Language and speech in Melanie Klein’s work

ABSTRACT

Melanie Klein’s writing style was distinctive. Many would concur that her theoretical and clinical writings are characterized by the absence of the fully developed poetic in the sense that literary theory understands this term. Although the visual poetic, as such, cannot be attributed to Melanie Klein’s style, her discours has power to evoke image. Through iconicity of her images, Melanie Klein creates then effect of visualizing the inner world of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive position, which is marked by lack of successiveness and temporality characteristic of the symbolic order. Narrative of a Child Analysis reveals that the speech of Melanie Klein becomes idiosyncratic when she attempts to introduce preverbal contents in the verbal realm. At those points of the analysis her language becomes concrete, nonmetaphoric, ridiculous and misshaped. Grotesque. In an attempt to describe the characteristics of internalized part objects and their mutual relations in Richard’s inner world, Melanie Klein constructs formulas-agglomerations which produce comic effects, such as greedy-octopus-Daddy, salmon-genital, Richard’s bomb-faeces. Thus the image of Richard’s inner world becomes isomorphic with Rabelais’ laughter-provoking, comic-grotesque images of hell. Melanie Klein (Bakhtin would say) carnivalizes Richard’s inner world so it does not seem scary but more like a “cheerful carnivalesque scarecrow.”

KEYWORDS:

• Melanie Klein
• phantasm
• iconic
• Bakhtin
• carnivalization of the soul

Notes

1 Chora refers to a space or receptacle or wet nurse that gave birth to everything. It is unstable, uncertain, ever changing, unnameable. It is everlasting, indestructible but providing a situation for all things to come into being. It antedates not only universe, but words and syllables. Kristeva (1984) borrowed that term from Plato to denote pre-verbal functional state that is characterized by representation but that is not encompassed by the network of signifiers.