Beyond Repair: Interpretation, Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play-Technique

ABSTRACT

This article puts clinical child psychoanalysis into conversation with recent debates about critical method in order to question the turn toward so-called “reparative reading” in feminist and queer theory. While Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s original call for a new kind of reparative method culled its key terms (“reparative” and “paranoid”) from child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the scholars who have adopted reparativity in critical theory pay little attention to Klein’s work. In this article, I take up Klein’s theory of the depressive position and reparativity as she elaborated them in her clinical work with children, particularly her wartime analysis of “Richard” in 1941. Klein interpreted Richard’s play—his clinical “war games”—through her idiomatic vocabulary of “attack” and “repair.” By situating this case and Klein’s larger theory of psychic reparations in the political climate of wartime Europe, I argue that Klein’s writings point to the ethico-political dangers inherent in reparative endeavors, which name the object and narrate its injury and repair according only to the perimeters of one’s own self. From this reading, I propose that there might be a benefit to foregoing the injury/repair framework implicit in reparative agendas—both critical and clinical alike. By returning reparativity to Klein, I therefore aim not to offer a corrective to Sedgwick or to the scholars following her, but rather to interrogate the ethical stakes of all reparative endeavors, be they political, intellectual, or clinical. At the most basic level, then, this article argues that the space of the clinic is an important (and often undervalued) object for the consideration of critical method.

Notes

¹ For the purposes of this article, my scope is limited to those, following Sedgwick, who work explicitly within the framework of “reparative reading.” However, other key contributors to the debates about critical method include Steven Marcus and Sharon Best, Rita Felski (2014), Ellen Rooney, Franco Moretti, and Toril Moi, as well as a number of special issues of journals such as Novel (2009), Representations (2009), differences (2010), SAQ (2011), GLQ (2011), M/C Journal (2012), and Feminist Theory (2014), among others.

² My decision to read Klein’s theory of reparation specifically, separated from later interpreters like Wilfred Bion, Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Hanna Segal, R. D. Hinshelwood, and Donald Meltzer, has to do with historical methodology organizing this article. Because reparative reading practices were catalyzed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s engagement with Klein, I think a detailed return to Klein’s original theory and socio-political context is not only lacking from current scholarship on reparative reading, but also (and more importantly) is justified by the fact that it is the interpretation of her work alone that is principally at stake in queer and feminist cultivations of reparative reading. For a recent use of specifically post-Kleinian theories of reparation to consider reparative reading, see Gail Lewis’s “Not by Criticality Alone” (2014).

³ For a comprehensive biography of Melanie Klein’s life and work, see Phyllis Grosskurth’s Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (1986).

⁴ For a full accounting of these discussions, see Pearl King and Ricardo Steiner’s The Freud–Klein Controversies, 1941–45 (1991). For cultural studies analyses of these discussions, see Jacqueline Rose’s “War in the Nursery” in her Why War?—Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (1993) and Deborah Britzman’s After Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories (2003).

⁵ For further reading on the role of instinct in Klein’s theory of unconscious phantasy, see Susan Isaacs’s 1943 paper on “The Nature and Function of Phantasy” (Isaacs, 1948) and R. D. Hinshelwood’s definition of the same term in A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1998, p. 34). For a recent analysis of the elision of Klein’s biologism from feminist readings of her work, see Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Gut Feminism (2015).

⁶ Throughout Klein’s oeuvre, she is persistent in her conviction that “mental health” is demonstrated by genital heterosexuality. For examples of this, see cases like “Mr. B,” “Erna,” “Rita,” “Little Dick,” and “Richard.” Ramon E. Soto-Crespo argues creatively and persuasively for a reading of Klein’s work that challenges her heteronormativity and her understanding of an anatomically grounded sexual difference by focusing on the life-worlds of the child’s unconscious phantasies. However, at the level of Klein’s interpretive presence in the clinic, she consistently privileges genital heterosexuality. For Soto-Crespo’s rereading, see “Heterosexuality Terminable or Interminable? Kleinian Phantasies of Reparation and Mourning” in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Soto-Crespo, 2001).

⁷ For a fascinating historical account of Rudolf Hess’s role in the wartime psychoanalytic work that sought to understand “Nazi psychology,” see The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind by Daniel Pick (2014). Pick does not explore the coincidence of “asylum” that was motoring Hess’s escape, but his desire for political refuge through an appeal to psychological malady is certainly noteworthy.

⁸ For further analysis of this, see “The Hitler Inside: Klein and Her Patients,” in Michal Shapira’s The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (2013).

⁹ For further reading on the public policy debate among Allied countries about German reparations, see Bunselmeyer, The Cost of War, 1914–1919 (1975), and Kent, The Spoils of War (1992).

¹⁰ For a consideration of the painter’s identity, see Olsen's “Depression and Reparation as Themes in Melanie Klein’s Analysis of the Painter Ruth Weber” in The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 27(1) (2004).

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Carolyn Laubender

Carolyn Laubender, PhD, is a lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and director of the BA in Childhood Studies at the University of Essex. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Psychoanalysis and History, Free Associations, Feminist Theory, Journal of International Women’s Studies, and Harts & Minds: The Journal of Humanities and Arts. Her current project, The Child in Mind: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Clinic, theorizes how the child psychoanalytic clinic became a site of experimental political action throughout Europe in the 20th century.