The Destructive Force Within

IT IS DIFFICULT TO OVERESTIMATE Melanie Klein's impact on psychoanalytic thinking. So many of her locutions and concerns are part of psychoanalytic daily life. She shares with nineteenth century psychiatry, poetry, and gothic literature an obsession with splitting. In Klein's writings, splits in personality become splits in ego, object, and affect. She embarks on what may well be one of the most detailed portrayals of psychological splitting in the history of ideas. She shares this preoccupation with Freud and Jung, but gives it her own turn, takes it to places the founders of depth psychology did not quite get to. If the idea of splitting is popular today, Melanie Klein is a background influence.

Klein shares with existentialism a preoccupation with death. Our sense of self, other, and time is stained by death on the horizon. For Freud and Klein, death is not only a definitive event approaching us, but something working in every psychic pore now. Klein spins variants of Freud's death drive throughout her work. She takes seriously Freud's insistence that Eros and the death instinct permeate every fiber of psychic life. How death work and life work contribute to every psychic event involves "problems whose elucidation would be the most rewarding achievement of psychological research" (Freud, 1937, p. 243). Klein immerses herself in death and life processes to contribute toward the elucidation Freud invites.

Klein makes psychoanalysis more honest by making explicit its implicit concern with psychosis. In an earlier contribution (Eigen, 1986, pp. 5–31), I showed how an underlying concern with madness contributed to Freud's structural concepts and descriptions of psychic processes. He applied notions drawn from psychotic phenomenology to treatment of neurotics. Klein tears the veil away and focuses on psychotic anxieties, mechanisms, and defenses that make their way through infancy and remain active all life long. She gives credence to the intuition that m