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| 2007/01/22 15:04:10瀏覽524｜回應0｜推薦1 | |
By confronting archaic anxieties, which had received little attention before her, and by winning over the British therapists, Melanie Klein gained an international audience within the psychoanalytic movement. To her innovative thought and her talent were added an indefatigable tenacity and an unparalleled ability to guide her friends, to divide her adversaries, and to regulate envies and gratitudes—the signs of a powerful woman. Many people noticed these qualities after Klein arrived in England. Just after Ferenczi’s 1927 visit to London, for example, Ferenczi wrote Freud, as we recall, to denounce “the domineering influence which Frau Melanie Klein has on the whole group….Apart from the scientific value of her work, I find it an influence directed at Vienna.”1 Did Melanie “mesmerize” the British Society, as some have accused her of doing? Although Klein rose to the status of an “idealized object,” did she nevertheless help lower herself into its “denigrated opposite?”2 From the beginning, both her adherents hand her skeptics acknowledged what the former considered her innovations and the latter her doctrinal transgressions. The debate only intensified when Anna Freud began to publish her own writings, which evinced an approach to child analysis that directly conflicted with Melanie’s. The first skirmishes took place when the master’s daughter attempted to be published in England. Anna Freud (1895-1982) was thirteen years Melanie’s junior. The last of Freud’s children and one of his own analysands, Anna did not graduate from the gymnasium although she was highly intelligent. She was placed under the guidance of Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth so she could learn child analysis, and she became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1922. After practicing child analysis for two years, she hurriedly published The Psycho—Analytic Treatment of Children.3 It was important for the daughter and the heir of the inventor of psychoanalysis, whose cancer was already known, to confirm her father’s authority. When Anna addressed the Berlin Society in 1927, she contended that the analysis of normal children could be hazardous, which conflicted with Melanie’s view that analysis should play an integral role in the education of all children. Anna’s work essentially argued that the analyst should adopt the role of the child’s idea ego so that treatment could get under way. Of course, such a notion of the analyst as a mentor whose authority exceeds that of the parents themselves was poles apart from Klein’s own conception. The British analysts—Barbara Low (whose support of Anna Freud never dwindled and who wrote a very positive review of Anna’s book), David Eder, Edward Glover, Joan Riviere, Ella Sharpe, and Klein herself—pored over the master’s daughter’s work. Though a diverse group, they unanimously agreed, according to letter Jones wrote Freud in response to his expostulations, that it was ill advised for Anna to have been “so hasty as to publish her first lectures in such an uncompromising form and on such a slender basis of experience,” a decision that risked imposing a “check” on the development of early analysis.4 Until the end of her life, Anna remained bitter about this denunciation, particularly with respect to Jones, who proved at this point that he could hold his own with Freud. The antagonism between the two women only deepened. These two intransigent personalities—Anna/Antigone and Melanie/Valkyire—who came from different cultures, each defended her own notion of child analysis. Their differences soon became quite apparent, at which point Melanie summarized Anna Freud’s principles of child analysis, which she found unacceptable, as follows: 1. No analysis of the child’s Oedipus complex was possible, as it might interfere with the child’s relations with its parents; 2. Child analysis should exert only an educative influence on the child; 3. A transference neurosis cannot be effected because the parents still exert a predominant role in the child’s life; and 4. The analyst should exert every effort to gain the child’s confidence.5 If such principles were adopted, they would in fact contradict Klein’s own observations, which many analysts had already accepted as forming the basis of a new analytic technique: the early emergence of the Oedipus complex, the concomitant presence of an aggressive object relation that results in the projection of the death drive, the prior emergence of the superego, the rapid emergence of transference in children and the meaning of its impact on interpretation, particularly in negative transference, and so forth. All of these insights were laid out in Melanie’s work—and she returned to them in the English version of The Psychoanalysis of Children in 1932. The Anna Freudians, for their part, objected that Melanie, in addition to advancing the theoretical innovations I have just mentioned, failed to consider the real existence of the mother, interpreting instead the fantasies and innate drives projected by the child. As varied a group of clinicians as Melitta, Bowlby, and Winnicott shared this view to varying degrees, and some of the Independents would try to fill the gaps in Klein’s work by referring to Merrel Middlemore’s work The Nursing Couple. The contentiousness between the two analysts, which preceded the Freud’s arrival in London in 1939, underlay the dissensions that would later be articulated by clinicians both British and Continental and would be elaborated upon during the famous Controversial Discussions. A broader mindset, a commitment to scientific research based on empirical experience, and a highly democratic impulse that infiltrated the institutional politics of the British Society all helped transform this contentiousness into an unprecedented scholarly debate, as evidenced by the published Freud-Klein Controversies.6 Long before the Second World War, then, these diverging views hardened and led to fractures inside the very fabric of the British Psycho-Analytic Society. The impassioned quarrel between Melanie and Melitta, which Glover only encouraged, added even more venom to the discussions. Political realities entered the fray beginning in 1938, as many Continental analysts—Balint, Bibring, Edlberg, Hitschmann, Hoffer, Isakower, Kris, Lanton, Stengel, Schur, Stross, Sachs, Straub, and others—escaped the Nazis and settled in England. Their arrival en masses inflamed the brewing crisis. On the one hand, classic Freudianism and Anna Freudianism, which functioned as a hegemony, were confronted in England with a dissidence that was no small matter, as some on the Continent believed. On the other hand, because of both the war and the sudden influx of new immigrants, these practitioners were faced with a dearth of clients, even with unemployment. Who will submit to training analyses? How will we educate psychoanalytic trainees? Are some groups perhaps abusing their power by injuring others? As always, symbolic “power” proves to be economic as well. Behind all these theoretical machinations, a social struggle had started to overwhelm the psychoanalytic field. Freud died on September 23, 1939. All his loved ones and disciples mourned him greatly. In the dramatic context of the war, moreover, his disappearance inspired his disciples to clarify their master’s ideas. Each of them claimed to speak for him, professed undivided loyalty, and in fact sought to appropriate his work in a grand totemic feast during which the sons—under the direction of the daughters—debated among themselves and tried to separated the “pure” from the “impure.” The history of psychoanalysis, still an emerging discipline, suggests that its protagonists experienced it, more or less unconsciously, as a religion. Jung’s schism with Freud had recently suggested as much, and Lacan’s dissidence would do so as well. And yet it the fact of this retreat, the reader may believe that the shake-ups in the British analytic movement during the war, which arose out of Melanie Klein’s work as well as her controversial discussions with the Anna Freudians, offer an encouraging example that this sort of religiosity can be overcome. To the violence of conflicts—which were indeed sacrificial, if not sacred—were added a viable work of reflection and a theoretical, clinical, and institutional development. The exchange of new and complementary perspectives opened up the path toward viable psychoanalytic research. Can we really pursue that path today, one that the successors to these pioneers have refined? For the time being, Melanie dreaded the arrival of the Viennese contingent, 7 whose conformity she rejected: “It will never be the same again. It’s a disaster.”8 The Viennese themselves, who found themselves persecuted and vulnerable because of their exile, were prone to feeling that “ ‘bei uns war es besser’ (we did it better in Vienna).”9 The stage was set for an ever-deepening conflict, a conflict fomented by both Glover and Melitta. Conflict Spiraled even more because the analyst of English origin took refuge in the country during the war, while the Continentals remained in London and stuck together during their many days spent in theoretical discussion—at first in the majority, but then in the minority. A “middle group” crept up between the two brigades, and some observers pondered the meaning of the attendant intellectual tempest. One of them was James Strachey, who quite accurately described the “extremism”10 of the two camps and who wrote the following in 1940, in a bizarre letter to Edward Glover: “Why should these wretched fascists and communists invade our peaceful compromising island?—(bloody foreigners).”11 As London was being torn apart and bombarded by Nazi war planers, psychoanalysts, unscathed by the blitz, spent their time arguing about the propriety of Klein’s contributions, the exact meaning that Freud sought to give to the “death drive” and the “superego,” the nature and early emergence of the “primal fantasies,” the “body-ego,” “rejection,” “negation,” the possibility or impossibility of a scientific judgment in psychoanalysis: in sum, they spent their days pondering the price of tea in China. This “trivial”12 debate began with some very practical questions: How should we train young analysts? Have the Kleinians not appropriated the majority of the candidates for themselves? An ad hoc committee was appointed that concluded that Melanie had not “manipulated” the young trainees! Irritated, the kleinians who had once considered breaking away were able to relax for a moment. But the respite mattered little, as the theoretical disputes persevered. Glover and Melitta were uncompromising, Anna Freud showed herself to be more reasonable but still dictatorial and aggressive, Jones may have been simply feebleminded and wily, Ella Sharpe switched sides, Sylvia Payne was fairly objective, while Joan Riviere refused to accept any challenges from the Viennese—and only Winnicott, who was more independent and clearheaded than ever and who hardly ever participated in the discussions—allowed himself to bring up real life: “I would like to point out that an air raid is going on,” he once said during a debate on the subject of aggression in psychoanalysis! The various factions had staked out their respective ground. With Anna Freud were Dorothy Burlingham, Kate Friedlander, Barbara Lantons, Hedwing Hoffer, Barbara Low, and Ella Sharpe, with Melitta off doing her own thing. Continentals, all of them men, and who were less effective than the ladies, also joined the group: S. H. Foulkes, Willi Hoffer, and Walter Schmideberg. The Kleinian camp included reliable woman: Paula Heimann, Joan Riviere, Susan Isaacs, and, for a time, Sylvia Payne, who would soon become an Independent; it also included such men as Roger Money-Kyrle, John Rickman, W. Scott, and D. W. Winnicott. The intermediaries made themselves heard as well: James Strachey, Marjorie Brierley, and others. The majority of the members of the British Society would express concern about the Kleinians’ proselytizing tendencies. Jones made an invaluable foray into diplomacy, one that approached hesitation and idecision, and he shuttled deftly between the two groups, as evidenced by the following excerpt from his January 21, 1942, letter to Anna Freud: “I consider Mrs Kelin has made important contributions….On the other hand she has neither a scientific nor an orderly mind and her presentations are lamentable.”13 Particularly he presentations on the Oedipus complex and the role of the father, he added, forgetting that her himself had endorsed Klein’s notions on those subjects in his 1934 article “The Phallic Phase”!14 In another letter, the society president was none too kind to Anna either: “[Anna] is certainly a tough and indigestible morsel. She has probably gone as far in analysis as she can and has no pioneering originality.”15 Jones, in fact, was nowhere to be found during the Controversial Discussions. He suffered from a series of psychosomatic illnesses and retreated into the countryside. He miraculously recovered just as the Discussions were ending, though by that point he had surrendered leadership to Glover—and had thus taken away any opportunity Melanie might have had to benefit from his influence.16 Fortunes changed, however, and Edward Glover, at first the director of research at the institute, felt increasingly put upon by the success of Klein’s theory and by the compromise that the two factions were forming. He resigned from the British Society in 1944 and joined the Swiss Society, expressing his dismay at seeing the British Society become “a woman ridden society” and at seeing the “Klein imbroglio” develop—which was really just a way of implicitly acknowledging that this attempts to discredit Melanie had failed. Anna Freud, who shared child analyst training duties with Melanie Klein, resigned from the Training Committee and began to lead seminars from her home. She had already been accepted as an authority with her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, and she organized the Hampstead War Nursery, which remained under her influence. Their closest rival was the prestigious Tavistock Institute and Clinic, which Hugh Crichton-Miller founded in 1920 to treat those suffering from shell shock, that is, those nervous traumas—shaking, paralysis, hallucinations—that result from repeated exposure to explosives. Under the direction of John Rees, these activities grew to include the treatment of juvenile delinquents in individual or group therapy. Under the influence of Rickman and Bion, Freudian and Kleinian theories came to dominate the work of the Clinic, so much so that it came to be considered one of the bastions of Kleinianism. Beginning in 1946, John Bowlby introduced the Independents’ approach as well as family therapy to the Clinic, and Balint contributed his group therapy technique.17 Anna Freud, who was highly combative and even “dictatorial” but who was thrown off track by the dissemination of Klein’s views, threatened and manipulated until people began to fear she would follow Glover: Could Freud’s daughter actually resign from the British Psycho-Analytical Society? Never! What should be done about the mere prospect? The atmosphere could not have been more heated. Melanie, too, entertained thoughts of breaking away, as some had suggested that she should do. She divided her time between her family in Cambridge and her patients, particularly in Pitlochry, Scotland, where she analyzed little Richard. As she was absent from the beginning of the Discussions, she sent her devotees in her place, who nevertheless remained under her firm and steady control: she supervised every aspect, for example, of Susan Isaacs’s work on the phantasy.18 Klein rarely intervened orally, and Jones occasionally prevented her from speaking,19 but she issued no shortage of notes and letters. When she presented written texts, moreover, the pages were dense.20 A militant mind-set surrounded her. The most passionate of her supporters formed the “I.O.(Internal Object) Group” in order to clarify the matriarch’s theory and to make it accessible to the Viennese. The “battle group”—Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and the doctrinaire Joan Riviere—grew even tighter. On both sides, women were the most active, but they never stopped turning to men: Papa Jones and Papa Glover were discussed or invited to the Discussions, and the symbolic authorities Freud and Abraham were often cited, particularly by Melanie.21 The figure of the father, whether dead or not, clearly hovered over the Discussions, even more so because the Kleinian faction appeared less strong than it actually was, with the result that Melanie’s political genius became more impressive than ever imagined. I will give two examples of this. Just when all hopes of reconciliation had vanished, Klein attempted to compromise with Anna Freud in May 1942. Anna was “very surprised, though very pleased” by this development, and, even if the armistice was far from succeeding, Melanie’s idea was clear: she did not want schisms, she held herself out as a follower of Freud, she just needed some time to prove it, whether with Anna or against her, but in any event not against psychoanalysis, for all psychoanalysis is—and can only be—Freudian psychoanalysis. Klein hated the adjective “Kleinian,” and with good reason. It was only because of Glover’s malicious rumor-mongering that people thought she saw herself as a prophet, even as Jesus. Her determination to innovate within the context of Freudianism was a valid conviction and, for that very reason, provided a convincing strategy: My greatest experience in this was “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and the Ego and the Id and what an experience it was. In a smaller way I saw in my own work [on reparation and the depressive position] repeatedly a new light appear and things altered by it….I think these findings could not have been unworldly to have been made even by Freud and he would have had the greatness, the strength, the powers to present them to the world. I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I am not afraid of fighting against anybody, but I really don’t like fighting. What I wish to do is to quietly let others participate in something I know to be true, important, and helpful.23 And there we have a nice display of insolence with a noble stab at modesty! In a similar spirit, Klein sent Winnicott a note apologizing for asking him to tone down a resolution he had proposed presenting. By showing consideration for Winnicott, she was preserving more than anything else their shared place in the Freud locomotive. And then she forwarded her comments on Winnicott’s proposed text to the other members of the group: I think the impression which it might give that Freud is more or less history would not only be dangerous, but the fact itself is not true. Freud’s writings are very much alive, and still a guide for our work….Anything which could give the impression that we think that Freud could be put on a shelf is the most dangerous trap we could fall into.24 That view could already be termed, as part of an effective strategy, a “return to Freud.” That is, to a clearly refurbished Freud! Melanie was not content with merely summarizing Freud’s views as a way to defend herself, for she also attacked those who did not read Freud as she did 25 and solidified her own ideas. It is not true, she said, that she denied the existence of the mother’s external reality, and to the extent that she believed that what is perceived is always “colored” by the fantasy, one has to concede “the vicissitudes of the relationships with internal objects” that are “fluid” and not established for once and for all.26 It is true that the seeds of depressive feelings exist from the beginning of life, but they are limited to the time between the child’s third and fifth month during the depressive position. And the father is not present in the child’s fantasy before the fourth month.27 And the love for the mother is not merely libido, but a veritable form of gratitude toward the person whom the child himself dreams of feeding,28 an emotion that is already highly complex before the depressive position even though it is entirely manifested only with that position.29 And an immediate sublimation is formed within the relation to the breast, which is a true “bridge” between the infant’s paranoid omnipotence and his adaptation to reality.30 Klein the theoretician built her castle while Klein the politician maneuvered with great skill, particularly with respect to Strachey’s preliminary report on the training of psychoanalysts. As Melanie was not a physician herself, she fought against the discrimination visited upon psychoanalysts who were not doctors, and she advocated a training in psychoanalysis alone as she believed medical training was of no help in understanding mental disorders. To Strachey, she decleared her wish to remain “behind the scenes,” although she very tactfully suggested that it would be inadvisable to “penalize originality”—the subtext being that the “originality,” her own, was on the verge of prevailing. At the same time, she told her cohorts the following: We must, of course, avoid giving any ground to feel that we are triumphing and I feel that I can now keep on for a time bearing the situation in which my work is at the same time being appreciated and depreciated, sometimes in one breath by the same people.31 The war among the ladies wound up being a peace among the ladies. Several of them had a change of heart: some of the loyalists—Marjorie Brierley, Barbara Low, Ella Sharpe, and Adrian and Karin Stephen (who supported Klein from the beginning)—turned against Melanie with hostility. At the same time, Sylvia Payne, who, along with W. H. Gillespie, had declared herself an “Independent” and who had endorsed Susan Isaacs’s work on the phantasy, became disappointed with Glover and abandoned Melanie’s adversary for good. Payne was elected president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1944. Klein’s theories held their own, even among her adversaries: although Anna Freud did not adopt the depressive position, didn’t she begin to speak of “grief in infancy?”32 Miss Freud resigned from the Training Committee in 1944 and abstained—as did Glover, the Schmidebergs, and the Viennese—from participating in any way in the second series of Controversial Discussions. As a result, “power” reverted de facto to the prewar members of the society.33 Following a series of theoretical and administrative negotiations, a compromise was struck. These ladies—and these gentlemen—subscribed to the principles of democratic cohabitation. For institutional purposes, the society approved two parallel courses of psychoanalytic training in order to satisfy both the Kleinians and the Anna Freudians. This did not prevent many clinicians—and some of the best ones at that—from feeling a mix of irritation and admiration for Melanie, as did R. D. Laing, Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott, and Sylvia Payne. One of the important benefits of these skirmishes among the various psychoanalytic factions was to facilitate a close analysis of the tyrannical logic underlying groups—all groups. One could hypothesize, in fact, that the sectarian functioning and exclusivity that characterized the Kleinians (they were caricatured as “the Ebenezer Church”)34 served as a laboratory for Bion—one that complemented his experience as an military psychiatrist who was the officer-in-charge responsible for rehabilitating victims of shell shock—when he offered a scathing analysis of group functioning.35 Although his book was based on Kleinian principles, it did not find favor with Melanie, who was analyzing Bion when he wrote it—and her reaction was well founded! Bion’s book incorporates his belief that a group is an entity unto itself and not simply a conglomeration of individuals with which one has a relationship comparable to the infant’s relation to the breast (or to the part object). The failure to respond effectively to the demands of this relationship is experienced as an intolerable frustration, which is manifested in the paranoid-schizoid regression that characterizes the members of the group. Although the family grouping, with its oedipal libido, largely remains, as Freud believed, the prototype of the group bond, Bion wisely modified that analysis and contended that group dynamics reflect far more primitive mechanisms, as manifested, in Klein’s view, by the depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions. It is true that groups in any form (the religious ones based on a hypothesis of dependence, the aristocratic ones based on coupling for the aristocratic ones, and the military ones based on fight-or-flight) conceal not only psychotic anxiety but defensive reactions against such anxiety as well. The inability to form symbols is not the sole province of isolated cases, as Klein showed with Dick, but “[extends] to include all individuals in their functions as members of the basic-assumption group.”36 The Controversial Discussions clearly reflected such paranoid-schizoid regressions, and Melanie’s personality no doubt reinforced the imago of the fascinating and persecuting breast.37 But Klein also encouraged, as she did with Bion, the analysis of this phenomenon in the etymological sense of the word: its decomposition through genuine analytic work of an unprecedented depth and clarity, one that applies to the interpretation of all groups, whether they by psychoanalytic, political, religious, or otherwise. In the end the most important consequence of this “peace among the ladies” was nothing more than to preserve the spirit of inquiry. In addition to forming the group known as the “Independents” (Jones, Sharpe, Flugel, Payne, Rickman, Strachey, Brierley, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Balint, Kluber, Khan, and Bolby38), the British analysts sustained an ecumenical movement of substantial psychoanalytic investigation. Since that time this broadening of the mind and this taste for confrontation have been appreciated by all those who consider psychoanalysis to be an active quest. Even more intimately, finally, the upshot of all this has been described by Winnicott, who, in a parallel to Bion’s dissectin of the group, endorsed a more sober, essentially analytic, alternative: “The Capacity to Be Alone”39 as the foundation of creativity, and creativity in psychoanalysis in particular. Melanie responded with her own “On the Sense of Loneliness,” in which she elaborated upon the benefits of feeling lonely.40 It is as if she were showing us the way there!41 |
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