Abstract
A wonderful panel at the 2013 Prague Congress of the IPA discussed the Kleinian concept of reparation. Led by a North American analyst, the panel engaged its international audience through its amazing clarity and close tracking of the connection between clinical data and theory. After the meeting, conversations continued, enthusiastically exploring aspects of the presentations.
A brief twenty years ago, at a similar panel, a North American analyst presented a patient for discussion by a modern Kleinian from London. In her initial discussion the Kleinian referred frequently to psychotic elements in the analysand’s personality. The ensuing conversation centered around whether the analysand was psychotic from the viewpoint of descriptive psychiatry and analyzability. In an ever more frustrating debate that gave new meaning to the phrase “confusion of tongues,” and with hardly less affect than the child-adult sexual interaction to which Ferenczi (1949) was referring might generate, the presenter and members of the audience tried to defend the analysand’s claim to sanity, while the discussant and others in the audience insisted on the richer understanding of the clinical material afforded by the Kleinian viewpoint. Informal talk after the meeting continued the debate—who was crazier, the patient or the Kleinian?
Another thirty years or so earlier, leading American analysts had dismissed Kleinian thought, contrasting their “ego psychology” with Kleinian “id mythology” (Rapaport and Gill 1958). Indeed, in reading Klein it is often difficult to tell whether she is referring to the analysand’s conscious or unconscious picture of his own mental functioning or to the analyst’s ideas about that mental life.
While the ever growing success of modern Kleinian thought in North America is certainly based on its considerable clinical utility, I believe another major factor is at work. The British Kleinians, seemingly in response to allegations that their language is confusing and hard to understand, have undertaken a rigorous clarification of that language. The volume under review, inspired by R. D. Hinshelwood’s classic Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1989, 1991), is a significant contribution to this ongoing effort. It begins with twelve “main entries,” each roughly twenty pages long. These well-annotated essays on major concepts in Kleinian analysis range over topics from “unconscious phantasy” to “Oedipus complex” to “superego.” Each essay begins with a definition, followed by a list of key papers, a chronology of thinking on the topic (often including extensive quotations from the key papers), and a summarizing list of “key ideas.” A second section is devoted to “general entries,” an alphabetically arranged collection of short essays, most about a page in length, explicating concepts and providing brief professional biographies of major Kleinian thinkers. The book ends with a bibliography of Kleinian writing to 1989, which is disappointing: I would have welcomed a friendly guide to the later literature. A more serious and puzzling omission is that the book lacks an index. Although the entries are cross-referenced and the “general entries” are arranged alphabetically, the absence of an index is frustrating for readers in search of specific information.
The writing is of uniformly high quality and great clarity. Somehow the authors have succeeded in preparing a “dictionary” that is at the same time a pleasure to read straight through, a delight for browsing, and a rigorous work of reference.
Now that object relations theory and its vocabulary have become central to North American psychoanalysis, many analysts here believe they have a good grasp of that formerly strange language and may see little need for a specifically Kleinian dictionary. Terms like “beta elements” and “projective identification” fly about American psychoanalytic meetings like native species. However, though the words are the same, the concepts often are not. In fact, the presence of these homonyms not infrequently confuses discussion, as analysts use the same words while giving them different meanings. A great advantage of The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought is that it gives us a route into the sometimes fine, but often significant, distinctions between the terminological usage of modern British Kleinians, on the one hand, and North American object relations theorists on the other.
Compare the discussion of “projective identification” in The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought with that appearing in APsaA’s Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (Auchincloss and Samberg 2012). The latter defines “projective identification” as “a process whereby unwanted, split-off parts of the self are forced into the object so as to control the object from inside. Projective identification is used variably to mean: Fantasy, a defense and an object relationship; in some definitions it is also a mode of communication” (p. 203). Terms and Concepts also defines “projection” as “a defensive operation whereby an individual attributes an unacceptable or intolerable idea, impulse or feeling to another person.” By contrast, the volume under review says the following about projective identification: “This is the more traditional Kleinian view of projection in which part of the self is attributed to an object. Thus, part of the ego—the mental state, for instance, such as unwelcome anger, hatred or other bad feeling—is seen in another person and quite disowned (denied) in oneself. . . . In current usage by British Kleinian analysts the term ‘projection’ is not sharply distinguished from the term ‘projective identification’. ‘Projection’ tends to be used to mean the general mental mechanism of transferring something from the self to another. ‘Projective identification’ involves a more detailed consideration of what is projected by whom, to whom and with what effect. All the many forms and contents of projection—of impulse, feeling, thought, part of the self, internal object—are now thought to involve unconscious identification by the projector with the projected attribute. Indeed, in current British Kleinian usage ‘projective identification’ is really an unpacking of the concept of projection and it hardly makes sense to give the terms different definitions” (p. 455). Knowing that British Kleinian and North American students of object relations theory are using words differently, we can be spared confusion and learn better from them both.
On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere set out through Middlesex County to warn that the “British are coming,” although, contrary to myth, he did not cry it out since his message was a secret. Two hundred forty-three years later, the British, or at least the British Kleinians, have conquered large portions of North American psychoanalysis. They have been kind enough to provide us a wonderfully clear dictionary of their sometimes difficult language. I highly recommend it to those who want to talk usefully with these invaders.