The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young
Mental Space
by Robert M. Young
| Contents | Preface | Acknowledgements |
Chapter:1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Bibliography
Chapter Five
PRIMITIVE SPACE: PSYCHOTIC ANXIETIES
In this and the two chapters which follow I shall examine the forces at work in the
inner world which militate against the existence, maintenance and creative use of
congenial mental space. Why do we feel hemmed in, haunted, unable to think and to pursue
our better impulses to fruitful results? What makes life so unsafe from the inside, as
well as from the outside? They are topics it is hard to think about, partly because they
are so primitive and pre-verbal, partly because they are so distressing. I believe that
the fact that they have been rendered more explicitly by Kleinians than by other
psychoanalytic writers is due in no small measure to the fact that for the most part
Kleinians eschew the physicalist and scientistic language of neo-Freudian metapsychology
and employ terms which are more resonant with experience as people suffer it. The same can
be said of many writers in the Independent tradition, but they are less prone than
Kleinians to explore the most primitive dimensions of human nature. It has been said that Klein wrote more about the positive, loving and hopeful side of
human nature in her later writings than in her earlier ones. I grant this, but it is her
stress on the primitive, distressed and destructive side of humanity which was so
startling for her contemporaries and which strikes me as her most original contribution. I
also believe that this side of her thinking is closest to Freud's mature thinking, when he
stressed the role of Thanatos and reflected on society and civilization. My comment to
those who think I may unduly stress her more sombre thoughts is that plenty of people have
offered optimistic - even palliative - renderings of psychoanalysis. I am very struck by
the bleak side of human nature on the hoof, in particular, the rampant inhumanities which
have followed the nominal ending of the Cold War. Klein and those who have pursued her
steady gaze into human distress seem to me to give the best guidance on what we are up
against. If we do not take the full measure of the consequences of human anxieties and
defences, we will not be sufficiently stoical or prepared for the long haul of staying
with humanity in the determined pursuit of better interpersonal and social relations. One of the illuminating distinctions that Kleinian psychoanalysis has given us is that
between knowing and knowing about. In psychoanalysis, knowing about something often
operates as a defence against knowing it in a deeper, emotional sense. I well recall my
first, greatly-valued supervisor, Bob Hinshelwood, saying once in an ironic way that if
you don't understand what the patient is on about in the session, you make a clever
interpretation, and if you aren't in touch with the patient at all, you can always write a
paper. It is fairly easy to know about psychotic anxieties and projective mechanisms, but
knowing them in an inward and sustained way is very difficult, indeed. Of course, what one comes to know one knew all along, as I shall illustrate, and
knowing about it can be as much a barrier as a catalyst to being able to think about that tacit knowledge. At the unconscious level we all know about the normality and
ubiquity of psychotic anxieties, but it is quite another matter to be able to reflect upon
some of the consequences of the omnipresence of these primitive unconscious phantasies for
life, culture, politics and the theory of knowledge. Having completed a reconsideration of the literature on psychotic anxieties, I will
address two tasks. The first is to try to describe and give some emotional meaning to the
kinds of phantasies against which we - as individuals and in groups and institutions -
spend so much of our energy defending ourselves. Second, I want to gather together and
draw attention to the implications of Kleinian ideas for how we think of human nature, by
which I mean, with respect to individuals and all other levels of culture and
civilization. It turns out that defence against psychotic anxieties is offered by
Kleinians as a deeper explanation than the incest taboo for the basis of that thin and all
too easily breached veneer that constitutes civility and stands between what passes for
the social order, on the one hand, and chaos (or the fear of it), on the other. This turns
out to be a mixed blessing, since our defences against psychotic anxieties act as a
powerful brake on institutional and social change toward less rigid and more generous
relations between individuals and groups. They diminish mental space; put differently,
they fill one with disabling feelings and make it hard to the point of impossibility to
think. As we saw in chapter two, Freud's theory of civilization drew attention to the taboo
against violent sexual competitiveness and rapaciousness as the corner-stone of
civilization. The polymorphously perversely sexual patriarch was said to have been killed
by the primal horde, thus establishing the incest taboo, the basis for all other taboos
and the system of custom and legality that gave birth to civilization and culture. Freud
constantly emphasised that man is a wolf to other men, that the veneer of civilization is
thin and under threat from moment to moment and that all of life is a constant struggle
conducted in the fraught space between erotic and destructive instincts. For Freud the
basic conflicts occurred at this level of the psyche. As Meltzer describes it, Freud's
world is 'a world of higher animals', 'creatures seeking surcease from the constant
bombardment of stimuli from inside and out'. He contrasts Klein's world as 'one of holy
babes in holy families plagued by the devils of split off death instinct' (Meltzer, 1978,
part III, pp. 115-16). One is a world of animals as scientific objects reacting to
stimuli, the other a world of human subjects haunted by demons. One emphasises the
relations with the environment, the other relations with the inner world of phantasy. This is not merely a difference of emphasis. Matters which may appear on the surface to
be about common sense or adult relationships or genital sexuality may also turn out to be
about much more primitive psychological levels of distress. Similarly, the difference
between the worlds of Freud and Klein may be described as one of level of
explanation and of causality. Bion put the point clearly in the conclusion to his essay,
'Group Dynamics - A Re-view', Bion says, 'Freud's view of the dynamics of the group seems
to me to require supplementing rather than correction' (Bion, 1961, p. 187). He accepts
Freud's claim that the family group is the basis for all groups but adds that 'I would go
further; I think that the central position in group dynamics is occupied by the more
primitive mechanisms that Melanie Klein has described as peculiar to the paranoid-schizoid
and depressive positions. In other words, I feel... that it is not simply a matter of the
incompleteness of the illumination provided by Freud's discovery of the family group as
the prototype of all groups, but the fact that this incompleteness leaves out the source
of the main emotional drives of the group' (p. 188). He then summarises the notions of
'work group' and the 'basic assumptions' that assail them - 'dependence', 'pairing',
'fight-flight' (which I characterise below, p. 134-5) - and suggests that these may have a
common link or may be different aspects of each other. 'Further investigation shows that
each basic assumption contains features that correspond so closely with extremely
primitive part objects that sooner or later psychotic anxiety, appertaining to these
primitive relationships, is released. These anxieties, and the mechanisms peculiar to
them, have already been displayed in psychoanalysis by Melanie Klein, and her descriptions
tally well with the emotional states' of the basic assumption group. Such groups have aims
'far different either from the overt task of the group or even from the tasks that would
appear to be appropriate to Freud's view of the group as based on the family group. But
approached from the angle of psychotic anxiety, associated with phantasies of primitive
part object relationships... the basic assumption phenomena appear far more to have the
characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety, and to be not so much at
variance with Freud's views as supplementary to them. In my view, it is necessary to work
through both the stresses that appertain to family patterns and the still more primitive
anxieties of part object relationships. In fact I consider the latter to contain the
ultimate sources of all group behaviour' (p. 189). In Bion's view, then, what matters in
individual and group behaviour is more primitive than the Freudian level of explanation.
The ultimate sources of our distress are psychotic anxieties, and much of what happens in
individuals and groups is a result of defences erected against psychotic anxieties,
so that we do not have to endure them consciously. I'll say something about the term 'psychotic' and then turn to the concept of phantasy
and the anxieties which primitive phantasies generate. To most of us 'psychotic' refers to
psychosis, a primary disturbance of relations with reality, and psychotic symptoms are an
attempt to restore the link with objects (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1983, p. 370). When I
was trained as a psychiatric aide in a state mental hospital in the 1950s, we were taught
a small number of things about psychosis, and they seemed adequate in those pre-Laing
(1960; Young, 1966a) and pre-Goffman (1961) times. Psychotics were 'out of contact with
reality' for much or all of the time. They heard and saw things that were not there -
hallucinations - and wildly distorted things that were - delusions. The notion of
'psychotic' was safely restricted to people designated as 'mad'. Their likely diagnoses
were schizophrenia (four varieties: catatonic, paranoid, hebephrenic, simple); true
paranoia; manic-depressive psychosis; psychotic depression; organic psychosis. The
categories of dementia praecox or schizophrenia and of manic-depressive psychosis have
been in existence for less than a century and are more recent than Freud and Breuer's Studies
on Hysteria. Emil Kraepelin coined the term 'dementia praecox' in 1896. What we now call psychosis has always had a special place in practically all cultures,
although that place has varied from divine, to diabolical, to providing special insight,
to links with witchcraft and enviable freedom from social (though not always physical)
restraints. Think of the 'Ship of Fools' and the depictions and expressions of the mad by
Bosch, Breughel, Goya and van Gogh, Magritte and Man Ray, as well as the manifestos of the
Surrealists and Dadaists. In their very different ways, they all celebrated illumination
coming from the most primitive levels of the unconscious. Like the critiques of the
categories of psychiatry written by Foucault (1967), Laing (1960) and Cooper (1972), these
artists pointed to madness as offering a basis for making critiques of the repressions,
sublimations and alienation of conventional society and put one in touch with something
truer and in some senses better (see also Gordon, 1990). These notions remain widespread.
In a BBC2 television film in a series on 'Madness', Jonathan Miller referred to ideas of
the mad as childlike, as direct beneficiaries of God and to the beatific association
between poverty and lunacy, while that morning's Observer (13 October 1991) alluded
to 'the sixties argument that the mad are truly sane'. I am not analysing or assessing
these claims, only noting their currency. I want to turn now to the mechanisms in question and their evolution from the asylum to
the nursery. Klein described schizoid mechanisms as occurring 'in the baby's development
in the first year of life characteristically... the infant suffered from states of mind
that were in all their essentials equivalent to the adult psychoses, taken as regressive
states in Freud's sense' (Meltzer, 1978, part III, p. 22). Klein says in the third
paragraph of her 'Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms' (1946), 'In early infancy anxieties
characteristic of psychosis arise which drive the ego to develop specific
defence-mechanisms. In this period the fixation-points for all psychotic disorders are to
be found. This has led some people to believe that I regard all infants as psychotic; but
I have already dealt sufficiently with this misunderstanding on other occasions' (Klein,
1946, p. 1). Meltzer comments that 'Although she denied that this was tantamount to saying
that babies are psychotic, it is difficult to see how this implication could be escaped'
(Meltzer, 1978, part III, p. 22). Kleinian thinking evolved in three stages. As in the above quotation, Klein saw
schizoid mechanisms and the paranoid-schizoid position as fixation points, respectively,
for schizophrenia and paranoid psychosis the depressive position as the fixation point for
manic-depressive psychosis. Then the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions became
developmental stages. Her terminology included 'psychotic phases, 'psychotic positions'
and then 'positions' (Klein, 1935, pp. 275n-276n, 279). Thirdly, in the work of Bion and
other post-Kleinians, these became economic principles and part of the moment-to-moment
vicissitudes of everyday life. The notations 'ps' and 'd' were connected with a
double-headed arrow - ps÷d - to indicate how easily and frequently our inner states
oscillate from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position and back again (Meltzer,
1978, part III, p. 22). In Bion's writings on schizophrenia an ambiguity remained as to
whether or not the psychotic part of the personality is ubiquitous or only present in
schizophrenics, but Meltzer concludes his exposition of Bion's schizophrenia papers by
referring to the existence of these phenomena in patients of every degree of disturbance,
even 'healthy' candidates in training to be therapists (p. 28). Going further, he and
colleagues have drawn on the inner world of autistic patients to illuminate the norm;
Frances Tustin (1986) has essayed on autistic phenomena in neurotic patients, while Sydney
Klein (1980) has described 'autistic cysts' in neurotic patients. I offer here John Steiner's brief characterisations of the two positions which have
come to be seen as the basic modes of feeling between which people oscillate: 'As a brief
summary: in the paranoid-schizoid position anxieties of a primitive nature threaten the
immature ego and lead to a mobilisation of primitive defences. Splitting, idealisation and
projective identification operate to create rudimentary structures made up of idealised
good objects kept far apart from persecuting bad ones. The individual's own impulses are
similarly split and he directs all his love towards the good object and all his hatred
against the bad one. As a consequence of the projection, the leading anxiety is paranoid,
and the preoccupation is with survival of the self. Thinking is concrete because of the
confusion between self and object which is one of the consequences of projective
identification (Segal, 1957). 'The depressive position represents an important developmental advance in which whole
objects begin to be recognised and ambivalent impulses become directed towards the primary
object. These changes result from an increased capacity to integrate experiences and lead
to a shift in primary concern from the survival of the self to a concern for the object
upon which the individual depends. Destructive impulses lead to feelings of loss and guilt
which can be more fully experienced and which consequently enable mourning to take place.
The consequences include a development of symbolic function and the emergence of
reparative capacities which become possible when thinking no longer has to remain
concrete' (Steiner, 1987, pp. 69-70; see also Steiner, 1993, pp. 26-34). So much for bringing 'psychotic' into the realm of the normal and neurotic. Turning now
to 'phantasy' I'll begin by pointing out that a full page of the index to Developments in Psychoanalysis (Klein et al., 1952) is devoted to this single
term, and the entry fills half a page in the historical account of The Freud-Klein
Controversies 1941-1945 (King and Steiner, 1991). The essays in Developments in
Psychoanalysis are versions of the papers which formed the Kleinian texts in that
controversy. Many things were at stake, but at the heart of it, in my opinion, was the
question of the primacy of the inner world, as opposed to the more interactive, adaptive
framework of ideas which came to be associated with ego psychology and, more recently,
so-called 'contemporary Freudianism'. Anna Freud rebuts the claim that she 'has an
inveterate prejudice in favour of the modes of external reality... and of conscious mental
processes' (King and Steiner, 1991, p. 328), but I think that the relative weights
assigned to inner and outer worlds provides a legitimate demarcation between Kleinian and
Freudian orientations. The contrast became even more marked between Klein and her
successors, on the one hand, and developments in America, on the other: the school of ego
psychology developed by Hartmann (1958), Kris (1950a), Lowenstein (1963; cf. Hartmann, Kris and Lowenstein, 1946) and the American school epitomised by the
systematising work of David Rapaport (1967). Ego psychology is probably the majority point
of view in Continental and American psychoanalysis (Tyson and Tyson, 1990), but it is in a
minority position in Britain, where it is associated with the Hampstead Child-Therapy
Clinic (now called The Anna Freud Centre) and the contemporary Freudian or 'B Group' at
the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, where its best-known exponents are Joseph Sandler (1987,
1989), Anne-Marie Sandler (1978) and Peter Fonagy. As a part of the issue over the primacy of the inner world, I believe that people were
genuinely shocked by what they thought was sheer craziness and nastiness of the child's
unconscious as described by Klein and her supporters. Indeed, there is a protest along
these lines by Michael Balint, who dryly comments in the discussion of Susan Isaacs'
fundamentally important paper (to which I shall turn next) that 'perhaps Mrs Klein is
laying undue emphasis on the role of hatred, frustration and aggression in the infant'
(King and Steiner, 1991, p. 347). Fairbairn, in contrast, seemed to feel (at least at that
time) that Kleinian accounts of phantasy were so successfully descriptive of the inner
world that he proposed dropping 'phantasy' in favour of 'inner reality' (p. 359). I begin with the elementary point that 'phantasy' refers to 'predominantly or
entirely unconscious phantasies', as distinct from the sort of conscious fantasies
or imaginings we associate with daydreams or idle imaginings (Isaacs, 1952, pp. 80-81).
Joan Riviere appeals to Freud's hypothesis that the psyche is always interpreting the
reality of its experiences - 'or rather, misinterpreting them - in a subjective
manner that increases its pleasure and preserves it from pain' (Riviere, 1952a, p. 41).
Freud calls this process 'hallucination; and it forms the foundation of what we mean by phantasy-life. The phantasy-life of the individual is thus the form in which the real internal and
external sensations and perceptions are interpreted and represented to himself in his mind
under the influence of the pleasure-pain principle'. Riviere adds that 'this primitive and
elementary function of his psyche - to misinterpret his perceptions for his own
satisfaction - still retains the upper hand in the minds of the great majority of even
civilised adults' (p. 41). I suggest - and this lies at the heart of my overall argument - that this point
about misinterpreting the reality of the psyche's experience as normal and basic and
hallucinatory is the essential point - the ur-fact - about human nature. It is also the
essential basis for the theory of knowledge and our hopes for better human relations in
couples, families, groups, institutions, communities and nations. It provides the
potential space within which we can re-evaluate, ruminate and reconsider our relations
with the world. It is the point of origin of mental space. This general function for phantasy is repeated in Susan Isaacs' definition. The
'"mental expression" of instinct is unconscious phantasy... There is no
impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy'
(Isaacs, 1952, p. 83). 'The first mental processes... are to be regarded as the earliest
beginnings of phantasies. In the mental development of the infant, however, phantasy soon
becomes also a means of defence against anxieties, a means of inhibiting and controlling
instinctual urges and an expression of reparative wishes as well... All impulses, all
feelings, all modes of defence are experienced in phantasies which give them mental life and show their direction and purpose' (ibid.). When we turn to the content of the phantasies a problem of communication arises: 'they
are apt to produce a strong impression of unreality and untruth' (Riviere, 1952, p. 20).
This is because when we write or speak about them we are clothing preverbal and very
primitive mental processes in the language of words in dictionaries. My way round this is
to share some images and experience from my own clinical and personal experience.
Phantasies are rendered by patients as black holes, nameless dread, part objects, offal,
shit, urine, dreams of wet cinders or barren desert mindscapes, pus, slime, feelings of
being overwhelmed, engulfed, disintegrated, in pieces, devoured, falling through empty
space, spiders, bugs, snakes. Language drawn from work with autistic patients includes
dread of falling apart, falling infinitely, spilling away, exploding away, threat of total
annihilation, unintegration (as distinct from the disintegration of schizophrenia),
experiencing a missing person as a hole (rather than 'missing' them as not present). When I cannot find a piece of paper or go to a room and cannot recall why, I don't just
think of age and preoccupation. The fabric of reality is momentarily rent asunder, and in
that moment I feel in imminent danger of dying, of disintegration, of unendurable panic.
When I was a boy there was a nearby grand house, set in large grounds in a gully, with
walls and a gate with a heavy chain and a wrought iron sign: 'DRIVERDALE'. I could
not go near it without intense anxiety. (It was a feat of my adolescence to drive my
motor-bike at high speed through the grounds.) The same intense terror was experienced
with respect to a green house we had to pass on the way to the swimming pool, and we
called the woman who lived there 'The Green Witch'. I believed in and feared the Bogeyman
and could not go to sleep unless the door of my wardrobe was shut. I was mortally afraid
of the Frankenstein monster and the Mummy (of 'The Mummy's Curse'), and until I went away
to university I could not go into the kitchen without first reaching round the door jamb
and turning on the fluorescent light, which took an age to go on. I was similarly wary of
the darkened back porch, while going into the back garden after dusk was simply out of the
question. My childhood and adolescence were filled with terrors, imaginings, fantasies and
some activities about which I would blush to tell - all tearing the fabric of civilised
society. Prominent among the terrors was the sheer horror of hearing the word 'Terrell',
the name of the nearby state mental hospital. I cannot recall a time when this word did
not conjure up an unpicturable hell, into which my depressed mother and I were in imminent
danger of being tossed as a result of my transgressions, in particular, my inability to
behave with sufficient respect and deference toward my father. A version of this terror
still overcomes me when I am in the grip of an argument and cannot let up. Behind these
conscious experiences, I now know, lay psychotic anxieties. I offer these reports as my version of what Klein calls 'a cave full of dangerous
monsters' (Klein, 1935, p. 272). My general point is that if you ask the question, 'What
is a psychotic anxiety when it's at home and not in the pages of an implausible and nearly
unfathomable text by Melanie Klein?', you'll be able to be less sceptical if you
interrogate the fringes of your own memories and distressing experiences and, of course,
dreams. Elizabeth Spillius points out that 'unconscious phantasies are somewhat more
accessible in early childhood; in adulthood the path to them is indirect, through dreams,
in imaginative constructions, sometimes in group behaviour, in symptoms, parapraxes, etc.,
though always in disguised form' (personal communication). I shall offer more illustrations anon, but for the present I want to assert that
psychotic anxieties are ubiquitous, underlie all thought, provide the rationale for all
culture and institutions and, in particular cases, help us to make sense of especially
galling ways of being. I have in mind Meltzer's idea of the claustrum, wherein dwell
ultra-ambitious and survivalist conformists who live in projective identification,
which he takes to mean that their dwelling place in the inner world is just inside the
rectum, thus confirming the colloquial description of such people as 'arseholes'. His
analysis shows that this degree of use of projective identification is a defence against
schizophrenic breakdown. This suggests that many of our chief executives and leaders live
perpetually on the verge of madness. No wonder that they absolutely must get their
way (Meltzer, 1991, 1992). Klein's views on these matters are based on Freud and Abraham's notions of oral libido
and fantasies of cannibalism (Gedo, 1986, p. 94). She refers to sadistic impulses against
the mother's breast and inside her body, wanting to scoop out, devour, cut to pieces,
poison and destroy by every means sadism suggests (Klein, 1935, p. 262). Once again, the
projective and introjective mechanisms of the first months and year give rise to anxiety
situations and defences against them, 'the content of which is comparable to that of the
psychoses in adults' (ibid.). Orality is everywhere, for example, in the 'gnawing of conscience' (p. 268). Riviere
says that 'such helplessness against destructive forces within constitutes the greatest
psychical danger-situation known to the human organism; and that this helplessness is the
deepest source of anxiety in human beings' (Riviere, 1952a, p. 43). It is the ultimate
source of all neurosis. At this early stage of development, sadism is at its height and is
followed by the discovery that loved objects are in a state of disintegration, in bits or
in dissolution, leading to despair, remorse and anxiety, which underlie numerous anxiety
situations. Klein concludes, 'Anxiety situations of this kind I have found to be at the
bottom not only of depression, but of all inhibitions of work' (Klein, 1935, p. 270). It should be recalled that these are pre-linguistic experiences developmentally, and
sub-linguistic in adults. As I have said, it is a characteristic of the world view of
Kleinians that the primitive is never transcended and that all experiences continue to be
mediated through the mother's body. Similarly, there is a persistence of primitive
phantasies of body parts and bodily functions, especially biting, eating, tearing,
spitting out, urine and urinating, faeces and defecating, mucus, genitals. Having said that, I shall offer an example of undiluted Klein. She is in the middle of
an exposition of the part which the paranoid, depressive and manic positions play in
normal development (p. 279) and offers two illustrative dreams, which I shall not quote.
(I should emphasise that I am drawing on a passage from the middle of an exposition and
interpretation which is six pages long.) I want to convey the flavour of the primitive
phantasies which I have been discussing. Here is part of the interpretation: 'The
urination in the dream led on to early aggressive phantasies of the patient towards his
parents, especially directed against their sexual intercourse. He had phantasied biting
them and eating them up, and among other attacks, urinating on and into his father's
penis, in order to skin and burn it and to make his father set his mother's inside on fire
in their intercourse (the torturing with hot oil). These phantasies extended to babies
inside his mother's body, which were to be killed (burnt). The kidney burnt alive stood
both for his father's penis - equated with faeces - and for the babies inside his mother's
body (the stove which he did not open). Castration of the father was expressed by the
associations about beheading. Appropriation of the father's penis was shown by the feeling
that his penis was so large and that he urinated both for himself and for his father
(phantasies of having his father's penis inside his own or joined on to his own had come
out a great deal in his analysis). The patient's urinating into the bowl meant also his
sexual intercourse with his mother (whereby the bowl and the mother in the dream
represented her both as a real and as an internalised figure). The impotent and castrated
father was made to look on at the patient's intercourse with his mother - the reverse of
the situation the patient had gone through in phantasy in his childhood. The wish to
humiliate his father is expressed by his feeling that he ought not to do so' (Klein, 1935,
p. 281). And so on for another half page. A similarly daunting example could be drawn from
Meltzer's account of the dream materials which can be attributed to unconscious phantasies
of anal masturbation (Meltzer, 1966, esp. pp. 104, 106-7). This is veritably hard to bear, hard to credit, hard to follow. Klein is operating -
well and truly - in the most primitive parts of the inner world, where dream symbolism
meets up with primitive bodily functions and body parts. Her way of describing these
phantasies is easy to caricature and becomes wooden when adopted in a parrot-like fashion
by inexperienced acolytes. In the subsequent history of Kleinian psychoanalysis, however,
her outlook on unconscious phantasy has continued to prevail. Elizabeth Spillius reports
that this is one of Klein's concepts which has been 'very little altered' by subsequent
Kleinians (Spillius, 1988, vol. 1, p. 2). However, many Kleinians (though not all, for example, Donald Meltzer) have altered
their language and have become more likely to make interpretations in terms of functions
rather than anatomical part objects. Edna O'Shaughnessy has suggested the notion of
'psychological part objects' as an analogy to bodily part objects. Spillius takes this up
and argues 'that we relate to psychological part objects... to the functions of the part
object rather than primarily to its physical structure. It is the capacities for seeing,
touching, tasting, hearing, smelling, remembering, feeling, judging, and thinking, active
as well as passive, that are attributed to and perceived in relation to part objects'.
Spillius concludes her remarks on this change in emphasis in technique by relating it to
Klein's concept of projective identification. The functions 'are frequently understood as
aspects of the self which are projected into part objects' (pp. 2-5; cf. vol. 2,
pp. 8-9). Klein was untroubled by being called an 'id psychologist' (Gedo, 1986, p. 91). She
unrepentantly conceived the analyst's task to be to confront the patient with the content
of the unconscious. She eschewed 'corrective emotional experience', did not encourage
regression and the reliving of infantile experiences (nor did she avoid them when they
occurred), or explicit educational or moral influences, and kept 'to the psycho-analytic
procedure only, which, to put it in a nutshell, consists in understanding the patient's
mind and in conveying to him what goes on in it' (Klein, 1955, p. 129). She felt that
confidently articulating interpretations of very primitive material in the face of
resistance diminishes the patient's anxiety and opens the door to the unconscious. Nor did
she shy away from such deep interpretations or transference interpretations from the
beginning of analytic work with a patient (Klein, 1975, vol. 2, pp. 22-24; Gedo, 1986, p.
92). Why is all this such an innovation? Riviere points out that anxiety was of great
significance to Freud, but that much of his rhetoric was scientific, especially
physiological. He did not concern himself with the psychological content of
phantasies. Indeed, he and many of his 'Freudian' followers have tended to use scientistic
analogies instead of conveying human distress in evocative language. By contrast,
'Anxiety, with the defences against it, has from the beginning been Mrs Klein's approach
to psycho-analytical problems. It was from this angle that she discovered the existence
and importance of aggressive elements in children's emotional life... and [it] enabled her
to bring much of the known phenomena of mental disorders into line with the basic
principles of analysis' (Riviere, 1952, pp. 8-9). This contrast between Freud and Klein takes us back to one of the major themes of my
argument - the issues raised in chapters one to three. I am referring to the need to break
away from describing the inner world in terms drawn from a metapsychology based on
analogies drawn from physics and biology. I am advocating, instead, the bold use of terms
drawn from the language of everyday life and the employment of any way of representing
primitive processes that comes to hand. This involves a move from the didactic and
objectivist language of natural science and the epistemologies which kow-tow to it and
toward evocative and phenomenological ways of attempting to convey the inner meaning of
experience. Mental space need not be reduced to the realm of extended substances; it can
be filled and populated by whatever helps us to keep feeling alive. Rather than defer to
the canons of Cartesian dualism, our criterion should be whether or not a given account
resonates with the dialectic of experience. Kleinians have consistently written in a language which eschews physicalist scientism,
albeit Klein did retain a notion of instinct, even though this was largely redundant as a
result of her object relations perspective. They went on to propose elements of a general
psychology, including the claim that there is 'an unconscious phantasy behind every
thought and every act' (Riviere, 1952, p.16). That is, the mental expression of primitive
processes 'is unconscious phantasy' (ibid.). It is not only a background
hum, as it were. Isaacs claims that 'Reality thinking cannot operate without concurrent
and supporting unconscious phantasies' (Isaacs, 1952, p. 109). And again: 'phantasies are
the primary content of unconscious mental processes' (pp. 82, 112). 'There is no impulse,
no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy' (p. 83).
'Phantasies have both psychic and bodily effects, e. g., in conversion symptoms, bodily
qualities, character and personality, neurotic symptoms, inhibitions and sublimations' (p.
112). They even determine the minutiae of body language (p. 100). The role of unconscious
phantasy extends from the first to the most abstract thought. The infant's first thought
of the existence of the external world comes from sadistic attacks on the mother's body
(Klein, 1935, p. 276; 1946 p. 5). 'Phantasies - becoming more elaborate and referring to a
wider variety of objects and situations - continue throughout development and accompany
all activities; they never stop playing a great part in mental life. The influence of
unconscious phantasy on art, on scientific work, and on the activities of everyday life
cannot be overrated' (Klein, 1959, p. 251; cf. p. 262). These anxieties are not only ubiquitous: they interact in complicated ways. As Riviere
points out, 'It is impossible to do any justice here to the complexity and variety of the
anxiety-situations and the defences against them dominating the psyche during these early
years. The factors involved are so numerous and the combinations and interchanges so
variable. The internal objects are employed against external, and external against
internal, both for satisfaction and for security; desire is employed against hate and
destructiveness; omnipotence against impotence, and even impotence (dependence) against
destructive omnipotence; phantasy against reality and reality against phantasy. Moreover,
hate and destruction are employed as measures to avert the dangers of desire and even of
love. Gradually a progressive development takes place... by means of the interplay of
these and other factors, and of them with external influences, out of which the child's
ego, his object-relations, his sexual development, his super-ego, his character and
capacities are formed' (Riviere, 1952a, pp. 59-60). Turning, as I promised to do at the end of chapter three, to the bearings of these
ideas on groups and institutions, I want to begin with two points. The first is that the
move is a simple one. Bion says, 'My impression is that the group approximates too
closely, in the minds of the individuals composing it, to very primitive phantasies about
the contents of the mother's body. The attempt to make a rational investigation of the
dynamics of the group is therefore perturbed by fears, and mechanisms for dealing with
them, which are characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position. The investigation cannot
be carried out without the stimulation and activation of those levels... the elements of
the emotional situation are so closely allied to phantasies of the earliest anxieties that
the group is compelled, whenever the pressure of anxiety becomes too great, to take
defensive action' (Bion, 1961, p. 163). The psychotic anxieties in question involve
splitting and projective identification and are characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid
and depressive positions, now as group processes (p. 164). The move from the individual to
the group does not raise new issues about explanation. He says a little further on, 'The
apparent difference between group psychology and individual psychology is an illusion
produced by the fact that the group brings into prominence phenomena which appear alien to
an observer unaccustomed to using the group' (p. 169). My second point is that those of us who have tried to change institutions, and have
learned that there are things that'll knock you down that you didn't see coming, will be
relieved to have this illumination and to be better informed about what we are up against.
I remember with some chagrin the occasion when a senior colleague insisted that I train in
group therapy and go to a two-week residential Leicester Conference on group relations
(Miller, 1990). I was offended by his saying I'd had no experience of groups, since I'd
spent my Sixties and Seventies in all sorts of collectives, co-ops and even a commune.
Looking back from the vantage point of a number of years of conducting and being
supervised on group therapy, trying to assimilate the experience of a Leicester Conference
(which all acknowledge takes years) and being a member of staff at group relations events,
I am persuaded that unless we understand the psychotic anxieties Bion is on about, we will
never know what we are up against in human nature and in trying to change things. Bion
says that falling into the forms of basic assumption functioning which he describes is
instinctive, involuntary, automatic, instantaneous and inevitable (pp. 153, 165). However
much experience one may have of groups and institutions, group relations events provide a
unique setting for reflection about the primitive processes at work in them. Elliott Jaques and Isabel Menzies Lyth are also very sober and stoical in their
assessments of the barriers to change. Jaques begins his essay on 'Social Systems as a
Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety' (1955) by reiterating that 'social
phenomena show a striking correspondence with psychotic processes in individuals', that
'institutions are used by their individual members to reinforce individual mechanisms of
defence against anxiety', and 'that the mechanisms of projective and introjective
identification operate in linking individual and social behaviour'. He argues the thesis
that 'the primary cohesive elements binding individuals into institutionalised human
association is that of defence against psychotic anxiety' (Jaques, 1955, pp. 478-9). He
points out that the projective and introjective processes he is investigating are basic to
even the most complex social processes (p. 481, cf. 481n). His conclusion is cautionary and points out the conservative - even reactionary -
consequences of our psychotic anxieties and our group and institutional defences against
them. He suggests that as a result of these reflections on human nature 'it may become
more clear why social change is so difficult to achieve, and why many social problems are
so intractable. From the point of view here elaborated, changes in social relationships
and procedures call for a restructuring of relationships at the phantasy level, with a
consequent demand upon individuals to accept and tolerate changes in their existing
patterns of defences against psychotic anxiety. Effective social change is likely to
require analysis of the common anxieties and unconscious collusions underlying the social
defences determining phantasy social relationships' (p. 498). I turn now to the investigator who, in my opinion, has made the most of this
perspective, Isabel Menzies Lyth, who built her research on the shoulders of Bion and
Jaques. She has investigated a number of fraught settings, but the piece of research which
has deservedly made her world-famous is described in a report entitled 'The Functioning of
Social Systems as a Defence against Anxiety' (1959). It is a particularly poignant
document, which addresses the question why people of good will and idealistic motives do
not do what they intend, that is, in this study, why nurses find themselves, to an
astonishing degree, not caring for patients as they had originally wished to do and
leaving the nursing service in droves. It would be repetitious to review the mechanisms
she describes. They are the ones discussed above. What is so distressing is that they
operate overwhelmingly in a setting which has as its very reason for existence the
provision of sensitivity and care. Yet that setting is full of threats to life itself and
arouses the psychotic anxieties I have outlined. She says, 'The objective situation
confronting the nurse bears a striking resemblance to the phantasy situations that exist
in every individual in the deepest and most primitive levels of the mind. The intensity
and complexity of the nurse's anxieties are to be attributed primarily to the peculiar
capacity of the objective features of her work situation to stimulate afresh those early
situations and their accompanying emotions' (Menzies Lyth, 1959, pp. 46-7). The result is the evolution of socially structured defence mechanisms which take the
form of routines and division of tasks which effectively preclude the nurse relating as a
whole person to the patient as a whole person. 'The implicit aim of such devices, which
operate both structurally and culturally, may be described as a kind of depersonalisation
or elimination of individual distinctiveness in both nurse and patient' (pp. 51-2). She
lists and discusses the reifying devices which reduce everyone involved to part-objects,
including insight into why nurses mechanically follow orders in ways that defy common
sense (p. 69). There is a whole system of overlapping ways of evading the full force of
the anxieties associated with death, the ones which lie at the heart of the mechanisms
which Klein described (pp. 63-64; cf. Riviere, 1952a, p. 43). Menzies Lyth draws a cautionary conclusion rather like Jaques': 'In general, it may be
postulated that resistance to social change is likely to be greatest in institutions whose
social defence systems are dominated by primitive psychic defence mechanisms, those which
have been collectively described by Melanie Klein as the paranoid-schizoid defences'
(Menzies Lyth, 1959, p. 79). In recent reflections on her work and that of her colleagues,
she has reiterated just how refractory to change institutions are (Menzies Lyth, 1988, pp.
1-42, and personal communications). The Leicester Conferences on group and organisational behaviour, with particular
emphasis on authority and leadership, have been held at least once a year since 1957. They
are heir to the traditions discussed above, especially the work of Klein, Bion, Jaques and
Menzies Lyth. (Other influences are mentioned in Miller, 1990, pp. 165-69.) One among
several interrelated ways of characterising the two-week residential conferences is that
they are so arranged as to facilitate experiential learning about the ways in which group
processes can generate psychotic anxieties and institutional defences against them (p.
171). The struggles that ensue in the members' minds between individuation and
incorporation, as a result of the conference group events, is hard to credit by anyone who
has not taken part in a Leicester Conference or related 'mini-Leicester' events.
Similarly, descriptions of events and feelings are likely to seem odd to anyone not
familiar with the sorts of events around which the conferences are structured. I believe,
however, that the relevant emotional points will be sufficiently clear without a
(necessarily) long description of the conference rubric. My own experience involved feeling continually on the edge of disintegration as a
result of behaviour in the various group events (ranging in size from a dozen to more than
a hunderd people) which I found appalling and from which there seemed no escape, while
efforts to persuade people to behave well produced flight, sadism, collusive lowering of
the stakes or denial. The potential of the group for uniting around (what was called on
occasion) 'cheap reconciliation' or for cruelty, brought me to the point of leaving on
several occasions, and I frequently had the experience of having to use all my resources
to hold myself together against forces which I experienced as profoundly immoral, amoral
or pathetically conformist. No appeal to standards of group decency was of much avail. I ended up forming a group in my mind which consisted of all the people I admired in
history and in my lifetime, e.g., Socrates, Lincoln, Gandhi, King, Bonhoeffer, Marcuse,
Mandela, who had stood up to intolerable social forces without quitting the field or
having their spirits broken. I dubbed this 'The PS÷D Solidarity Group' and, armed with
their mandate (bestowed by one part of my mind onto another), managed to talk my way into
a meeting with the staff, for the purpose of mounting a critique of the rubric of the
exercise. I felt contained by the inner solidarity provided by my imagined group, while I
was, in truth, actually on my own in the phenomenal context of the conference events. I
had blown out of a group in considerable distress, because it had utterly failed to live
up to its self-designation of advocating and practising decency and civility among its
members and urging such standards on the larger group of conference members. Just as I was on the point of sitting down to confront the staff group in the name of
my inner world group (vainly hoping they would show some interest in its name, membership
and values), a representative of the group I had left appeared and bestowed
'plenipotentiary powers' (the highest of the designated forms of delegation of authority)
on me, freeing me from the dreaded status of 'singleton'. A singleton is a person with no
role status in the large group (see Miller, 1990, p. 179 and Turquet, 1975, where the
plight of the singleton is insightfully and poignantly described). I had felt unutterably
alone, almost totally in the grip of paranoid persecutions, holding on for dear life to my
hallucinated historical group. The bestowal of my conference group's trust reincorporated
me into the social whole on terms I could accept. My confrontation with the staff group, acting in this exercise as 'Management', was -
predictably - without issue, but I went away feeling that I had spoken my piece without
suffering the humiliation that many others had experienced. I had offered my analysis of
the situation and their role in it, one dimension of which was that they would - as
a part of the point of the exercise - continue to behave as they were doing, i. e., act as
an immovable object onto which the groups would project their phantasies about authority
and (hopefully) begin to take responsibility for themselves. I felt that I had done that
and negotiated my own rite of passage - just. Having gone some way toward resolving my own temporary insanity (though not my
omnipotence) I was only able to bask pleasantly in group membership for a few minutes
before members of another group, who had sought refuge in being regressed and silly (they
had all been to previous conferences and might have been expected to be street wise, but
they took refuge in regression and called themselves 'The Potty Training Group'), stormed
into the room where the staff/Management group were holding court. The person whom I had
considered to be the mildest member of that group physically attacked a German member of
staff with shouts of 'fascist' and other violent epithets. He was aided and cheered on by
other members of his group, until one, a woman I felt sure was a Jew but I now recollect
was probably not but was a German, broke down sobbing and shouted for all this to stop,
which it did. The descent from work or task-oriented groups to groups in the thrall of psychotic
basic assumptions is, as Bion pointed out, spontaneous and inevitable (Bion, 1961, p.
165), even in a situation which all concerned know to be temporary and 'artificial'. I
continue to find this profoundly sobering. I also continue to ruminate it and am far from
having digested the experience, though I have found it increasingly helpful in my work and
related activities. After canvassing the literature on psychotic anxieties and reflecting on it and my own
personal and clinical experience, I am left with a daunting sense of the power of the
inner world and an awesome awareness of how very deep, primitive, abiding and alarming its
nether regions are. I shall try to say something more about the articulation between these
anxieties and wider social and ideological forces. But notice this: my argument moved from
individual to group phenomena with some ease. The principles which apply to the inner
world of the individual also help to illuminate the inner world of the group. The group is
at work in the inner world of the individual, and the most primitive level of the
individual has its grip on the group. The anxieties I have attempted to outline (and, to a
degree, evoke), exist throughout human nature - in all of life from the cradle (some say
earlier) to the grave, in all of play and culture, and act as a brake on benignity and
social change which it is hard to imagine releasing, even notch by notch. I shall return
to this problem in the next two chapters, where the role of projective processes will be
examined. The history of psychoanalysis has left us with a small number of ideas about the veneer
of civilization. Freud said it was thin and constantly under threat. One reading of those
who still speak in his name and quote his slogan: 'Where id was, there ego shall be. It is
a work of culture - not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee' (Freud, 1933, p. 80), takes
this to mean that the result can be dry, flowering land, i. e., that there can be a
'conflict-free sphere of the ego'. A second, rather disparate, group proffer a continuum
extending from Wilhelm Reich's advocacy of desublimation and a promise of a return to
Eden, to the Winnicottian position that eschews Klein's undoubted stress on the power of
destructive forces, and sees rather more decency and hope in liberal society. I dare say that Klein said rather less about the other side of human nature - the
constructive or erotic impulses - because she found herself in mutually critical dialogue
with colleagues who she felt over-emphasised those aspects. Finding the twig bent, as she
thought, too far one way, she bent it the other way, perhaps to leave it straight for
those that followed. It is my impression that some of her followers are embarrassed about
this and want to emphasise her more optimistic ideas. I find this odd and inconsistent
with her courage to know the worst in the service of a better world. A third group are
orthodox Kleinians who recall that the veneer of civilization is very thin indeed and that
the maelstrom beneath is perpetually and rather pathetically defended against. It can be
argued that this provides the basis for an optimism of the will, coupled with a pessimism
of the intellect and a belief that it is essential to know what is bubbling away
underneath the surface if we are to have any hope of cooling some of the crust. I also
believe that this position is consistent with a careful reading of Freud's Civilization
and Its Discontents, written half way through his sixteen-year struggle with cancer.
It is worth recalling that he says there that the history of civilization is 'the struggle
between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as
it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially
consists of... And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease
with their lullaby about Heaven' (Freud, 1930, p. 122).
Human nature turns out to be far more ambivalent and refractory at a much deeper level
that we ever imagined when we embarked on making the world suit our desires. The
nurse-maid told us that, too, in the deeper levels of the fairy-tales she recited and
which we avidly requested. I find myself thinking increasingly of Sisyphus, whom Albert
Camus (1955) urged us to imagine as happy. Perhaps he comforts himself with the stoical
maxim: 'It is not given to you to complete the task, yet you may not give it up'.