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How I got into this predicament, I'll never know Absolutely incredible To be executed for a crime I never committed Of course, isn't all mankind in the same boat? Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed? The difference is that all men go eventually but I go at six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock but I have a smart lawyer
Otto Weininger's book on death and the death instinct is a readable work, of eminently digestible length, that elaborates on Melanie Klein's formulation of personality development And despite its immersion in such violent concepts as ego annihilation, hatred, rage, envy, and the death instinct, it is a surprisingly gentle book. Weininger, a psychologist who has taught at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto for many years, uses his own clinical experience with adults and adolescents, and with children in a variety of painful circumstances, to offer the reader an understanding of the applications of Kleinian theory.
The struggle of most non-Kleinians the Kleinian perspective has been, at least in part, with her attribution of intense emotions such as hatred and destructiveness to babies. How these tiny humans can already be so adept at the defense of projective identification, how they can, indeed, “feel empty and experience a sense of not being—a sense of death” when a parent does not respond appropriately to their needs, strains even the most conscientious psychoanalytic mind.
Weininger, in an attempt to make Klein palatable, steers away from a detailed exposition of the theory; instead, he leads us into it by clinical example. We are told about Klein's view of the origins of the death instinct and of the superego by being introduced to a seven-month-old baby who cried loudly and kicked whenever his parent tried to pick him up, and we become quite rapidly engaged. “The parent began to tell the infant that he should be satisfie