Theorists of the Psychoanalytic School

Melanie Klein

Life

Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882 into a Jewish family. Marrying and having children at a young age, she was unable to fulfil her wish to study medicine. She became interested in psychoanalysis in Budapest before the First World War. In 1921, at Karl Abraham’s invitation, she spent five years at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, and after 1925, at Ernest Jones’s invitation, she settled in London. From 1934 onwards she made major theoretical contributions to the field and engaged in productive debates, particularly with Anna Freud. Klein is the founder and one of the most important representatives of the British object relations school.

Her work and theory

Klein’s work is based on child psychoanalysis and the observation of infant development. Although she came from the Freudian school, her main difference is that she viewed “object relations” differently from Freud. For Freud, what mattered was how drives governed by the “pleasure principle” seek discharge and the routes they take when blocked by the outside world; the object mattered as the target of the drives, but not in any essential sense. Klein, by contrast, held that certain internal objects are present from birth and that drives are ready to be directed towards them.

Another feature of Klein’s thinking is the large place she gave in her therapeutic work, under the heading of aggression, to the death drive, which Freud had described but not developed much theoretically. She used the terms “libido” and “love and gratitude” in opposition to “death drive” and “envy”, to bring out the conflict between them.

The Kleinian unconscious is not a static store of feelings and memories in the Freudian sense; the dynamic movements of the internal objects within it give rise to a continuous production of phantasy, and the analysis of unconscious phantasies is central to Kleinian therapy. As the infant develops, new objects are introjected (taken into the inner world). According to Klein, introjection happens because the infant, who from birth feels filled with “aggressive, bad and persecuting objects” under the influence of the death drive, wants to soothe this badness by taking in the “good objects” outside.

Klein’s view of introjection differs from Freud’s

In “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud linked introjection to the wish to keep alive an object lost through death, abandonment or other causes by creating an inner representation of it. Klein’s introjection is a defence mechanism in Freud’s sense, but it does not occur secondarily to the loss of an object; it has the primary task of soothing the aggression within the child.

Objects are introjected as good and bad objects. The mental formation that can be called the “early ego” (though not yet a self) must first keep good and bad objects apart, that is, “split” them, because the aggressive energy attached to the bad objects could damage the good ones if they were held together. The prototype of these objects is the mother’s breast. The breast that feeds and satisfies the child and is there whenever wanted is registered as the “good breast”; the breast that withholds itself even when full of milk is registered as the “bad breast”. According to object relations theory, not only objects but also the child’s self is split into a “good self” and a “bad self” according to the positive and negative responses it receives from the mother.

Positions

The infant’s first three months are, in Klein’s terms, the “paranoid-schizoid” position. In this period the infant projects its aggressive impulses (envy) onto external objects (the mother) in order to reduce them, and uses schizoid defence mechanisms to avoid the bad external objects. The period between three and six months is the “depressive position”. Here the good and bad objects (breasts) that the infant had kept apart come together. This integration is driven by the early ego, which is now able to bear the harm that might come from bringing good and bad together.

The aggressive impulses belonging to the bad object attack the good object, and this arouses guilt in the infant, a state called “ambivalence”. As a result of these feelings of guilt, the infant enters the “depressive” position. Through the interaction between good and bad objects, aggressive impulses are neutralised, and the love object gains strength as an important support for the infant’s development. The object becomes whole and is seen realistically, freed from the extremes of being all good or all bad.

Klein also moved Freud’s Oedipus complex into the first year of life. For the boy, turning away from the mother stems from not wanting to lose the father as a whole object of love and hate, not only, as Freud claimed, from the threat of castration feared as punishment for incestuous wishes. The superego forms following the Oedipal period, and it will be as strong and domineering as the infant’s aggressive feelings are intense.

Kleinian analysis

In analysis, Klein places particular emphasis on envy. The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions persist in part in most adult patients. For Klein, envy, greed and jealousy are three related feelings. Envy is resenting someone who possesses a good object one does not have; it is malignant and includes the wish to spoil or destroy. Jealousy, by contrast, carries attachment to and love for the good object, which is why general moral norms regard jealousy as preferable to envy. Greed is linked to the wish to take in the object as much as possible and to gain complete control over it.

On the introjection of the analyst as a good object in the transference, and on bringing envy under control, Klein writes:

“By taking the analysis back to the earliest stages of infancy, we enable the patient to revive certain fundamental experiences and feelings. The content of this revival is made up of what I have called ‘memories in feelings’. In the process of re-experiencing, it becomes possible for the patient to develop a different attitude towards their earliest frustrations. Of course, if the infant was exposed to very unfavourable conditions, the retrospective establishment of a good object cannot undo bad early experiences. Yet the introjection of the analyst as a good object, if not based on idealisation, can to some extent provide a good object that was lacking in the past. Moreover, as projections lessen and tolerance grows while resentment diminishes, the patient can find some pleasant memories and features in the past, however unfavourable its real experiences were. The way to achieve this is through the analysis of the positive and negative transference, which leads us back to the earliest object relations. What makes all this possible is that the integration achieved through analysis has strengthened the ego, which was weak at the outset.” (Envy and Gratitude, p. 86)

Carl Gustav Jung and analytical psychology

Carl Gustav Jung, named after his grandfather, a professor of medicine at the University of Basel, was the son of a Swiss pastor. He began studying medicine in Basel in 1895 and in 1900 started working as a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli as Eugen Bleuler’s assistant. He completed his doctorate in 1902 on occult phenomena and their connection with psychology and pathology, and spent six months in Paris deepening his knowledge with Pierre Janet. He married Emma Rauschenbach in 1903 and, at 36, became the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung, who also drew on astrology in his psychological explorations, is known above all for the concept of the collective unconscious, which he developed after his collaboration with Sigmund Freud ended.

Jung’s concept of libido

The Latin word libido originally means “wish, desire, will”. The fundamental disagreement between Freud and Jung concerned the nature of this concept. Freud narrowed its meaning to “sexual desires and wishes”, while Jung used it to mean a general life energy, giving it a meaning in keeping with its roots. In other words, Freud’s teaching centres on “sexual libido” and Jung’s on “energic libido” (Sambur, 2005).

The personal unconscious

The personal unconscious is where experiences are stored that were once conscious but were later repressed for various reasons or forgotten because they seemed unimportant. This material can be brought back to consciousness and used when needed (Sambur, 2005). Entirely personal experiences, such as childhood memories or books we have read, are found here. The personal unconscious can be said to parallel the unconscious in Freud’s theory.

The collective unconscious

According to Jung, beyond the personal unconscious there is a “collective unconscious” that we inherit, just like physical characteristics; this is where Jung departs from Freud. Like other unconscious processes, it consists of thoughts, experiences and images that are hard to bring into consciousness, but its contents have never been repressed from consciousness. All human beings are born with this shared material, which, as its name suggests, is essentially the same for everyone (Burger, 2006). It includes universal experiences such as the fears specific to childhood (fear of separation, fear of the dark), a baby’s bonding with its mother from birth, and acceptance of a supernatural power or God governing the universe.

For Jung, this realm is the opposite of the personal unconscious, lying beyond it and having a deeper reality. Its images consist of “primordial images”, which Jung called “archetypes”. These images lead a newborn to respond in particular ways to its mother, and human beings to the dark and to God (Burger, 2006). Archetypes are not vivid pictures like memory images of past experience, and they are countless, as numerous as the events, phenomena and objects that have occurred on earth (Gürses, 2007). The archetypes Jung discussed most are the persona, anima, animus, self, shadow, wise old man, sun, moon, mother, father, hero, God and death. They are not experienced directly in daily life but appear in fairy tales, myths and legends.

The main archetypes

Persona: the name of the mask worn by actors in ancient Greek theatre. In analytical psychology it is the metaphorical mask a person wears in response to the expectations of society and tradition. It corresponds to the concept of a social “role” and expresses an artificial personality formed where the person’s real personality meets a personality acceptable to society’s values.

Shadow: unlike the persona, which regulates our relations with society, the shadow regulates our relationship with ourselves. It represents the dark side we dislike and repress into the personal unconscious. Jung held, in line with the dialectic that everything exists through its opposite, that we cannot speak of good without bad. Well-adjusted people face this side of themselves and integrate good and bad within; those who cannot see their dark side in others through projection, as in one of Freud’s defence mechanisms.

Anima and animus: the anima is the feminine side of a man and the animus the masculine side of a woman. When these archetypes, which regulate relationships with the opposite sex, can be experienced comfortably in consciousness, the person forms healthy relationships. Falling in love and finding the partner one is “looking for” is really about discovering and expressing the anima or animus within. If this archetype is repressed, the balance of the self is disturbed and a one-dimensional, shallow personality results.

Jung’s psychological types

Jung, who spent part of his life travelling the world making psychological observations, eventually decided, based on the people he had observed and without neglecting to stress that individual differences always exist, to create a classification to make sense of different dimensions of personality. He first identified two basic types, “introversion” and “extraversion”. Later, realising there were more and different personality types, he identified four basic functions according to how people perceive the world (Burger, 2006): thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. People in whom thinking dominates tend towards logical, objective analysis; those in whom feeling dominates interpret information according to values and subjective impressions; those in whom sensation dominates focus on observation and experience; and those in whom intuition dominates are imaginative and inclined to the abstract. Combining these functions with the attitudes of introversion and extraversion, he created a two-by-four table and identified eight basic personality types.

Although criticised on this point, Jung does not claim that every person belongs absolutely to one of these eight categories. He draws attention to the different distribution of attitudes and functions at the conscious and unconscious levels in each person, and is interested in that distribution.

Otto Kernberg and object relations theory

Life

Born in Vienna in 1928, O. F. Kernberg emigrated to Chile with his family at the age of 11, fleeing Nazi Germany. He studied medicine there and settled in the United States in 1959. A professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, he is also a training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Dr Kernberg was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1997 to 2001 and has served as an editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

His contribution to psychoanalysis

Kernberg’s importance comes from having applied psychoanalysis successfully to severe and borderline personality disorders and from his theoretical and practical contributions in this field. He studied human aggression and destructiveness. His main books include Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975), Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (1976), Internal World and External Reality: Object Relations Theory Applied (1980), Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies (1984), Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Psychotherapeutic Strategies (1989) and Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (1992).

It is striking that Otto F. Kernberg, whom many analysts and therapists regard as “the greatest living master”, is not better known outside psychoanalytic circles. The main reason is no doubt the very “medical” style and stance adopted by this legendary figure, yet Kernberg’s success also stems from this style and stance. In Kernberg we find neither the captivating style and theory applicable to cultural fields that we find in Lacan, nor the epistemological brilliance and revolutionary way of thinking of Kohut. His importance lies rather in having taken psychoanalysis out of its role as a “cosmetic” and expensive pursuit of the privileged and applied it successfully to the field of serious personality disorders.

His view of borderline pathology

Kernberg made the most important contribution to understanding the psychodynamics of borderline personality disorder. Through his “clinical psychoanalysis” he created the possibility of treating these severe cases with analytic therapy, and developed a well-defined, effective technique for the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of patients with borderline personality organisation, based entirely on the analysis of defences and transference. His theory and technique fostered a team-based approach and contributed constructively to the points at which psychoanalysis, general psychiatry, other psychotherapy schools and medication can meet.

Kernberg, who comes across in his case presentations as having a very solid psychological make-up and unshakeable self-confidence, has a theory that is surprisingly simple, realistic, practical and even schematic. It draws on Freud’s drive theory, on the object relations approach of Melanie Klein and the British School, on the ego psychology of Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann, and, in its developmental approach, on Margaret Mahler. Kernberg managed to synthesise all these scattered and sometimes opposing approaches with remarkable clarity. Biological data are given prominence, and the contributions of general medicine and psychiatry are not ignored. His style carefully avoids cultural allusions and “intellectual conversation”; his concepts are clear and precise, and his way of thinking is highly reductive, as if working from a visual model.

As one of the scientists who has studied human aggression and destructiveness most closely in practice, Kernberg built his theory specifically to explain aggression and, as might be expected, made few changes to his theoretical approach over his lifetime. His fierce theoretical debates with another great master, Heinz Kohut, which attracted great interest in psychoanalytic and psychiatric circles for many years, also revolve around this issue.

Disagreements with Heinz Kohut

Defending the Freudian tradition against the technically and theoretically innovative Kohut, Kernberg sharply criticised Kohut’s technique and theory, particularly for not allowing the study of human aggression and destructiveness. Kohut sees aggression and destructiveness as a by-product of the fragmentation of a self whose cohesion has not been fully consolidated, and sets out to consolidate the self through something like a “corrective emotional experience”.

Kohut’s theory is optimistic about human nature and his technique is gentle and empathic; intense emotional regression and confrontation are avoided in analysis. Kernberg’s technique, by contrast, allows intense transference and countertransference reactions to develop; indeed, examining and working through aggression and negative transference within therapy is the essence of the treatment. Theoretically, the failure of personality integration is attributed to excessive aggressive drives and to the primitive defence mechanisms used to deal with them.

His view of narcissistic and borderline structures

Many researchers accept that Kernberg’s technique is valid for borderline conditions but find Kohut’s more suitable for narcissistic cases. Kohut himself carefully distinguished narcissistic disorders from borderline pathology and accepted that these cases lie at the limits of analysability with a specially modified psychoanalytic technique. Kernberg, however, places narcissistic pathology within the broad spectrum of borderline personality organisation. The debate between these two great masters therefore centres on narcissistic conditions and the role of aggression in narcissism. Kernberg’s book Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, which sets out his main theoretical theses very well, is also significant for stating the core points of his criticism of Kohut.