Heather Love

Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
loveh@english.upenn.edu

 

Review of: Esther Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia.Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

 

Back in 1979, Robert Hass wrote, “all the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.” He seemed to be referring to the lack of adequation between language and reality: “because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to the thing it signifies” (4). Things aren’t that different in 2005: the fading of the object world can still break your heart. But the most recent thinking about loss doesn’t tend to be about language or representation. Rather, loss is increasingly played in the register of the world-historical, as critics have drawn on psychoanalytic models to consider the intersection between individual and collective trauma. Witness, memorialization, haunting, and the melancholy of just about everything: such work has taken up the question of “the politics of mourning.” What might constitute an ethical relation to the past? How can we draw on the losses of the past in order to imagine new futures?

 

I like the new thinking about loss very much, but sometimes I get to thinking about the old thinking about loss, about stories older and darker than Hass’s blackberry. For instance: Uranus and Gaia have twelve children; Uranus hates them, so he buries them inside their mother’s body, deep in the earth; Gaia gives her son Cronus a big knife and he castrates his father, frees his siblings, and rules over them. Cronus then has several children with his sister, all of whom he eats at birth to keep them from betraying him in turn. This works pretty well until his son tricks him into vomiting up his brothers and sisters, and they send their devouring father down into the underworld. Now that’s loss!

 

Now that the foundations of the world have been laid, it is hard to match these antics. One place to look, however, is in the annals of psychoanalysis, where such cycles of revenge, retribution, and flesh-eating are played out on the much smaller stage of the individual psyche. Melanie Klein (1882-1960) was particularly attuned to such dynamics. In her pioneering work in child analysis and the field of object relations, she described the mix of paranoia and jealousy, rage and anxiety, brewing inside even the smallest of human minds. Several decades later her work continues to shock with its uncompromising view of the psychic life of babies.

 

Klein made a number of important theoretical innovations with which critics and analysts are still coming to terms. While analysts before her had “analyzed” children by talking to their parents, Klein developed a technique to work with very young children directly, in an approach that combined play and talk. Her work is at the origin of the field of object-relations psychoanalysis, which sees development as implicated from the very start in the relation to others and which has appealed to many as an alternative to the Freudian tradition. Originally a disciple of Freud, Klein moved to England and drifted away from orthodoxy, finally distancing herself publicly in a series of debates in the 1940s (the Controversial Discussions) with, among others, Anna Freud. She challenged many central tenets of Freud’s notion of development: she situated the Oedipal crisis much earlier in time, challenged the notion of penis envy, and cast childhood experience in terms of “positions” rather than in terms of a developmental sequence of phases. In an especially dissident move, Klein developed a model of infantile experience that focused almost exclusively on the figure of the mother. Feminists have been drawn to this version of psychic development that focuses on the relation between the baby and the mother instead of on castration, the phallus, and the father.

 

Some have tried to imagine Klein’s account of early childhood as a kindler, gentler alternative to Freud’s, but it is not easy to do. For Klein, the relation between the mother and the child offers no refuge from violence. The infant does receive some satisfaction from the mother’s care, and it is out of such experiences that the internal image of the Good Mother is formed. But at just about the same time, the image of the Bad Mother is born out of experiences of frustration and disappointment. In this earliest phase of development, which Klein called the “paranoid-schizoid position,” the baby keeps these two images as far apart as possible, in order to keep the Bad from spoiling the Good; one of the key developmental tasks (and this can take a lifetime) is to integrate these two images and to survive the realization that these two opposed experiences have the same source.

 

The very bloodiest battles of object relations are fought between mother and child. The objects that make up the internal world are just what you might expect would be important to a little baby: breasts, mouths, feces, penises. While once in a while it is possible to get a good object and to keep it safely inside, mostly these objects are in pieces, and they are angry. Klein writes,

 

The little girl has a sadistic desire, originating in the early stages of the Oedipus conflict, to rob the mother’s body of its contents, namely, the father’s penis, faeces, children, and to destroy the mother herself. This desire gives rise to anxiety lest the mother should in her turn rob the little girl of the contents of her body (especially of children) and lest her body should be destroyed or mutilated. In my view, this anxiety, which I have found in the analyses of girls and women to be the deepest anxiety of all, represents the little girl’s earliest danger situation. (92)

 

The early life of the child looks in that case more like Seed of Chucky than like a scene of oceanic bliss. This is perhaps what Jacques Lacan had in mind when he referred to Melanie Klein as an “inspired gut butcher” (qtd. in Kristeva 230).

 

Klein’s version of infant life, however, is made up of equal parts rending violence and restorative sadness. These infantile situations recur throughout life. While they are the cause of continuing anxiety and aggression, they also give rise to other feelings, also central to Klein’s project: longing, concern, and the desire for reparation. The crucial developmental turn for the child is from the “paranoid-schizoid position” (characterized by splitting and unbridled aggression) to the “depressive position,” where the child actually feels concern for the objects under attack. Listen as Klein describes the “infantile depressive position,” a state which she understands as “melancholia in statu nascendi“:

 

The baby experiences depressive feelings which reach a climax just before, during, and after weaning. . . . The object which is being mourned is the mother’s breast and all that the breast and the milk have come to stand in for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness, and security. All these are felt by the baby to be lost, and lost as a result of his own uncontrollable greedy and destructive phantasies and impulses against his mother’s breasts. Further distress about impending loss (this time of both parents) arises out of the Oedipus situation, which sets in so early and in such close connection with breast frustrations that in its beginnings it is dominated by oral impulses and fears. The circle of loved objects who are attacked in phantasy and whose loss is therefore feared widens according to the child’s ambivalent relations to his brothers and sisters. The aggression against phantasied brothers and sisters, who are attacked inside the mother’s body, also gives rise to feelings of guilt and loss. The sorrow and concern about the feared loss of the “good” objects, that is to say, the depressive position, is, in my experience, the deepest source of painful conflicts in the Oedipus situation, as well as in the child’s relations to people in general. (147-48)

 

The widening circle of violence here recalls the clashes of the Titans–but the guilt and concern are new. While Klein in no way underestimates the pure cussedness of this greedy little baby, she sees a potential for repair in the feelings of loss that accompany the urge to destroy. Klein offers an appealing conjunction: on the one hand, she recognizes just how bad things can be; at the same time, she points toward a desire (albeit a desire couched in depression) that they should be better.

 

Such a conjunction is at the heart of Esther Sánchez-Pardo’s attraction to Klein’s work in her recent book, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia. The title of the book is drawn from Freud’s characterization of melancholia. In his famous distinction between mourning and melancholia, Freud describes melancholia as a form of pathological mourning in which loss is disavowed and the lost object is internalized and becomes subject to recrimination. He writes, “what is now holding sway in the superego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time ” (54-55). Sánchez-Pardo draws not only on Freud’s account of melancholia but also on work by Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Sándor Radó, Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok, and others, at the same time standing by her claim that “Melanie Klein is the theorist of melancholia par excellence” (4).

 

Like many contemporary critics, Sánchez-Pardo attempts to bridge the gap between psychoanalytic accounts of individual subjectivity and historicist accounts of the social world. She puts forward a very particular definition of the “culture of the death drive,” one that draws as much on the social conditions of the early twentieth century as it does on a transhistorical notion of a death instinct:

 

It is my contention that melancholia is generated by what I call “cultures of the death drive,” a variety of forces that produce melancholia, a malaise affecting the “privileged” victims of a new urban, industrialized, and capitalist world order: women, lesbians, gay men, blacks, Jews, ethnic minorities, and in general those who suffered the consequences of deterritorialization and diaspora after the wars. (194)

 

Sánchez-Pardo understands melancholia as something socially produced. While its relation to childhood “positions” cannot be set aside, it is the result of particular historical forms of exclusion. As a result, she argues, it attaches to particular kinds of people.

 

Cultural, social, historical, political, and psychosexual factors bear on the production of individuals who are prone to melancholia. One of the conclusions of this study is that women, feminine masochists, lesbians, and gay men are more prone to melancholia. To engage in psychoanalytic and textual inquiry into the reasons why these heterogeneous groups are privileged victims of modernist melancholia is one of my aims. (195)

 

Sánchez-Pardo is hardly the first person to suggest that women, feminine masochists, lesbians, and gay men are “more prone to melancholia.” Like so many central psychoanalytic concepts, melancholia has been taken up to offer yet another perspective on what is wrong–really deeply wrong–with homosexuals, women, racially marked subjects, and people not from Western Europe. This is not at all what Sánchez-Pardo means, however. Sánchez-Pardo comes to diagnose society, not the individual. She sees melancholia not as a matter of arrested development or any other personal “fault”; rather, it is a result of the social exclusion of modernity’s others. This social violence is a matter of concern and care for Sánchez-Pardo: like the depressive infant, she has reparation on her mind.

 

Such a task is laudable–even, you might say, a matter of pressing personal concern. And Sánchez-Pardo works very hard. Cultures of the Death Drive is a massive text, almost more like two books than one. The first section is a close analysis of Klein, with special emphasis on her cultural context and on the importance of gender and sexuality in her work. The second focuses on melancholia in modernism, and considers several literary and visual texts through a Kleinian psychoanalytic lens. The book will be of interest to people with varying levels of familiarity with Klein; while Meira Likierman’s recent book on Klein might be clearer and Julia Kristeva’s weirder, Sánchez-Pardo’s specific emphasis on melancholia, the social, and modernist aesthetics is valuable.

 

Part II of the book begins with a chapter (really more like a second introduction) in which Sánchez-Pardo surveys major modernist scholarship of the last few decades and announces her intention to analyze the “cultural, literary, and artistic production of women, lesbians, gay men, and racialized and stigmatized Others” (205). She goes on to devote chapters to the work of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen. Though these authors do fill out the list of “stigmatized Others” that she mentions, the exclusive focus on their work is hard to explain. There are so many figures whom she might have considered under this rubric: Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust, for instance, or Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean Toomer, or Jean Rhys. It might also make sense to move beyond the traditional limits of modernism to more recent writers such as Marguerite Duras, Tsitsi Dangarembga, or W. G. Sebald. What about Elfriede Jelinek? She seems to be living in a pure culture of the death drive.

 

The problem is not so much that these are not good choices for talking about modernism and melancholia–they are. The problem is rather that, despite repeated acts of definition, the contours of this project never emerge with real clarity. So much interesting theoretical and cultural work has been done on the intersection of representation, melancholia, and the social in recent years that it has become increasingly difficult to stake out fresh terrain. However, some of the most relevant recent work in the field does not appear in this study. Critics such as Anne Anlin Cheng, David L. Eng, and Ranjana Khanna have engaged deeply with questions of racialization and melancholia; it would also be interesting to take up the writings of Frantz Fanon and Octave Mannoni, whose writing was foundational for these critics. Given that sexuality is so central to her project, it is odd that Sánchez-Pardo does not engage more fully with the work of queer critics who focus on the politics of mourning and negativity (Douglas Crimp, Leo Bersani, or Tim Dean, for instance).

 

The position of psychoanalysis in the contemporary intellectual climate is insecure enough that books that depend on a psychoanalytic framework often include an implicit or explicit apology for this approach. On the one side, psychoanalysis has been attacked by the skeptics, those who have argued that Freud was a bad scientist (see, for instance, Frederick Crewes’s edited collection Unauthorized Freud); on the other, it has been attacked by social theorists who object to its privatizing and ahistorical focus on the individual psyche.

 

Although a lot of recent work in queer, postcolonial, and critical race studies draws on psychoanalysis, it remains a hard sell for modernity’s “privileged victims.” Psychoanalysis is at the heart of the modern project of normalization that gives birth to these Others. And the rest, you might say, is history–the project of naming and identifying in this period is inseparable from stigmatization and violence. Sánchez-Pardo works hard to keep Klein clear of these charges. In particular, she presents a version of Kleinian theory that emphasizes the flexibility of gender and sexual positions, arguing that “Klein did not fall into the traps of the furor curandi and the pathologization of homosexuality by which most of her contemporaries were driven” (115).

 

There is some truth in this claim, and there are certainly ways in which Klein’s take on gender and sexuality offers an appealing alternative to Freud’s take on gender and sexuality. (There are, of course, ways in which Freud’s take on gender and sexuality offer an appealing alternative to Freud’s take on gender and sexuality as well, but that is another story.) But there is also a sense in which one simply cannot avoid “falling into the trap” of pathologizing homosexuality because homosexuality is like that–it comes pre-pathologized. Even Sánchez-Pardo’s significantly groovy take on sexual development falls into that trap, if it is one.

 

It is almost impossible to track the way to homosexuality. Simply put, there is no single way, not even psychoanalytically speaking, and certainly not in Klein’s narrative of the Oedipus conflict. Klein posits only one prerequisite for the attainment of the normal (i.e., the most common) heterosexual position, the supremacy of the good mother-imago, which helps the boy to overcome his sadism and works against all his various anxieties. (114-15)

 

The slip between normal defined as “the most common” and normal defined as right–between the descriptive and the normative–is a confusion that is endemic to modernity. But it is particularly exacerbated in psychoanalysis, which retains its legacy as a curative science.

 

Still, if psychoanalysis is a cure, it is a poisoned cure, one that incorporates the gut-wrenching (and sometimes even gut-butchering) realities of psychic and social life. And when it comes to talking about loss and its repercussions, nobody does it better. At the end of the book, Sánchez-Pardo writes, “throughout this volume, I have been pervasively and systematically addressing loss, something that has come to interest many of us during this period, when loss, trauma, and aggression seem to be of great concern” (391). Sánchez-Pardo is undoubtedly right about this focus, and it’s hard to imagine the situation changing anytime soon.

 

Furthermore, this book asks what loss is good for: “What political and social forms of freedom, we ask, can be derived from Klein’s theorization of the relationship between melancholia and the depressive position? And to what extent, then, can we return for models of freedom to a modernist aesthetic that dwells on and draws its force from the memorializing of social ‘loss’?” (388). While Sánchez-Pardo does not answer such questions, she takes an important first step by insisting on loss. In a world in which disavowal and aggression hold sway–in which paranoid-schizoid tendencies seem to be winning out over depressive ones–sorrow, longing, and concern are themselves crucial to the work of reparation.

Works Cited

 

• Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York: Norton, 1960.
• Hass, Robert. “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Praise. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1990.
• Klein, Melanie. The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. New York: Free, 1986.
• Kristeva, Julia. Melanie Klein. Trans. Ross Gubermann. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.