minds frightening and exacting parent-figures.
We hate in ourselves the harsh and stern figures who are also part of our inner world, and are to a large extent the result of our own aggression towards our parents…
[The:] satisfactory balance between ‘give’ and ‘take’ is the primary condition for further happiness.
If in our earliest development we have been able to transfer our interest and love from our mother to other people and other sources of gratification, then, and only then, are we able in later life to derive enjoyment from other sources.
A good relation to ourselves is a condition for love, tolerance and wisdom towards others.
Orthodox psychoanalysts live in their own world, observing, reasoning, generalizing (and often jumping to conclusions), and writing in their own way—they always remind me of a school of Talmudic scholars, passionate and obsessive interpreters of the Word, except that for psychoanalysts the Word is neither the Torah nor the Talmud but the collected works of Sigmund Freud. Though a thoroughly indoctrinated Freudian, Melanie Klein sometimes stepped out of this orthodoxy to see things with a fresh eye and to interpret them in her own way. She wrote many years ago, but much of what she said about the infant mind still rings at least partly true.