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Psychoanalysis: Then and Now
Elizabeth Spillius and Edna O’Shaughnessy

Edna O’Shaughnessy and Elizabeth Spillius are both psychoanalysts who have studied, developed and extended the theoretical and clinical work of Melanie Klein. In recognition of their long and substantial contribution to psychoanalysis and the high professional esteem and affection in which they are held by the British Psychoanalytical Society they were awarded Honorary Membership of the Society. On this moving occasion in January 2006, they were both asked to give a short talk on ‘Psychoanalysis: Then and Now’.

A supposedly 10 minute address on 18th January 2006
Elizabeth Spillius

I would like to join Eglé, Red and Anne-Marie in thanking the British Society for all that you have given us over many years. It was not always so simple, however: there were many times when I asked myself, ‘Whatever am I doing here? I’m an anthropologist!’ However, two or three years ago I discovered that I really thought the two disciplines had more in common than I’d thought, so that even that wrinkle of discontent was smoothed out.

I will try to address the theme that David Bell and the Scientific Committee have suggested – ‘Now’ and ‘Then’. My ‘Now’ has been especially occupied with interest in psychoanalytic technique, and I’d like to thank Bernie Barnett and the Curriculum Committee for getting me started on this particular venture by suggesting that I teach a course on it, which I’ve greatly enjoyed. But it soon linked up with another current interest which is more occupied with ‘Then’, namely, the explorations I’ve been doing in the Melanie Klein Archive into Klein’s technique, and I thought that tonight I’d briefly try to bring a bit of Klein’s ‘Then’ into our ‘Now’.

Rather to my surprise, Klein’s technique as shown in her unpublished lectures and in her voluminous clinical notes was much more like Freud’s than like contemporary Kleinian technique or like modern technique in general. Like Freud, Klein stresses the importance of the transference, but, also like Freud, she does not seem to make it the absolute cornerstone of her technique in the way we usually do now. Further, she was much more preoccupied, especially in her earlier work, with the verbal content of sessions than with the emotional atmosphere. I think it is a hallmark of modern technique, as Anne Marie has said, that we start with the tone, the emotional atmosphere of the session, and then we relate the content, the words, to that atmosphere. I think Klein must also have used the emotional atmosphere, but she certainly didn’t explicitly focus on it, especially in the early sessions I shall describe. I want to show how her technique seems to have changed as time went on, so that by 1948 the emotional atmosphere and the transference had become more central. Sometimes, even in the early days of her work, the emotional atmosphere took over. I’ll give an example.

Klein’s work with ‘B’ in 1936/7

There are nearly 500 pages of notes of sessions with B, starting in 1936 and 1937, with additional notes in 1940, 1943 and 1948. Then, like all other clinical notes in the Archive, the records of his sessions in the Archive abruptly stop; Klein doesn’t say why. This patient appears in Klein’s 1940 paper ‘Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states’ in which she describes her sessions with him just after his mother’s death in 1936/7. She describes him as a man in his early 40s ‘with strong paranoid and depressive traits’. The first session I’ll describe came some time after his mother’s funeral.

We don’t know much about B. He worked in the City, but he also seems to have lived in what sounds like a rather large house in the country, and his sessions are full of material about plants and wildlife. One of the rather touching aspects of Klein’s character was that she was endlessly curious, and so, although she was very much a city person, she became almost as involved as B himself in the habits of rats, foxes, badgers, ferrets, rabbits, hares, blackbirds, owls, horses, bulls, cows, dogs, foxgloves.

Klein says B began the session ‘very angry and again despairing , very much in connection with his wife who can’t be improved, etc’. In the preceding session B had had two dreams, and Klein went back to one of these dreams and discussed it again at some length. She asked B ‘..how could the dog kill the rat in the lavatory?’ [in the dream] and B says, ‘It just shows that his association is nonsense’. The notes continue: ‘K interprets that it is quite sensible if connected with the attacks on the behind of the human body, which played such a part in recent material. The dog, his own tearing part of his personality, attacking the behind of the woman, of his mother, to kill there the father’s penis, represented through faeces. The larger room [in the dream] is the deeper inside of the body, junk, dirt and many people, the objects and dangerous faeces it is full of, the place where through his and his wife’s fault, actually through his and his mother’s fault, the good objects, formerly horses, now things, are destroyed. Here again it is rats and mice,. bad faeces, and father’s penis, the many people, the foreign bodies he was complaining about some time ago, when he referred to his sudden feeling that he is not a unity, which are at work. K adds that this material was expressing itself in the hate against the Church fathers.’ (File B66. 264)

When I read this I wondered what I would have felt if either of my two analysts had spoken to me at length like that about all those objects. Klein reports what B said as follows:

‘B says that he had thought about a quarter of an hour ago something which may be unimportant, but he feels he should say it. While I was interpreting he thought of the two dreams – and even before I had started to give the detailed interpretation about the rat dream – as an outside and an inside dream. He agrees that this is an unusual way of putting it. He agrees that he should have thought an out-of-doors dream and an indoor dream, and that this way of putting it seemed to confirm my interpretation. K had pointed out that the woman – mother – was pleasant and loved, and things turned awful as soon as her inside came into question in connection with the intercourse. This part of the discussion with B came later because actually, when he told the thought about outside and inside dream, he suddenly said, ‘One of these days I shall kill you’, in quite a special voice. K asks how. He says, ‘With the fist I shall bash your brains in’. K asks for his phantasies about it, and B replies with a rather grim laughter, ‘I shall tell them to you when I have done it. I shall ask you to analyse them when you are dead’. Describes that he sees K as a corpse with a bashed-in head, and he asking K to analyse him. K interprets that he might often have felt her sitting there as a corpse, whom he had destroyed through poisonous words, associations, etc., but B says very decidedly, that [it] was different now, that was with the fist. Leaves K without looking at her at all’. In her notes K adds that his faeces are being analysed, but he thinks the probability of an ulcer is ‘very little’. (B66: 265-266)

I think K was probably quite upset by B’s threat and his anger. In the next session he said it was very painful to him that he could get so carried away by his hate, ‘putting this quite generally’, Klein continues in her notes, ‘and in no relation with K or her feelings about it, or his anxiety of having hurt or frightened her, which, judging from former occasions when he had lost his temper with her, he had felt guilty about, so it is obvious that he should feel some guilt or something after saying such an unusual thing. He says that it was because of K’s sermon, though actually, as K points out to him, it didn’t happen on this occasion, but after his mentioning, or rather recognizing, outside and inside, and K suggests that this wish and actual strong impulse to kill her, was in the transference, to the father, because he was representing the destructive rats inside his mother’s body and his own. Going over the material again, explains that the actual Oedipus situation (not using this word) love to mother, including strong death impulses against father, was unbearable, and had resulted in the relation to his mother which he had called on the razor edge between love and hate. Also that the bashing in of K’s head was partly an attack on K’s body to get hold of the rats, and that I should then actually go on analysing him’.(B66: 266-268)

Klein, I thought, was nothing if not persistent. But she didn’t take up the immediate emotional event of the session, B’s anger at her ‘sermon’; she says she represented the father and it was the father B wished to kill.

Klein’s last recorded session with B, in 1948

I will move now to a session in 1948, the last recorded one of her work with B. B himself is in a different mood, and Klein is working rather differently. She pays more attention to the emotional situation of the session, partly the situation between B and herself, but also she pays close attention to how he is feeling in himself.

‘B reports a very pleasant dream he had had. Throughout the dream he had a very pleasant feeling and, unusual for him, that nothing to the contrary entered’.

‘He was in Cornwall and he found in a river a little crystal bottle, very nicely made, which had the initials of both his father and mother in gold on it. He knew that it must have been there for many years and was surprised how well it had kept. To this place in Cornwall he associates pleasant childhood memories, particularly the fact that they could eat seaweed “picking it up as they went along”. The fact that they were allowed this unconventional food ad libitum, stands out against the other aspects of [his] upbringing.’        

‘The first remark of the patient before he told me the dream, had been an appreciation of analysis (which is very rare with him). K suggests that the unconventional food is the analysis. He had been very careful not to let people know he is in analysis and the analysis had shown that he was concerned about his parents - [they] might not have agreed to his being analysed. Now this unconventional food is appreciated and brings up the unconventional food allowed by mother - in the first place the breast feeding in which no such rules as later on would enter ..

‘B says that he felt that the bottle with the mixed initials of both parents was as if they had, after all, been happily united’.

‘Thought which has been very repressed in B - he always felt the unhappiness of the parents, particularly also their sexual unhappiness’.

‘K: depths of rivers and sea had so often in his analysis stood for the inside of the body, his as well as mother’s, also for the analysis which finds things in the depths. He had now discovered that through analysis, the unconventional food. that there is an aspect of the parents, sexually, which is good and also that they are united and preserved in his own mind, in his own inside, which is a way of keeping them alive. The river here standing for his unconscious as well as for his inside. This implies a return to a happy earliest relation to mother – a good feeding situation revived in relation to K and to the analysis’.

‘B: He brought a jar of goat milk to town and when coming into my house thought that he would like to offer it to me and he adds, “There seems to be milk all around”’

‘K: That this milk is the return for the food received in analysis and for the early food which he would like to return to mother’.
 

‘He remarks that he is rather surprised that there should have been nothing evil in this dream and can hardly believe that it could all have felt to be so good. In the same hour B has all sorts of associations regarding family life, relation to children, relation to wife – all of a confident nature. His worry about his wife’s health is much lessened. He also expresses his belief in the analysis quite strongly’.

‘K suggests that this change in mood and the complete contrast between the dream with the bottle and the [earlier] blackbird dream are inter-connected. Some relief about his guilt relating to the sexual life of parents and their [word is missing here] has led to a greater conviction that there is an aspect of the parents early married life which is good and which he can preserve inside him self. The little bottle of course represents the breast as well as the two genitals of the parents united in a happy way.

‘B agrees but says the bottle was a very fragile object after all and could be broken, which indicates anxiety about his being able to preserve these precious objects against his own attacks.’ (B68: 464-468)
 

And that is the last note in the Archive about B and his analysis.

I think we can see not only that B is in a different frame of mind but that Klein’s technique has changed too. She still doesn’t treat the transference as being utterly central in the way many analysts would today, but the feeling between the two of them permeates the session and is spoken about much more than it was 12 years before, and the focus on verbal content and the translation of it into concrete bodily contents is much reduced. And, as a friend remarked after the meeting, it is clear that she was fond of B.

I find it moving that Klein kept such detailed records of her work, records that allow us to follow the development of her technique and to relate it to her ideas and her conceptualisations both about technique and about the nature of the mind. They allow us to know more about her character too, with its strange combination of innocence and sophisticated thinking.

I hope too that I have managed to convey just a little of the fascination of anthropological research in an Archive, even to those of you who are firmly focused on the ‘here and now’.