Exploring Melanie Klein’s Archive at the Wellcome Library — Some Notes on Envy and Hidden Admiration

8th June 2021

This will be my (Jane Milton’s) last blog post before handing over to the new Melanie Klein Trust archivist, Christine English. I know that Christine has already identified some very interesting archival material that she will be sharing on the blog – which I am certainly looking forward to reading.

So, to round off my always stimulating, fruitful time exploring the Klein archives (though I will continue to refer to them) here are some clinical notes I came across recently, which I hope will be thought-provoking.

Klein discusses what she calls ‘memories in feelings’ several times in the third and fourth volumes of her Writings. For example, an important footnote to page 180 of Envy and Gratitude reads:

All this [referring to early phantasies concerning the breast] is felt by the infant in much more primitive ways than language can express. When these pre-verbal emotions and phantasies are revived in the transference situation, they appear as ‘memories in feelings’, as I would call them, and are reconstructed and put into words with the help of the analyst. In the same way, words have to be used when we are reconstructing and describing other phenomena belonging to the early stages of development. In fact we cannot translate the language of the unconscious into consciousness without lending it words from our conscious realm (Klein 1957).

In archive file PP/KLE/D.11, I found a detailed and complicated example of a ‘memory in feeling’, together with Klein’s interpretations of and reflections on it, in the analysis of a man in his late forties, whom she calls ‘Mr X’.

In the second half of file D.11, Klein discusses the difficulties that the patient is having, in integrating feelings towards his parents with the analytic transference situation. The analyst is sometimes spared the complex and contradictory negative feelings felt towards the primary objects, while, at other times, the situation with the parents is idealised, and the analysis and analyst denigrated. The following material appears in the digitised collection as images 18, 20 and 22-28 (omitting some pages which are crossed out and do not appear to belong to the sequence):

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I could give you many more instances of attitudes, which have all in common the attempt on the part of the patient to avoid a synthesis between the various aspects of figures and relations, which have come to focus on the analyst. The point here is that the synthesis, which the patient has not been able to establish sufficiently in the past is bound up in the various anxieties coming to the fore. The analyst is loved and hated, as other people in the patient’s life were earlier on, and the patient resorts to all sorts of defences and among them the process of splitting figures and situations, in order to avoid the relations that these various aspects represent, the various aspects of the mother and father. It is, therefore, our work to help him to experience again and again – and this is a slow process we know – the realisation, that he has only divided up, split his ego, his relations with people, and the people themselves, in the attempt to avoid conflict, anxiety and guilt. Our interpretations aim at synthesis, but the synthesis can only be achieved piecemeal, and again and again the patient has to be confronted with experiencing conflict and suffering, which he has tried to avoid in the past.

Re memories in feelings: (to George)

[George is a child Klein saw between the ages of 3 and 8, in the 1930s, who appears in two of the ‘restricted’ files B.39 and B.40]

This brings me to a point which applies to adults as well as to some extent to children. We know how important it is to revive in our patients[’] memories. We however also know that such memories can be extremely falsified. This is included in the concept of cover memories. So while it is beneficial to get as many memories as possible, it is in connection with emotions, desires, anxieties which partly led to these memories, and which these past experiences were connected with, that we have to understand any situation in the past as well as in the present. We should never rest content with just having past experiences as it were reconstructed in the analysis, because we must not treat them as it were as isolated events. Only if we are able to bring out the whole situation of feelings, anxieties, fitting into the development as a whole, we can feel that we have benefitted sufficiently from the revival of memories. Now there would probably be no difference of opinion on that point. I still think it is worthwhile mentioning, for there are stages of development of which we cannot get memories in the full sense of the word, expressed by words, and in the clear-cut way in which memories of a later stage may appear. And yet they are memories of feelings.

Refer back to Mary in this connection – reproducing the situation of the baby (lamb) with all the oral details attached to it [it is not clear to whom Klein is referring here]

A VERY EARLY MEMORY IN FEELING

Man Patient X (age: just under fifty) 8th February 1946

In identification with the little child who was teething and woke at night repeatedly crying, the father felt suddenly, having just woken from sleep, what an “awful thing was going on in the child”. He had a vision of something growing out of the soft mouth, flesh being contrasted here to something very hard like spikes which were somehow thrust on him (because by now he felt it happening to himself and not to the child) and being forced to push these spikes together. (this was shown by a gesture). And a terrible feeling how awful that must be. At this moment, when visualising the spikes coming together, he had a vision of these hard things outside him, and “death-head” was the next association to it. The feeling of grievance that he could not stop that happening, that this whole thing had been thrust on him, that something had made these spikes come out, and that he had no more control over these spikes because again something forced him to push these spikes together.

Now these feelings he found extremely difficult to put into words, while he was otherwise very vocal. It seemed as if they just could not be put into words. And he fully agreed when I suggested that this incapacity was due to the fact that such things may be felt but not thought of in words at a very early stage. The one stimulus for experiencing what quite obviously was a memory in feeling was the identification with the little daughter. Another is the transference situation at the moment.

In the preceding hour some guilt about leaving the responsibility all his life too much with other people, or rather a tendency towards that which was very much controlled, had come up. Facing that, a very high appreciation of the value of the analysis and the effects, and a feeling of unworthiness in having it, had become quite clear. A particular association was leaving the responsibility for sweets (tuck at school) with the mother. He would not take sweets with him after the holidays, but she should rather send them. They were packed into a tin, and there seemed something very wrong about that, an inexplicable feeling that it was not, as it were, her job to send them in a way which left some responsibility with her which she should not have. This had connected with feelings that however valuable the analysis might be, he does not make the best of it, or won’t do in the future.

My suggestion in the preceding hour had been that he would use the interpretations, and the analysis, in the wrong way, that he would not make the best of it. Now an association produced on the 7th was that after having left me, at the moment of going out of the room, he had suddenly had an association that in fact he would make use of the analysis in such a way that it would improve his earning capacity, and he disliked the thought that he would use it to make money.

Now there are here two trends of thought which became quite clear in the present hour: The good thing, the milk, the nipple, taken in would be changed into faeces and thus be completely destroyed – money making – bad purposes.

This is the way in which the nipple, and now my interpretations, would be treated while being taken in. The object would be destroyed, the “death head”, which himself felt was a later elaboration of what was felt dangerously destroyed in those early days, is the object- in this case me. Therefor the tin in which the sweets were packed is not only his inside in which he should not take the sweets, but it is more specifically the mouth and the teeth (the edges of the tin).

The very strong feeling that it was not his fault, because it was pushed, thrust on him, seems to connect with the nipple being pushed into him. And here the object itself becomes the teeth, a condensation of what is being done to the object and reflected in his attitude towards him. Also why was the nipple given to him? But there seemed to have been in fact at the very beginning of feeding great difficulties because the mother had been very ill, and X has a feeling- not supported by what he had heard- that for some time she could not have fed him. In his view, since she was so ill at his birth, some weeks could have elapsed before she could feed him. A view which seems rather phantastic when he was going over it in this hour, because what would have happened to the milk?

He had been told that his breast feeding otherwise had been normal up to about 8 months but with the strong feeling that to begin with there had been a long gap, a very long time before he started on it. The present impression was that he might have had very great difficulties in taking the nipple, perhaps because of a break in the beginning or perhaps because of fears, as the mother, who was on the whole affectionate and patient, was apt to be erratic and if things did not go well, impatient. The possibility appears that if at the beginning of the feeding there had been difficulties due to starting a little too late with the breast being given and to his difficulties, she might have been impatient and thrust the nipple into his mouth.

Very fundamental attitudes seem to be connected with this. Incapacity to make use of very great gifts in him, of choosing, or trying to get the best thing, to make use of opportunities – against that in the same way a tendency to thrust responsibility on to others which was in fact not carried out. A very strong drive to get the best opportunities and also to make use of them, but with a constant conflict over these two attitudes which no doubt had to some extent a paralysing effect.

An interesting point is the vision of the “death head” in front of the mouth, outside. It seems to show so closely the process of the object still outside and at the same time already internalised and again externalised – on the boundary. As well as the actual external object, the nipple, changed into this destroyed object.

Memories in feelings are not an unknown fact. But this should be put versus what is called “memories”. I find them in such ways also with adults, that the whole situation becomes alive. All this shows in attitudes and is connected with the transference situation.

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References:

Klein, Melanie (1957) Envy and Gratitude. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, The Writings of Melanie Klein Volume III. London: Hogarth 1975.