50 Psychology Classics (38 page)

Freud believed that the superego developed over a number of years, but Klein found it displayed very early on, particularly in girls. She noted the sense of guilt regarding destructive feelings toward the mother, and the corresponding desire to make “reparation” or undo these negative feelings by being good or loving. The roots of schizophrenia, she theorized, were to be found in children's relations with their superego, which often involved a frightening or strict mother figure.

The depressive position comes as the result of a child's feelings of guilt that their own aggression, hatred, and greed will bring about the loss of the breast/mother. When a baby is weaned off breast milk, it is often the catalyst for the depressive position to occur, because the child may feel they have brought this loss on themselves.

In the first two years of life children have obsessions or tendencies to do with eating, defecation, or the repetition of certain stories or movements. As adults we know these obsessions are neurotic, but understand them as part of the infant's desire to establish security. Children develop anxieties or psychotic tendencies, Klein wrote, only so that their still fragile ego can remain protected. The depressive position is actually the beginning of maturity, because babies now have greater sophistication in how they understand their own feelings and their world.

Normally, children's defenses or neuroses lessen as they develop and are able to adjust themselves better to reality. However, how we work through the depressive and schizoid positions also sets a template for how we deal with these feelings as adults. The early negative states can be reactivated in adult life at certain events. Mourning, for instance, is not only about the person lost, but about our internal losses. The development of a strong ego or sense of self in infancy, according to Klein, is therefore vital to adult mental health.

If children can fully express love for their mother in infancy, this sets them up to be able to enjoy life and love fully in adulthood. However, some children, according to Klein, are more aggressive and greedy than others, and bear more of a grudge against their mother when they do not feel their needs are being met. Feelings of envy make children less able to enjoy and be grateful for the sustenance and attention they receive. Such babies, Klein asserted, become envious people as adults. In contrast, those infants who can internalize the good aspects of their parent(s) have a fundamentally positive and grateful view of life, and are capable of being loyal, possessing the courage of their convictions, and generally being of “good character.”

Klein noted that a loving, supportive environment in infancy cannot prevent the love/hate split, but it does enable children eventually to grow out of it. In contrast, infants who do not get what they need may spend the rest of their lives chasing external things to make up for what they feel is missing inside, or have to express the anger they have never resolved.

A couple took their son Peter to see Klein. Since Peter's brother was born Peter had become very aggressive with his toys, doing what he could to break them. Observing Peter smashing two toy horses into each other, Klein wondered out loud to him whether the horses represented people; he agreed. As the bumping together continued, she gleaned that Peter had seen his parents having sex and it had generated considerable jealousy and anxiety. The bumping together represented the sexual act. By bringing Peter's repressed feelings out into the open, Klein helped the boy to curb his aggression.

It may seem a stretch to believe that a child can make such interpretations, but Klein claimed that if you spoke in their language a child really could understand. She believed that the way children play is a window into their unconscious mind and what is troubling them. Given children's difficulty in articulating all their thoughts, play was the best way of healing any mental issues.

The concept of “objects” in Freudian theory seems quite cold, but when we appreciate that in infancy we attach ourselves to a particular person (usually our biological mother) without giving much thought to who that person actually is—rather, we think only in terms of our own needs—the theory does make some sense. Arguably, this tendency carries over into adulthood, for in truth we are often less interested in who a person really is than in how they can satisfy some of our basic wants and wishes. It is only mature people who transcend “object relations” to really care about the worldview, interests, and aspirations of other people.

Whether or not you accept all Klein's ideas, it cannot be denied that most of our relationships with our parents and siblings—even if they are good—are complex, and we should not instantly dismiss the notion that many of our attitudes or hang-ups stem from the first few months of life. For Klein, this was the crucial time when the interaction between natural tendencies and environment sets us up to be a basically satisfied or unsatisfied person.

For some, Klein creates a rich world of ideas that explains our deepest needs and longings. For others, her books seem like mumbo-jumbo—Freudianism taken to its worst extremes. Her explanation of schizophrenia, manic depression, and depression as outgrowths of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions in infancy should be viewed critically; these days, such conditions are being increasingly fathomed by brain science rather than psychoanalysis.

Klein's style takes a while to get into, but for someone who was denied the chance to attend university she was clearly a profound thinker. Her own childhood clearly shaped her work, and her daughters provided a ready testing ground for her ideas. As with many children of psychoanalysts, this was not always appreciated.

Born in a middle-class suburb of Vienna in 1882, Klein was the youngest of four children. Her teenage ambition was to study medicine, but her marriage in 1903 to chemist Arthur Klein cut short her university experience
.

The Kleins moved to Budapest in 1910 for Arthur's work, where Klein discovered Sigmund Freud's writings and first underwent psychoanalysis with Sandor Ferenczi. She met Freud at the 1918 Psycho-Analytic Congress in Budapest
.

Splitting from her husband, Klein took her three children to Berlin, where she gained a mentor in psychoanalyst Karl Abraham. In 1926 she moved to London, where she remained for the rest of her life
.

Klein's personal tragedies included the death of her much-loved brother Emmanuel and sister Sidonie, both while they were young, and that of her son Hans in 1935. Her daughter Melitta, who also became a psychoanalyst, was one of her most vocal opponents. Klein also suffered from depression and anxiety for much of her life
.

Klein's writings include
The Psychoanalysis of Children
(1932),
Contributions to Psychoanalysis
(1948), and
Narrative of a Child Analysis
(1961)
. Love, Guilt, and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945
is a companion volume to
Envy and Gratitude.

Klein died in 1980
.

“The paranoic has specific persecutors. Someone is against him. There is a plot on foot to steal his brains. A machine is concealed in the wall of his bedroom which emits mind rays to soften his brain, or to send electric shocks through him while he is asleep. The person I am describing
feels
at this phase
persecuted by reality itself.
The world as it is, and other people as they are, are the dangers.”

“Everyone is subject to a certain extent at one time or another to such moods of futility, meaningless and purposelessness, but in schizoid individuals these moods are particularly insistent. These moods arise from the fact that the doors of perception and/or the gates of action are not in the command of the self but are being lived and operated by a false self.”

In a nutshell

We take a strong sense of self for granted, but if we don't have this, life can be torture.

In a similar vein
Karen Horney
Our Inner Conflicts
(p 156)
Melanie Klein
Envy and Gratitude
(p 180)
V. S. Ramachandran
Phantoms in the Brain
(p 232)
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person
(p 238)
William Styron
Darkness Visible
(p 278)

When Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing sat down to write
The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness
in the late 1950s, the conventional view in psychiatry was that the mind of an unbalanced person was just a soup of meaningless fantasies or obsessions. Patients were examined for the official symptoms of mental illness, and treated accordingly.

However, with his first book, written at the age of 28, Laing helped change the way we look at psychoses. His aim was “to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible,” and he achieved this by showing how psychosis—specifically, that relating to schizophrenia—actually makes sense to the person suffering it. Therefore the psychiatrist's role should be to get into the sufferer's mind.

Laing was at pains to point out that
The Divided Self
was not a medically researched theory of schizophrenia, but rather a set of observations—colored by existentialist philosophy—about the nature of schizoid and schizophrenic people. The science of schizoid conditions has moved on considerably since his day, toward a biological and neurological explanation, but his descriptions of what it feels like to live with a divided self, go “mad,” or have a breakdown remain some of the best written.

In the first few pages, Laing expressed a view common in the 1960s and 1970s that it is not the people who are locked up in asylums who are truly mad, but the politicians and generals who are ready to destroy the human race at the push of a button. He felt it was somewhat arrogant of psychiatry to class some people as “psychotic,” as if they had ceased to be part of the human race. For Laing, the psychiatrist's labels said more about the profession of psychiatry and the culture that created it than they did about anyone's real state of mind.

Mainstream psychiatry had got it wrong in dealing with schizophrenics. The salient point about schizoid individuals, Laing noted, was their hypersensitivity to what is going on in their mind, as well as extreme protectiveness of the self hidden behind layers of false personality. A doctor looking only for “schizophrenic symptoms,” as if the person were an object, would be resisted at every turn. Such patients did not want to be examined but to be
heard
; the real question was what had led them to experience the world in such a way.

“I've been sort of dead in a way. I cut myself off from other people and became shut up in myself… You have to live in the world
with
other people. If you don't something dies inside.”

Peter, one of Laing's patients

Laing defined “schizoid” people as those who live with a split, either within themselves, or between themselves and the world. They do not experience themselves as “together” and feel a painful isolation from the rest of humanity. His distinction between the schizoid person and the schizophrenic was this: While a schizoid can remain troubled but sane, the schizophrenic's split mind has crossed a line into psychosis.

Most people take for granted a level of certainty about themselves. They are essentially comfortable with who they are and their relationship to the world. Schizoid people, in contrast, have what Laing called an “ontological insecurity,” a basic, existential, and deep-rooted doubt about their identity and their place in the scheme of things.

Schizoid people's unique forms of anxiety include:

The terrifying nature of interactions with others. They may even dread being loved, because being known by someone so clearly means being exposed. To avoid being absorbed into another person through love, the schizoid may go to the other extreme and choose isolation, or even prefer to be hated, as this involves less chance of being “engulfed.” A common feeling is that, with such a fragile sense of self, they are drowning or being burned up.

“Impingement,” the feeling that at any moment the world may crash into their mind and destroy their identity. Such an apprehension can only come from a great feeling of emptiness in the first place—if someone has little sense of self to begin with, the world can seem like a persecuting force.