Reply to Bob Hinshelwood

I am grateful to Bob Hinshelwood for bringing Karin Stephen's contribution to the Waddington book to the reader's attention, as well as to mine. It adds helpfully to the contextualization of the article.

He criticizes me for what I said about Stephen's attitude to Klein. I think he is right that ‘it is on similar grounds to that of the superego’ that she is critical of the notion of ‘internal objects’.

Hinshelwood tells us that in her earlier 1943 article, Stephen ‘acknowledges the importance of Klein's contribution to the nature and origins of the superego’. In fact, in the piece published in the recent edition of this Journal there is no suggestion that she is impressed by Klein's ideas as amplifying those of Freud.

Apropos Stephen's response to Klein, I should mention that in the 1945 article Stephen does voice objections to Klein's idea of internal objects, at least as a way of speaking. This locution suggests, she says, that they are ‘real’ in the same sense as that phantasies or memories are real. Here I think she does argue against a straw man, one, that is, who might believe that when he talks in this way he believes the parents, the policeman or the biting dog are literally inside the mind or body. This is what she sees as ‘the illusion fostered by psychoanalysts’ that I mentioned in my piece. However, as Hinshelwood suggests, she has exactly the same objection against the reification of the superego.

There is a suggestion in her paper that she has the Controversial Discussions in mind in what she writes. On p. 20, she says:

This question of seeing through transference illusions is an important one for us at the present moment because it is very relevant to the discussions we sometimes have about how much ‘reality’ to ascribe to what Mrs Klein and her fellow analysts call ‘internal objects’. (Stephen 2000) (italics mine)

I should like to suggest that her argument against Klein may be not purely linguistic, but may imply a more substantial difference about the nat