Love, Hate and Reparation

"Melanie Klein was a follower of Sigmund Freud who settled in London in the 1920s and became highly influential within – and eventually beyond – British psychoanalysis, as well as controversial. Indeed, her ideas prompted debates at the British Psychoanalytical Society in the 1940s that are often known by the shorthand of “the controversial discussions”. She was a pioneering figure who tried to develop Freud’s ideas in a number of key areas. She was a major force behind the psychoanalysis of children. She sought to adapt the technique a bit – since small children could not be expected to lie for 50 minutes on a couch and “free associate” – using play, for example, as a means of trying to understand “the inner world”. In turn, her findings about infancy and the minds of children fed back into her accounts of the adult. Her ideas had profound consequences for psychoanalysis itself. She contributed greatly to thought about the “inner world”, about the kinds of figures or fragmented “objects” that exist in our own minds and to explore what we do to them in fantasy. For Klein, even when we are consciously thinking about something, there is also a domain of unconscious fantasy at stake. It became a convention to spell fantasy with a ‘ph’ in psychoanalytic thought, to emphasise this unconscious aspect. Moreover, Klein argues that there’s always a dimension of unconscious processes that colour our relationship to what we call “reality”. We relate to figures outside of ourselves – to social processes and to politics, for example – but this is also coloured by fantasies. I chose Love, Hate and Reparation because it’s aimed at a general audience. It was originally a set of lectures that she and her close colleague Joan Riviere set out in order to map out some of her core theories. It is an accessible starting point and the book also has a sense of vitality and even of urgency. There’s a real feeling from Klein and her group of needing to try to communicate these ideas to a wider audience and to make them useful and immediate. What one picks up in the book is the primary concern with internal reality, but it’s also a book that is shaped by and had implications for the sense of political crisis and the rise of extremism in Europe. What’s so interesting in this literature is this movement between different kinds of reality. We now have access to Klein’s archive – which contains many of her clinical notes. Putting that together with her published writings, you get such a vivid sense of her struggle to understand psychic life and of the presence of wartime history – for instance, there are many references in the archived notes to Hitler , war, bombing and destruction. She documented the private terrors of the night, or the dreamscapes of many of her patients, and also captured the profound anxieties of life itself in this period."