A Kleinian Appreciation

Over the last month I’ve been reading through Melanie Klein’s published works in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945. Tonight I had the joy of reading her paper “Symposium on Child-Analysis” (1927) which is a response to Anna Freud’s critique of Klein’s play technique with children. I wanted to describe some of Klein’s intriguing arguments and then describe how Kleinians have a radically different way of approaching analysis for patients from all populations: children, adult neurotics and psychotics.

Psychoanalytic Views of Mental Health

Freud once wrote, “But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that happiness” (Breuer & Freud, Studies on Hysteria, p. 306). Freud was clearly no optimist when it came to mental health. For Freud, society generally serves to discourage our natural libidinal and aggressive wishes through the creation of various social prohibitions that demand our drives be sublimated into healthy, socially acceptable channels. Freud never believed that psychoanalysis promised happiness. Instead, psychoanalysis is a quest for truth through the analysis of the patient’s unconscious wishes and beliefs.

The Importance of Neutrality in Psychoanalysis

The analyst’s posture in analysis is supposed to be driven by three aims: neutrality, abstinence, and anonymity. I want to focus specifically on neutrality. Read any psychological textbook and one always happens upon the same critique that neutrality is impossible. Freud was not always neutral, which should come as no surprise considering his case studies are all stories of failure not success. Relational analysts have emphasized two-person psychology and critiqued Freud’s neutrality as being robotic and inhuman.

I want to talk about the importance of neutrality or indifference. People going into the mental health profession tend to have certain proclivities to be caring and empathic. Of course, these attributes are necessary and can help the psychotherapist greatly who is engaging in difficult work. I wish I could find the quote from Freud that goes something like this: “the worst thing you can do is care too much about the patient”. This might strike some as odd. Aren’t psychotherapists supposed to care about the well being of others since their work is driven by a sense of benevolence? To explain why caring too much can severely hinder therapy, I want to use Klein’s idea of projective identification. This is a controversial idea that combines a couple of different notions such as: projection, introjection, and identification.