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Julia Kristeva's Melanie Klein operates on three levels. It is a study of the life, work, and influence of Klein; it is the second volume of a trilogy on female genius, whose other subjects are Hannah Arendt and Colette; and it is an expansion of Kristeva's own thinking. On the first level the book is excellent, but it is troubling on the second and third.
Kristeva gives a fine, compact overview of the evolution of Klein's thought in relation to her personal history and political battles. The portrait of Klein as the inventor of child analysis, original thinker, center of the Controversial Discussions, daughter of a difficult mother and mother of a difficult daughter, possessive and envious leader of a group, will be familiar to readers of the Grosskurth biography. But Kristeva has a distinct take on Klein, encapsulated in the book's subtitle: Matricide as Pain and Creativity.
On the first level Kristeva reads Klein in relation to what she sees as the central idea of psychoanalysis: “the human soul, which is bound up with the body and language … can become a privileged realm of rebirth” (p. 6). Where Freud concentrated on the child's desires and repressions, Klein focused on the infant's pain and splitting. This pain is object-related from the outset and is a manifestation of the death drive. The result is Klein's famous emphasis on aggression in the mother-infant relation. But such aggression is also the conflicted ground of symbolization, says Kristeva, putting “matricide … along with envy and gratitude, at the origin of our capacity to think” (pp. 12-13). Klein had “the courage to proclaim, in her own way, and without equivocation” that “in order to think, one must first lose the mother” (pp. 130-131). As the origin of symbolization, matricide is a kind of rebirth.
Kristeva's conception of rebirth serves to expand Klein's idea that “both sexes experience a primary feminine phase …” (p. 118). All infants have oral-sadistic incorporative fantasies about a “breast that