MELANIE KLEIN REVISITED 

HER UNPUBLISHED THOUGHTS ON TECHNIQUE

Elizabeth Bott Spillius, 2003

For all psychoanalysts technique is profoundly important.   It is the means by which we acquire our data, and without  good clinical data our theory would have no solid base.    In this paper I explore Melanie Klein’s unpublished work on technique.

   Klein published only two technical papers, ‘The origins of transference’ in 1952 and ‘The psycho-analytic play technique’ in 1955, but she left a set of unpublished lectures on technique together with over 1,500 pages of notes especially devoted to technical problems.   She intended to write a book on technique, but did not do so.   She was also going to write books on schizoid mechanisms, loneliness, and mental development – too many topics, perhaps, for her to focus on any single one of them.   Perhaps we should be grateful that she managed to write as much as she did.

It is important to remember that although Klein eventually developed a new, influential and controversial theory, she was basically a clinician.  She was fascinated by clinical material even to the point of losing herself in its details.    We know too from James Gammill’s account of his supervision with Klein from 1957 to 1959 that she had a remarkable memory for clinical material, her own as well as his (Gammill, 1989).   Winnicott makes the same point (Winnicott, 1962).   I am told that in arguments about theory with colleagues Klein tended to resort to convincing clinical examples.    She was sometimes accused of confusing concepts and data, which I imagine she found puzzling and unfair.  

            My view that Klein was basically a clinician was also her view of herself.   In an unpublished note  she says:

I would like to draw attention to the fact that I have always been primarily a clinician.  It has never happened that I arrived at a concept theoretically and then allowed this concept to guide my clinical work.  It as always been the other way round.  From time to time going over my psychoanalytic experience and observations, I have arrived at certain concepts . . . .  (D17, 1299, 886-7)

I base my statements about Klein’s empirical approach not only on her published work but also on some knowledge of the remarkable Melanie Klein Archive in London.  This archive was bequeathed by Klein to the Melanie Klein Trust when she died in 1960, and since 1981 it has been housed in the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, whose excellent archivists have catalogued and later microfilmed it.   It consists of twenty-nine boxes each containing 800 to 1,000 pages of papers.   There are 12 boxes of clinical notes and 9 boxes of lectures and notes about theory and technique.    In fact the size and richness of the Archive are not only exciting but daunting.  

So it is clear that Klein, unlike Freud, thought that her unpublished material was worth preserving.   It seems clear from even a brief reading that she was constantly re-working her ideas and going back to look at old material with a fresh eye.  I think also that she liked clinical material just for its own sake.   Sometimes she presented  long descriptions of patients’ material in her technical seminars, including far more detail than she would have needed to prove a point.  At first I found this rather surprising.  So great is Klein’s reputation in the British Society for having strong, even dogmatic views that I had expected that she would be tempted to start with her view and  would then have tried to make her patients’ material fit it.   One tends to feel something like this when reading Narrative of a Child Analysis (Klein, 1960).   But Klein’s supposed dogmatism is much less evident in the material of the Archive than one might expect.   Indeed, one of the most exciting parts of the Archive concerns a sea change in Klein’s approach in the 1940s when, through her clinical work, she began to see the importance of splitting, projection, fragmentation and reintegration.   At this time new data and new ideas tumbled over each other in such profusion that  it is perhaps surprising that she got her schizoid mechanisms paper (Klein, 1946 and 1952a) to be as orderly as it is – and even so it is not an easy paper.    Making links between clinical material and conceptual formulation was always something of a problem for Klein, and her most innovative papers are not easy reading.   Nor, unlike Freud, was literary style her forte.  

In the present paper I will focus on Klein’s technique with adult patients.    Her technique with children is important too, of course, but she has published a paper on it (Klein, 1955a) and has published much material that illustrates it (Klein, 1932 and 1960).  

In the Archive there are two complete and very similar sets of lectures on Klein’s technique with adults.  (C52, 1554, 592-694 and C53, 1554, 695-832).[1]    It is difficult to be sure of the exact dates of these lectures because Klein only gives dates for her clinical notes;  her lectures, manuscripts and technical and theoretical notes are usually undated.   We know from the records of the British Psycho-Analytical Society that Klein gave a course of formal lectures on technique in 1936 and again in 1945-46.   But we also know from the British Society’s records and from Klein’s own notes that she  gave many seminars in which she spoke about technique.   Klein also gave formal lectures on child analysis – these being what she was chiefly renowned for – which she gave year after year from 1947 until her death in 1960.   Many points of technique were covered in these lectures and in both her child and adult seminars.   She taught something in every term in every year from 1945 until her death in 1960, and she held private seminars too.  

It is likely that the lectures of C52 were given in 1936, for a letter from Edward Glover dated 19.1.1936 is to be found in an adjacent file, C54 (C54, 1554, 888).   His letter asks for the titles and dates of the lectures Klein is to give, and the titles she gives in reply tally more or less with the titles of lectures listed in C52.    It is also possible, however, that the lectures of C52 and C53 were worked over versions given later, or perhaps intended for publication.   C52 is unusually neat, tidy, and uncorrected.   Versions of several of these lectures of C52 and C53 are to be found in other places in the Archive.[2]  

Throughout the work for this paper I have had two questions in mind. Does this unpublished material add to what we know about Klein’s technique from her published work?    And does her technique as revealed in the Archive as well as in her published work differ from current Kleinian technique?

After first describing the formal lectures I will summarise some of the special points about technique from Klein’s voluminous notes.   I will then give two sessions of material from her clinical notes.  These clinical notes, detailed although not verbatim, give a feeling of how she thought and worked clinically.    Finally I will briefly discuss the ways in which Klein’s ideas about technique differ from those of her present colleagues.   

Klein’s formal unpublished lectures on technique, C52 and C53.

Tucked away amongst Klein’s notes on technique is a perspicacious little comment:

Note re teaching technique.  The difficulty for developing technique which has always existed – people always have great difficulties in speaking about their own technique.  It is a very secret thing, and the reason for that secrecy.  (C54, 1554, 863)

Unfortunately the note stops there and her ideas about the reasons for the secrecy are not divulged.   Certainly she did not keep her own technique secret.    Neither did Ella Freeman Sharpe, whose lectures on technique in 1930-1931 (Sharpe, 1930-31, also 1950 and Whelan, 2000) Klein draws attention to (C52, 1554, 669).  

            I have wondered why Klein’s lectures were written out in full the way they are.   Did she actually read them aloud?  Did she speak to them?  Not many analysts now remember what her lectures were like.    But Isabel Menzies-Lyth (personal communication)  says that for the most part Klein read her lectures aloud though occasionally she spoke to particular points;   she thinks that the lectures were not very well organised,  and that the experience of listening to Klein lecture was very different from being supervised by her, which Isabel, like others, felt to be a very enriching experience.    There is a brief note in the Archive in which Klein herself  gives a bit of an idea of her mode of presentation and it sounds consistent with Isabel Menzies-Lyth’s description.    Klein says:[3]

Note for Seminar File                                                            11.5.50

                A successful seminar was on transference from the beginning;  accordingly, approach to first interviews or first session.  Material for that from my old lectures on technique, Number Two, instances.   Further points were transference in connection with situation.   I read from page 5 onwards, expanded on page 10 re phantasy situations and real experiences, and the end of page 12 and so on  transference displaced onto other people in repetition of primary defences.   On page 15 about unconscious thread between one hour and former sessions (B99, 1980, 12). 

            There were six lectures with the following titles (C52, 1554, 591-694, C53, 1554, 695-832, and C54, 1554, 887).

I.  Guiding principles.

II.  Aspects of the transference situation.

III. On interpretation.

IV. On interpretation

V.  The analysis of experiences.

VI. This title appears to have got torn off the list  Klein sent to Glover, but the lecture is concerned with the analyst’s approach to patients’ complaints and grievances especially about his objects and his past experiences.

            In the first lecture Klein describes the ‘analytic attitude’, a combination of eagerness and patience in which the analyst is both detached from but absorbed by the patient, humble but confident, and, above all, the analyst should have ‘a deep and true respect for the workings of the human mind and the human personality in general’.  She describes Freud’s discoveries of the unconscious and of transference, goes on to outline their origin in the love and hate of the infant and small child for the mother and her breast, the first object.   She describes the painful recognition by the infant that his feelings of love and of hate are directed to the same person, and she shows how these positive and negative feelings come to be felt towards the father, siblings, and other objects, especially the analyst.   Our understanding of transference and the unconscious, she says, is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from other forms of therapy.   She says that positive transference was mainly stressed at first, then there was an overemphasis on negative transference, but the important thing is not the strength of either set of feelings but the deep and complex connection between them.

            The remaining lectures are a further exemplification of the complex themes of this first lecture.   In the second lecture she explores the theme of transference further, describing what she means by the ‘transference situation’ and its links with the past in both its realistic and its phantasy aspects.   She gives an example of the first interview with patient ‘B’ in which he thought Klein spoke rather like his mother, who kept him too dependent, and then he wondered if seeing Klein would make him late for his next appointment.   In her comment on this material Klein moved rather gently from his anxiety about whether he would be able to get away on time from his meeting with her to his next appointment, then to his mother having made him too dependent so that it was good to get away from her.   And from there she described how he seemed to feel that analysis might make him too dependent on her, and that he felt she would keep him in analysis against his will.  He agreed and added that he had wanted to get away from the session and also that he hadn’t wanted to be analysed by a woman but had not wanted to say so.   And so the analysis began.    Soon much deeper anxieties emerged about his worry over being too dependent.   Later Klein describes a session in which B stressed his positive feelings for Klein while hiding his mistrust and hostility, and she says that both feelings are always there though one or other may be denied or displaced on to other people.   She describes her finding that some aspect of transference is always evident at the beginning of analysis.   She gives several examples, too, of patients displacing their attitudes towards the analyst  to other external people.   She ends this lecture by saying that there is always some sort of continuity between one session and the next, and that within each session there is a thread running throughout.  

            Interpretation is the theme of Lectures 3 and 4.   Klein repeats some of what she said about the analytic attitude, including the analyst’s inevitable countertransference.   She says that patients must not mean too little or too much to their analyst, and that the analyst will be better at his work if he has a wide range of imagos derived from his own past and present object relations.   She does not describe the analyst’s countertransference as a useful source of information about the patient, which, as we shall see later, was a view that Klein never adopted even though it has become an important view in post-Kleinian analysis.

            In Lecture 3 Klein describes clinical material from a child, ‘John’, who in his play was being a lion eating up the sleeping Klein, which she interpreted as his fear that Klein would eat him up because of his wish, as the lion, to eat her.   She linked his feelings for Klein to his feelings about his mother.    John became more anxious temporarily – because his defences had been put out of action, Klein says – but then he felt better and feelings of love and confidence in Klein increased.

            In Lecture 4 Klein explains the development of internal objects through their constant projection and reintrojection.   She gives very detailed material about patient B again, but this time he is further along in his analysis and is much annoyed because Klein changed the time of his session and he now meets patients he dislikes.  

            Lecture 5, ‘The analysis of experiences’, is concerned with experiences of external reality.    She is especially concerned to show that however ‘real’ the experiences are, they are also affected by phantasies and, similarly,  phantasies are affected by real experiences.    She gives an example of a man traumatised by being his mother’s favourite until his sister was born.   Something similar happened in analysis when he realised that Klein had a child patient which led the patient to get very angry, threatening to break off analysis and refusing to lie down.    He began having very strange and perverse dreams, which led Klein to interpret that he felt his mother and sister had poisoned him because he had poisoned them.   This led to further distressing dreams and to clarification of a phantasy of his having inside him a mother with the patient inside her.   Eventually he developed a more positive attitude towards Klein’s child patient, to Klein herself, and to his sister, though with considerable guilt about the sexual play he had indulged in with his sister when they were children.    I found this material very interesting, and so, I believe, did Klein.   I think this was one of the times when she was so deeply intrigued by her patient’s material that she went beyond what was needed to explain her technical approach to her students and she got very much involved in the material for its own sake.

            Finally comes Lecture 6 which is concerned with the analysis of patients’ grievances.  Her view is that one cannot know to what extent a patient’s complaints are justified, and that, although the analyst should be fully sympathetic to the depth of the patient’s feelings, he should not take the further step of agreeing or disagreeing with the patient about the content of his grievances.   Further, the analyst should realise that the complaints also refer to the analyst himself.  Even a patient full of grievance, she says, unconsciously appreciates that the analyst keeps to the proper  analytic work. 

            In this last lecture Klein quotes Strachey on the way little bits of ‘cure’ occur when the patient can compare the analyst’s actual behaviour with the archaic imago the patient has projected on to him (Strachey, 1934).   Like Strachey, Klein thinks interpretations should address the ‘point of urgency’.

            Klein ends Lecture 6 with several points which she mentions again over the years in somewhat scattered notes on technique.   I quote from the last pages of Lecture 6:

                …No experience, past or present, can be considered by itself, that is, isolated, since it is always interwoven with the person’s phantasy life and his unconscious conflicts, and while he is in analysis, with the transference situation.   But then we need to be fully aware of the extreme variety and manifoldness of the transference situation, and of the circuitous ways the patient can use to disguise and to divert it.  . . .

                From what I have said just now I hope it has become clear that I do not mean that the analytic procedure is carried out by interpretations only,  nor that the analyst should interpret all the time.   For one thing, he must give the patient plenty of opportunity to express his thoughts and feelings, while at the same time he is gathering the material he is going to interpret.   In the normal course, he should not interrupt the patient but let him run on for a while . . .

                I have made much in this course of lectures on the analyst’s capacity to face the unconscious as it is, to pursue his work in the search for truth, and so on.   All this is closely linked up with the insight which it is so important to make clear in the patient, but which, first of all, must be operative to a sufficient extent in the analyst.  . . .  Speaking broadly of types of mental make-up, and not in the clinical sense, I may say that, from my observation, people of a depressive type seem to possess more of this insight than do others.’    (C52, 1554, Excerpts from Lecture 6, 690-93.)

            The lectures of C53 (C53, 1554, 695-832)  are substantially the same as those of C52 although there is one important addition.   Klein makes a strong statement to the effect that Freud’s closest followers have not properly used the technical implications of his new ideas of the 1920s about the death instinct (Freud, 1920, 1924), the superego (Freud, 1923) and anxiety (1926).   She criticises Ferenczi and Rank for their book (The Development of Psycho-Analysis,  1924) which, she says, stresses the old principle of catharsis;  she criticises Alexander for his belief that the analyst should try to convert the superego to ego  (D53, 1554, 696-713).   Elsewhere in the Technique Notes she criticises Hartmann, Loewenstein and the Krises for not using Freud’s concept of the death instinct and destructiveness (D7, 1299, 270), Anna Freud for assuming that small children have only a very weak superego (D16, 1299, 751), and psychoanalysts generally for not really using Freud’s great discoveries in their own technique (D16, 1299, 741-3 and 747-62).

Klein’s Technique Notes

These notes (as distinct from ‘lectures’) are mainly to be found in files D3 to D17, although the C category has  some important files too, C47, C48, C67, C76, and most of all, C72.   I will refer to them collectively as the ‘Technique Notes’. Each file usually contains many entries.   Some entries are only a few lines long, some are many pages.   They cover many topics, and in no particular logical or temporal order, although there is a strain of consistency of clinical and theoretical thinking that runs throughout.

In these Notes Klein refers to herself as ‘K’ rather than using the personal pronoun, as if  taking an outsider’s view of herself.   Some entries sound as if she were giving herself instructions for a presentation or a paper.  Occasionally she puts question marks in the notes, as if asking a colleague for an opinion, though I think these questions were really addressed to herself.    

Certain themes crop up again and again.   Transference is by far the most frequently discussed topic.   It is transference, she says, that distinguishes psychoanalysis from other forms of therapy (D7. 1299, 883;  D10, 1299, 355).    An understanding of the transference is the way to the unconscious – almost the royal road, she seems to be saying.  The following quotation is one of the many ways she puts it.  

From the beginning, make it clear that the fuller understanding of transference and the understanding of the deeper layers of the unconscious are bound up with each other (D10, 1299, 356). 

            She says somewhere – unfortunately I forgot to note the reference – that she does not make transference interpretations insistently, but that she does mention the transference at least once in every session.

            She emphasises the way people unconsciously repeat the experiences and phantasies of infancy and childhood in their relationship  with the analyst, as in other current relationships.   She says:

In these cases [neurotics and psychotics] there is also a restricted number of specific situations which are repeated over and over again.   But also with normal individuals who have good all-round relations and whose lives do not seem to be dominated by the urge to repeat certain situations, one discovers in analysis that though they have a wider range they are also to some extent bound to patterns of figures, situations and behaviour derived from early childhood, which influences their relations to people and their experiences in life (D10, 1299, 354).

This theme of repetition crops up again and in considerable detail (D7, 1299, 279-88, 312,328).   In several entries she points out that transference feelings to the analyst may be displaced to some other figure (D5, 1299, 132; D7, 1299, 315-19, 321;  D11, 1299, 375-82), a point she also makes in her published paper ‘The origins of transference’ (1952b).    

            She reiterates her view that transference begins to operate in the first session – a point of disagreement with Anna Freud -  and gives many examples (D5, 1299, 132;  D7, 1299, 307;  D11, 1299, 370-73).  

            It is essential, Klein says, for the analyst to have a feeling for both the positive and the negative transference (D3, 1299, 104;  D7, 1299, 310-11;  D17, 1299, 843;  D26, 1182, 119-22).   She thinks both are always present, though one or other may be masked by the other, but the hidden one will be expressed through displacement to some other person or activity.    She makes a point of disagreeing with Freud over his statement in ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’ that he could not analyse the negative transference of a patient (actually Ferenczi) because the patient did not express it (Freud, 1937).    

            Klein has particularly firm views about the fact that the analyst should link the transference to past experiences and phantasies (D3, 1299, 95-7;  D7, 1299, 243-58, 279-81, 290;  D16, 1299, 721-9;  D17, 1299, 829-34). ,    As usual, she gives examples.

NOTES ON TECHNIQUE

                It cannot sufficiently be stress[ed] and conveyed to the patient that transference phenomena are linked with the past.   In recent years the importance of transference to be gathered from unconscious, as well as from conscious material has been recognised, but the old concept that transference means a repetition from the past seems to have correspondingly diminished.    One hears again and again the expression of the ‘here and now’ which, though not out of place, is often used to lay the whole emphasis on what the patient experiences towards the analyst and leaves out the links with the past.   Freud’s discovery that the feelings towards him were transference from the past – one of the fundamental discoveries in psychoanalysis – retains its full value.   Both for teaching purposes and in the analysis as such we must beware that analysing the relations of the patient to the analyst both from conscious and unconscious material does not serve its purpose if we are not able, step by step, to link it with the earliest emotions and relations.   One of the many mistakes which is made by enthusiastic beginners is to misuse the rule that the present transference situations should be linked with the past by trying to go straight on to the earliest breast relation.   To quote an instance:  After my querying why the candidate had not made a transference interpretation       in the full sense, somebody else suggested ‘One should, shouldn’t one, line [link?] that with the breast disappointment?’   Now the instance in question was that the patient was deeply disappointed by having been allotted to a younger analyst (actually a student), whereas she of course wanted to be analysed by the senior analyst by whom she had been first interviewed.   In her material the deep disappointment with the father had come out quite clearly.   She had loved and admired him, but later on discovered that he was not what she had thought him to be (he had taken to drink) and then she started relations with boy friends, which were quite unsatisfactory to her.    Later on, she found a more mature man, whom again she idealised and badly wanted to marry.    The candidate had made no connection whatever between the disappointment that he, as a junior person, had become her analyst, with the fact that the idealised father, after disappointing, had been replaced by unsatisfactory boy friends, and that the more mature man again appears as the wished for object.   The right interpretation would have been to link the disappointment about the choice of analyst with the disappointment  of not being able to have the ideal father, and that the choice of young boy friends was unsatisfactory because they could not replace the ideal father, whereas the more mature man seed [seemed?] to revive the old idealised relation to the father. 

This illustrates one of the steps by which the link with the past can be established.   (Give more instances of those gradual links).  We see here the Scylla of not linking at all with the past, and the Charybdis of linking it straight away with the breast relation (D17, 1299, 829-830).            

 Two pages later, Klein adds the following:

Instance [example] ‘C’ who in a situation I had actually felt the importance and value of her work had been under-rated and who wanted to fight for that recognition, recognised, after adequate interpretation, that a strong impetus to fight for something which she did not want any more, was due to not having behaved in the same way in childhood.   Then she had cut herself off internally and, as soon as she could, externally, from her family and she did not want to repeat that in the present situation, but in fact in the current situation she was not particularly interested to carry out that fight because the interest had actually shifted.    This is an instance not only of relief having been achieved by a deep-going interpretation but also for attitudes and actions being influenced by recognising how strongly the past situation influences the emotions in the present one (D17, 1299, 833).

            Although she does not say so, I believe that Klein thinks of ‘the past’ in two senses.   The first is the particular patient’s own unique and mainly conscious view of his past – his parents’ and siblings’ characters, the major events, including traumas.   The second is the ‘unconscious’ past, the typical pattern of infantile phantasies, emotions, object relations:  the brief primal relation ‘à deux’, as Klein puts it, between mother and baby with its love and hate constantly developed by projection and introjection;  the love for the primal object, the breast, and the hate for it;  the intense curiosity about the mother’s body and the belief that inside it are the father’s penises and the babies;  the attack on the mother’s body; the paranoid-schizoid position;  attempts at reparation;  love and hate for the mother as a whole object and for the father as a whole object;  the primal scene;  the combined object;  the Oedipus complex;  the depressive position;  the mixed feelings for siblings.   Borrowing a term from Max Weber, I think of this as Klein’s ‘ideal-typical’ model of infancy (Weber, 1947).   Klein constructed this ideal-typical model by inferences drawn from clinical explorations of dreams, transference experiences of adult and child patients, and the gradual  accumulation of  intensive clinical experiences and formulations about  them.    There are individual variations, but the overall pattern is, she assumes, ‘typical’.

            Klein gives an idea of her use of this model in her technique in a passage in D7 where she describes transference as ‘feelers towards early situations’.   What she means is that the transference situation, that is, the present reality of the relationship between analyst and patient, gives leads, links, to the ‘past’, meaning at first the consciously remembered feelings about early relationships, and then the deeper and more unconscious feelings which belong to her ideal-typical model.    This is how she puts it:

One of the rules of technique applicable both to child and adult analysis:  transference interpretations are in a sense feelers towards early situations.   [Klein’s underlining.]They must however be fully dealing with the actual situation and the feelings aroused in this situation, which implies the whole present reality into which so many of the transference feelings are deflected.

In taking the transference situation back to the past there are certain general situations in childhood to which we may tack them on and which we can be sure that they are always attached to.   Enumerate such general situations of jealousy, frustration, rivalry, diffidence, lack of confidence in comparison with adults[,] night situations, afraid or unwilling to go to bed, left alone by grown-ups, etc.   Even such tacking on must have some basis in the situation we are just exploring.   It can never just be guess-work.   Give instances for that.

To which situation are we going back from the transference situation?  Quite early ones or others from later stages of life?   That depends entirely on the material.   There are certain situations coming up in the transference which so closely and intensely point to quite early situations, such as the breast situation for instance, that one can make a suggestion in this direction.   Try to give instances for that.

There is however no rule to which stage of development the transference situation should take us back.   There is material in which the early situation becomes at once prominent and we might have to follow this up again and again until the picture of childhood and of later life with adults fills itself in.  

As little as we can make up our minds that we are analysing first genital feelings and only step by step go back to oral ones – as was supposed to be a general rule in analysis in former time and is still maintained by some analysts – as little can we decide about a definite order in which to go back to the past.  It is true we may find that with the child as well as with the adult we may get greater resistance to reconstructing intermediary steps let us say in the child’s life the present relation to the parents than even the early situations in which these important feelings were evolved.   It must come in in an analysis which wants to achieve fully its purpose.

Another important point here is the balance between interpretations referring to the transference and space and time allowed for the reconstruction and expression in the patient of past situations.

But we must not forget that there is also something like a flight from the transference situation into the past.   That is different between adults and children, because of course the child still has got his parents as such important figures in his present life.   But it is even true to some extent of the child.   Adults at certain times may be quite willing to feel again guilt, etc. in relation to the past, but shy from re-experiencing this in the transference situation.  [In handwriting] Explain why.   At other times the past, when it is revived in full strength, becomes so overwhelming that there is a constant flight or turning to the transference situation.   The measure lies with where the greatest emphasis on anxiety and guilt is at the moment, that that is what must guide us.

One instance:  Richard.   There were various points at which he did not mind aggression towards the early mother, when she was the Hitler mother, but could hardly bear any aggression towards me (D7, 1299, 279 [which is also 280] – 281).  

No date is given for this entry but I think it is probably in the 1950s.

Another central view of Klein concerning transference is what she calls ‘the total situation’, a term she uses not only in the Technique Notes but also in her published paper, ‘The origins  of transference’ (Klein, 1952b).    In an entry in D7 in the Technique Notes she describes it as follows:

            What is a total situation

Actually experienced and mixed with phantasy.  Never a relation to one person but to a whole set and then external and internal.   I have already referred to the fact that in analysing any experience we have to keep in mind that experiences from the beginning of life are coloured by the infant’s emotions and phantasies.   This is particularly true of the young child but persists in some measure throughout life.   Another essential aspect of a situation reappearing in the transference can be found in the fact that the relation to the analyst is not only the relation to one person but involves other people as well.   . . .  To return here to my summary of earliest development::  I have mentioned that the relation to the mother or her breast as the primary object soon entails relations to the father or other people in the infant’s surroundings, but to this correspond the infant’s phantasies of the mother containing the penis of the father and babies.   It may well be that the relation to the mother and her breast as independent from her being bound up with other objects is very short.   We have every reason to assume that such a phase, a relation fully and actually à deux does exist, and it is the basis, I think, of all object relations.   . . .  Accordingly, it is from a very early stage onwards that the relation to the mother is bound up with the relation to other objects, and similarly the relation to the father is bound up with that to the mother and again to other people, particularly brothers and sisters.   In addition processes of introjection lead from the beginning of post-natal life to objects established within the self which very soon include the father’s penis and the father and other objects, particularly brothers and sisters (or expected brothers and sisters).   All these objects enter into the individual’s experiences and object relations, and reappear in transference experiences.   The analyst, therefore, does not on the whole deal with a relation à deux for this applies only in so far as the analysis goes back to the very earliest stages of life.  . . .  To summarise:  the total situation which we try to explore in analysis, taking it back to its origin, includes the patient’s relation to his inner world, therefore between phantasy  and reality experiences, his object relations external and internal.

But Klein can hardly bear to leave out the clinical material.   She concludes this entry by saying:

???  Should I give here the instances X and Y as illustrations of what I have described, remarking that even that is not the total situation which I have described here, but can easily be related to its foundations (the King in the background, the rejection by the bus-conductor who will not stop (D7, 1299, excerpts from 295-298).                            

Although there are more entries on transference than on any other topic, there are many other entries as well.   Anxiety is a frequent topic, but it would be impossible to list all the references to it.    Klein’s attitude to anxiety is such a fundamental part of her approach that she says something about it on nearly every page.   Her goal is to find the most urgent point of anxiety and to help the patient by interpretation to make it explicit, which at first often increases the anxiety, but eventually leads to its resolution.   She describes the character an interpretation should have if it is to deal with anxiety effectively:  it should be a transference interpretation, specific, timely, and connected with the layer of the mind which has come into play at the moment (D3, 1299, 63).   This is a point to which she was alerted in her earliest work with children and she adhered to it right to the end.   Another basic attitude towards anxiety that she frequently repeats is that anxiety and the defences against it should be interpreted together (D9, 1299, 358ff;  D14, 1299, 461-2).   She also describes her interest in patients who show very little sign of anxiety (D15, 1299, 640-42).   

            Contrary to popular opinion, and in spite of her reputation for ‘deep interpretations’, Klein did not advocate sudden jumps from the surface to the depths.   Instead she advocates ‘balance’:  balance between interpretation and listening (D3, 1299, 30-35, 59, 64, 65, 99);  between ego and id (D3, 1299, 99;  D17, 1299, 844);  between rigour and flexibility (D15, 1299, 647-9);  between the transference situation, the remembered past and the unconscious past;  between waiting on the one hand and relieving anxiety as soon as possible on the other (D7, 1299, 63).     ‘There is so much besides interpretation which the analyst does’, she says (D7, 1299, 285), and she has a long entry on the ‘inadequacy of short symbolic interpretations’ (D14 (1299, 465-75).[4]  The entries on balance are very close to what Klein says about the ‘analytic attitude’ in her first technique lecture, and again in the Technique Notes.   (See D5, 1299, 115-119, 149;   D7, 1299, 324, 326-7).

            Klein’s views on countertransference are very different from the current view initiated by Paula Heimann and others, that countertransference can be a valuable source of information about the patient (Heimann, 1950).   Klein’s view on the topic is close to Freud’s.   She thought of countertransference as an undesirable emotional response to the patient, a response in which the analyst was too much involved, too overwhelmed by the patient, or too antagonistic to him.   The analyst’s stability, she thought, should protect him from countertransference. 

            In 1958 a small group of youngish analysts held a tape-recorded meeting with Klein in which, at her request, they gave her a list of questions on technique which she answered.   The file that records this long discussion almost verbatim is called C72, 1531, 695-721.   My name for it is ‘Discussion on Technique Questions with Young Colleagues’.    There is also an edited version of this discussion in D17, 1299, 862-884.    The discussion was amiable but became quite heated on the topic of countertransference.   Klein was first asked to comment on whether countertransference  would be of value in understanding silent patients.   She replied at length.

Yes, well, if I start with that then I have altogether to say [a] little more about countertransference which has seen extremes of fashion in recent years.  And at one occasion I have been called counter-countertransference.  Now, it isn’t so. You know, of course that the patient is bound to stir certain feelings in the analyst and that this varies according to the patient’s attitude, according to the patient, though there are of course feelings at work in the analyst which he has to become aware of.   I have never found that the countertransference has helped me to understand my patient better.   If I may put it like this, I have found that it helped me to understand myself better.   (C72, 1531, 706)

. . .  At the moment when one feels that anxiety is disturbing one, I think probably it is again a matter of experience, one would really on the spot come to the conclusion what went on in oneself.   Therefore I cannot really find a genuine account that countertransference, though unavoidable, is to be a guide towards understanding the patient, because I cannot see the logic of that;  because it obviously has to do with the state of mind of the analyst, whether he is less or more liable to be put out, to be annoyed, to be disappointed, to get anxious, to dislike somebody strongly, or to like somebody strongly.   I mean it has so much to do with the analyst that I really feel that my own experience – and that goes back a very long time – that I had felt that – is rather to find out within myself when I made the mistake.   I always think it was because I had not enough got hold of myself, I would say.  I’m not saying that I didn’t make mistakes, of course I did make mistakes.   But I was very much inclined to study those mistakes and really to find out what led me to that mistake.    And then I really found it was a difficulty [in] myself.   (C72, 1531, 707)

Klein continues for quite a time in this vein and then says,

What are the uses of countertransference in analysis?  Where countertransference is unavoidable, it should be controlled, studied and used by the analyst for his own benefit, I would say, and not for the benefit of the patient, I don’t believe in it.  Any other questions about that?  

One of participants asks Klein:

How closely akin are countertransference and the empathy you were earlier mentioning as being a sine qua non of a good analyst?   

She replies:    There is a great deal in what you are saying now,  because to be able really to accept that now I see very mean traits in the patient, that he is really out to get everything out of him [I think she means ‘me’] what he can, that his attitude is really one in which he gets out of [people] what he can, then turns away, and even perhaps maligns them.   We get such characters to be treated as patients and what Dr L has just said has a great deal to do with that, and that is empathy with the patient.   . . . If we see such character traits just worked out against ourselves and instead of feeling, ‘Now, I can’t bear this patient and that proves that he is that and that and that – Now, instead of that, if I really feel, ‘Well, I want to study him, if he is so greedy, if he is so envious, that is part of his psychology, that is why he came to me which is what I want to understand.’   There is there another element, not only empathy, and that is the wish to know [my emphasis].  Now, the wish to know, I think, is a very important thing in being an analyst, the wish to explore the mind whatever the mind is like.   . . .  Shall I get very annoyed [at the patient’s envy, greed, etc] or shall I then think, ‘Why has he got that attitude?’   (C72, 1531, 708-9)

Neither Klein nor her six colleagues could leave the topic alone.  They went on arguing in the interval (apparently a long one, probably lunch) this time about a psychotic patient Klein had briefly treated when she was in Berlin.   She had been quite frightened.   One of the young analysts suggested that perhaps the patient was frightened and that he wanted to make Klein as frightened as he was, and hoped she would deal with it better than he had.   I thought this was rather a good suggestion, but Klein did not agree with it at all.    The editor of the discussion sums up what Klein said as follows:

I don’t really believe that it was because he put me in an anxious position that I could understand him better.   I feel that he put me in an anxious position because he was so tall, because I noticed there was something entirely different to any case I had dealt with before, and that this was a fact that I realised might lead to danger.   But that did not help me to understand him better, what helped me was that I remembered for instance how persecuted he was by his uncle and how terrified.. I interpreted to him that he was afraid I would put him back in the asylum  . . . Now it was not really because I felt he could be dangerous that I gave that interpretation, it was because I understood something about his psychology  (D17, 1299, 876).

Finally Klein ended the discussion by saying,

I think I have answered it [their question about countertransference].    Whether I answered it satisfactorily or not is quite another matter, and I am afraid I left  some of you with the feeling that I didn’t make myself  clear and that you don’t agree with me.  But that doesn’t matter.   I have given you at least my point of view as well as I could.

But even then they couldn’t stay off the topic for long.   They had a discussion about ‘linking’ –  Bion had read his paper ‘Attacks on linking’ to the Society in 1957.   But Klein and her Young Colleagues  did not stay on the topic of linking for long;  they soon found themselves going over the countertransference question once more.   It remained unresolved.  

            One can but sympathise with both parties in this discussion.   The young analysts were espousing the wider view of countertransference that has become generally accepted in modern Kleinian thinking.   But Klein was ‘right’ too;  she did not want analysts to be carried away by their transference to the patient and to regard this aspect of their own character as valid data about the patient.  

As one might expect from her views on countertransference, Klein does not use the concept of projective identification in exactly the way it is generally used by ‘post-Kleinian’ analysts today.   Even though she is usually thought to have ‘invented’ the concept in her paper ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (Klein, 1946 and 1952a), she makes comparatively little use of it in her published work.   Her main published paper on it is ‘On identification’, and that is an analysis of a novel not a patient (Klein, 1955b).   The novel concerns the projection of the whole of the central character’s self into someone else’s identity, which, clinically speaking, is much less frequent than projection of part of oneself or of  an internal object into another object.    

In the clinical part of the Archive, however, we see Klein making far more use of the concept of projective identification than she does in her published work.    On this topic Klein’s unpublished notes add a great deal to her published work.  The two last clinical files, B88 and B89 dating from the 1940s and the 1950s have many examples of her using the idea of projective identification.   Some of these notes she evidently used in teaching.   Some I think she recorded just for her own satisfaction because they were so interesting.   She usually uses the term projective identification in association with the patient having an unconscious phantasy of splitting off a part of himself  and attributing it to an object, often the analyst, thus leading to further phantasies and fears about the fate of the object, of the part of the self projected into the object, and of the self denuded by the projection.   One senses that Klein felt she had discovered something really important, something that opened up new and exciting ways of looking at material. 

In the Technique Notes there is also a 5-page entry about projective identification (D17, 1299, 800-806).    Klein says this is ‘to be used in a paper on projective identification’.   In it she says that projection takes place in two steps.   In the first, projection means attributing something of oneself to the object.   In the second step, which she says is ‘deeper’, there is a feeling of having done so, and this is projective identification.    This is not a distinction that has been adopted by Klein’s colleagues, and it does not seem to me that she herself makes much use of it in the clinical material she describes in the B88 and B89 clinical files of the Archive.   Once again she states that the analyst should not be influenced in his work by the patient’s projections, just as she had in the Discussion of Technique Questions with Young Colleagues (C72, D17), for she ends her brief notes on projective identification by saying,

… anxiety [is] stirred up by the patient projecting himself into the analyst, a process which is quite unavoidable in the analysis.   But again, if the analyst possesses the strength of ego and the other qualities to which I referred earlier, the anxiety of the patient projecting himself into him will not disturb him, and he can then analyse the projection of the patient’ (D17, 1299, 806).   

Klein does, however, describe in these brief notes and also in the Discussion of Technique Questions with Young Colleagues (C72, D17) how the analyst may project himself into the patient in order to understand him.   She stresses, however, that the projection must not be ‘too strong, too intense, too lasting’, for if it is, the analyst will lose his objectivity (D17, 1299, 862-884;   C72, 1531, 695-824). 

Many other topics of interest are mentioned in the Technique Notes:  her idea of the differences between her approach and that of Anna Freud;  ‘deep’ interpretation;  reassurance;  resistance;   the importance of not getting drawn into patients’ complaints and grievances;  envy;  an intriguing series of entries under the heading ‘On making use of apparently not very significant material’;  ‘When to ask for a dream’;  dissociation;  the manic position;  memories in feelings – a particularly poignant entry;  the negative therapeutic reaction;  ‘on the interpretation of very frightening material’;  internal objects;  aggression.    

A final comment about the last item, aggression.  Feelings of aggression are mentioned frequently throughout the  Notes, as are feelings of love.   But Klein mentions her attitude about the interpretation of aggression only once, in the Discussion of Technique Questions with Young Colleagues.    She says,

‘. . . there was a time when I felt very badly because my work on bringing out the problem of aggression [led to the result] that there was nothing but aggression.  [I] was quite despairing.  Whatever I heard in seminars, in the Society, it all was aggression, aggression, aggression.  . . .   the point is that aggression can only be tolerated [when it is] modified, mitigated, if we are able to bring out the capacity for love (C72, 1531, 819).  

We know from James Gammill (1989) that she felt the same way about some of her students’ indiscriminate use of her concept of envy.   I wonder what she would make of the fact that her post-Kleinian successors, forty-five years later, are accused of much the same sort of thing.     Would she take us to task?   Or would she think these are stereotypes used for other than clinical purposes?  

Two sessions with patients, a woman in 1942, a man in 1947.

I want to end this account of Klein’s thoughts on technique as revealed in the Wellcome Klein Archive by giving two brief excerpts of her at work.    The first dates from 1942 when she and indeed the whole Society were still in the throes of the War and the Controversial Discussions.   The second dates from 1947, War and Controversial Discussions now over,  Klein beginning to have a group of young colleagues interested in her ideas.   She herself was confidently working with her ideas of the ideal-typical infant, splitting, and projective identification.  

A woman in 1942.

Instance.  A woman patient has been to see Macbeth.  She is struck by the way in wh. she experiences this play.   She finds that she had very seldom felt so strongly identified with the hero and also experienced her feelings of guilt in this identification.   There are a few other things she noticed.  One, in leaving the theatre, she suddenly felt quite close to the people who were going out, as if she was somehow linked up with them, had come closer to other people.   There are many associations relating to her present and past life in connection with her incapacity to overcome her hatred and to forgive things wh. have been done to her in the past.   She realises that she never forgave anything;  but what had become clear now to her is that her hatred was really murderous.   In the same hour and even preceding these associations about Macbeth, she spoke with great friendliness about another woman whom she thinks very kind and friendly, doing genuinely kind things for other people, and recently she had also shown great appreciation of another woman for similar reasons.  Following on her associations about Macbeth, she says that it is striking that at the same time when she can definitely feel great changes in herself and progress in the analysis, she should also have such great doubts about K. and her work, wondering sometimes if K. really did not do harm, as people suggest K might actually [be] driving people mad.  It suddenly occurs to her that K. might really be like Lady Macbeth, and that though Macbeth was definitely a psychotic type, he might have remained all right and nothing of this disaster happened if she had not prompted him and made him more mad. 

                K. takes up this analogy, and suggests that according to this the patient and K. in her mind are married, and she the patient represents the man;  K. reminds her of material about homosexual desires to K.   She [K] points out that not only are we then in a love relation, but we are allied against the father, represented here by the King.   If this is so, the situation was to her particularly emotionally loaded because it showed her the fulfilment of her homosexual desires in connection with K., but realised as a wish situation in wh. she allied herself with K. against somebody who would now stand for K’s husband, or some man closely connected with K. – in the past an alliance with her mother against her father, whom she wanted to kill.

                The patient is deeply impressed by this interp. and said she had never considered it from this aspect, and now recognises that the depth of her guilt is related to this particular situation wh. in a way is new to her and the result of recent work about her homosexuality.  She associates something, and while she tells it says it must be a confirmation.   On the escalator she saw a man who was sick.