Dr. Loray Daws' review of “The Klein-Winnicott Dialectic…” has a comprehensive view of my work, i.e., the work of Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler. Dr. Daws indicates the breath, as well as the depth that the book encompasses, both integrating the historically polarized theories of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, through looking at the psychobiographical origins of their polarization, and examining the application of their integration to clinical work. Daws has also understood how the controversial metapsychology of the Kleinian death instinct can be brought back to the internal psychic world of Melanie Klein, where a domineering narcissistic mother resides, cloaked in an idealization. As Daws points out, Melanie Klein's splitting off the negative aspects of the mother, and preserving her idealized image takes on the visage of Ronald Fairbairn's “moral defense,” where the child preserves the mother's ideal image by blaming the Self, attempting to counteract the perpetual traumatizing damage of Fairbairn's “internal saboteur” and Klein's own Paranoid-Schizoid dynamic internal persecutory object.
Psychobiographic evidence suggests that Klein defended an idealized view of her mother, while splitting off her overwhelming narcissistic qualities, and channeling them into her theory making around the “death instinct.”
Daws comprehends the developmental focus of “The Klein-Winnicott Dialectic…” book. He grasps the shift of emphasis in the developmental direction, once a controversial metapsychology of a death instinct (being born with overwhelming hostile compulsions that must be projected outward) becomes transformed into a metapsychology of symbolization.
Further, as Daws notes, this shift towards the developmental highlights the phenomenology of the Paranoid-Schizoid and the Depressive positions as an independent theory of the psyche. Thus, Klein's theory no longer pivots around the death instinct metapsychology, making it more accessible to being blended with the theory of D. W. Winnicott for the most impactful clinical work. Winnicott's focus on the maternal environmental impact is also seen psychobiographically in the book, as Daws notes. With a mother of schizoid depression, rather than narcissistic domination, Winnicott had to mother his mother. Ultimately he became enraged with the enormity of the task of enlivening her. However, somewhat aware of his own environmental influence on nurturing the baby in his mother, he transferred this over to having significant impact with both child and adult patients in his clinical work. He did this first as a Pediatrician, and then later as his own form of psychotherapist. Thus being schooled in his own environmental impact on his mother, he nurtured his own theory of the developmental vantage point in psychoanalysis, even when being forced to nurture his mother though his own aliveness, proved to be exhausting and depleting for him. In an analogy to this, his first marriage (to Alice) led to depletion, in contrast to the energizing inspiration of his second to Claire Winnicott.
Dr. Daws also comments on the integration of the American and British schools of Object Relations theory in this book, and specifically mentions the developmental vantage points of some of the American theories, such as James F. Masterson's “abandonment depression” affect theory and Kavaler-Adler's theory of “Developmental Mourning.” He adds in Kavaler-Adler's view of the British Michael Balint's theory of “The Basic Fault.” Once Klein's own phenomenology can be seen as tilting a theory that has often been held down by an anchoring in a “death instinct,” to the forward flow of a developmental focus, Klein and Winnicott can form a powerful developmental dialectic in clinical practice, such as the integration of Winnicott's view of “object survival” and Klein's view of mourning as the ultimate psychic integration, following the visceral expression of primal rage. Such integration of the two theories overlaps with the other developmental affect theories such as the abandonment depression of Masterson, the “Developmental Mourning” theory of Kavaler-Adler, and the “Basic Fault” theory of Michael Balint.
Daws also emphasizes Kavaler-Adler's reworking of sadomasochistic
reactivity, in both the transference and countertransference, in the Winnicottian realm of the “transitional space,” citing
Kavaler-Adler's clinical chapters and examples. The expanded view of clinical work in transitional space in this book was also commented on by Dr. Neal Vorus in his review of this “Klein-Winnicott Dialectic…” book in the Division 39 Psychoanalytic Psychology journal in 2017.
Daws writes too of how the Demon Lover Complex in the creative women that Kavaler-Adler has written about in earlier books, such as “The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers,” and “The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity” can be seen in Melanie Klein and in her creative work (also longer clinical cases in “Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change…”. He notes that Kavaler-Adler wrote of this in writing of Melanie Klein's early short stories as well as in her theoretical writing, postulating that Kavaler-Adler saw them both as Klein's creative work, and essentially as her art, Winnicott also having his art form in his theory.
Dr. Daws can be congratulated for his insightful and elegant book review.