“Everything Good and Bad”: Developing Depressive Position and Imagination

Abstract

In late 1926 Klein emigrated from Berlin to London; the move was fortuitous, not only because the 44 year-old Klein could begin again with new patients. There were new colleagues whom she hoped would not be hostile to her work as were those analysts in Berlin and Vienna. She entered the British Psychoanalytical Society as a member by 1927 with a new kind of theory still under construction. Expanding on her notes and previous articles on the children in Berlin, Klein published what she saw as her most important work, The Psycho-Analysis of Children that proved to be a bridge to new considerations of a self and, for object relations, greater versatility for love and hate in emotional life with others. Along with her new claims for early analysis, between 1926 and 1940 Klein re-envisioned the ego as the developing self, defined as “everything good and bad.” Her new direction helped shift emphasis from persecutory part objects to the role of the good object, tied to both the internal and external world. While bodily organs and sensate activity continue to be the basis of phantasy, their symbolic equation now becomes elemental and often the volatile material for her capacious theory of symbol formation. As she was establishing herself in the British Psychoanalytical Society, Klein’s loyalty was to her on-going interest in building concepts from clinical experience. She designed an affecting vocabulary that could do justice to the fate of emotional situations she felt constituted infantile anxieties and defenses against them. Anxiety, however, will be necessary for a self to develop an ongoing relation to reality and to imagination. Yet even with all that was new, Klein had to address longstanding theoretical disputes over the nature of psychoanalysis, the emotional capacities of the child, the fate of aggression in early life, and the question of her style of interpretation in early analysis. With her developing theory of phantasy as constituting the mind, she had to explain the efficacy and therapeutic action of interpretation and why, in calling forth anxiety and meeting it with words, small children could understand their frustrations, terrors, hatred, and sullied attempts to love. Children were capable of creative reparation.