Trauma theory and Melanie Klein | About trauma

Melanie Klein’s clinical researches on early childhood led her to postulate that the traumatic pathogenic situation par excellence is the overriding triumph of the death instinct. (Hernandez)

Trauma theory poses a problem for Melanie Klein, and Melanie Klein poses a problem for trauma theory. From a Kleinian perspective, the traumatic experience is not traumatic in itself. The traumatic experience is traumatic to the degree that it activates the fear of annihilation and destruction that is always waiting within, the haunting presence of the death instinct. The death instinct, in turn, gives rise to primitive defenses. Fearing death, the traumatized person projects his fear outward into persecutory objects and people, who then come back to haunt him.

A Kleinian theory of trauma in effect blames the victim. It is as though the Kleinian therapist said

Getting run over, almost dying, and spending six months in the hospital recovering isn’t the real source of your trauma. The real source of your trauma is the hate and aggression you feel toward what we call good objects, the people who really care for you. Your PTSD is so extreme right now because you fear you cannot protect the good from your own anger and hate.

A Kleinian theory of trauma?

In fact, there isn’t any specifically Kleinian theory of trauma. There can’t be, for from a Kleinian perspective all the threats come from within—from your own fear, aggression, and hatred. Trauma theory is about the intrusion of the outside into the inside. While Kleinians recognize the importance of real world events, a Kleinian analytic perspective leaves relatively little room for the outside. The real action is within: the conflict between our own love and hate.

After being severely traumatized, and here the trauma of war makes a particularly dramatic example, we should feel that the world is out to get us. It is, at least sometimes. As Yossarian says in Catch–22 about the Germans, “they’re trying to kill me.”

From a Kleinian perspective, Yossarian is operating from the paranoid-schizoid position, as she calls it, in which the leading anxiety is for the survival of the self. This fear stems from

either the fear of the operation of the death instinct inwards—thus of self-destructiveness—or the fear of persecutors destroying the self and the ideal object. (Segal, 1981, p. 127)

The goal of therapy would be to encourage Yossarian to develop his guilt and sense of personal responsibility for his own hate and aggression.

This just doesn’t make sense, and I’m reminded of Freud’s change of heart regarding the stories he was hearing from young women who recalled being sexually abused in childhood or adolescence. At first he believed them. Eventually, upon hearing so many stories of abuse in the good bourgeois families of Vienna, he concluded that the women must be imagining their abuse (Masson, p. 264). Freud flinched.

Unlike Freud, Melanie Klein never changed her mind. From the beginning she held that anxiety is generated by the death instinct operating from within. All in all, hers does not seem a particularly promising theory if one wants to understand, explain, and treat trauma.

For example, a Kleinian would not hold to the dose-response curve to which many trauma theorists, such as Judith Herman (p. 57) subscribe: there is a direct relationship between the severity and duration of the trauma and the symptoms of PTSD. On the contrary, a Kleinian would hold that the degree of trauma would primarily depend upon how securely the traumatized person was established in the depressive position, in which we take responsibility for our own aggression and hatred.

Reparation

While Klein is not a natural trauma theorist, aspects of her work generate some intriguing insights. In opposition to the paranoid-schizoid position, Klein set the depressive position. It is from the concern for others expressed in the depressive position that we want to make reparation for all the harm we would have done them, even if only in our imaginations.

Generally speaking, this doesn’t make sense in the case of trauma, unless one is talking about the trauma of war, in which soldiers are sometimes traumatized by the harm they have inflicted on others. What does make sense about reparation is that Klein understands it as a creative act, in which we restore a part of our world that has been broken. If the reader remembers the full story of Catch-22, Yossarian actually feels great remorse that he failed to save Snowden, a dying comrade. Yossarian was in the depressive position.

Consider the following true story

At the site of the destroyed twin towers in New York City, in the lobby of an insurance company building near ground zero, a mural was displayed throughout most of 2002. It consisted of a series of self-portraits done by thousands of children, many of whom lost a parent or relative in the 9/11 attacks, others who had lost parents in wars around the world. An extract from an early paper by Hanna Segal, Klein’s most persuasive exponent, was placed beside the mural, serving as its motto.

It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair—it is then that we must re-create our world anew, re-assemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, re-create life. (Segal, 1952, p 199)

Marygrace Berberian, an art therapist and social worker who came up with the idea for the project, in which eventually 3,100 children’s self-portraits of grief were combined, says

Children were recreating life in their art . . . . Creativity allows for describing, building and reconfiguring an injured object so that mourning can begin. (Berberian 2003, p. 33)

From a Kleinian perspective, there is no better therapy for trauma than the act of creation, which may be artistic, or something as simple (if it really is simple) as caring lovingly for someone in need.

Time does not exist

For Klein, traumatic symptoms are not the result of repressed experiences that could not be dealt with at the time, for the emotions aroused were too intense. This view of trauma, which is basically Freud’s and is widely shared even today, sees trauma in historical terms, layer upon layer of repressed memories, what Freud called Nachträglichkeit. For Klein, historical time does not exist, at least in the paranoid-schizoid position. As Juliet Mitchell puts it,

This absence of historical time is evident both in Klein’s innovations and her omissions. Thus, the concept of regression plays no role in Klein’s theory. (Mitchell, p. 28)

The experience of being trapped in time past, traumatic time, is a widely recognized marker of severe trauma, which locks in the victim in the paranoid-schizoid position.

Klein’s term “position” is not merely a synonym for a developmental stage. Instead, a position denotes an attitude or orientation toward the world, one that is never overcome, never outgrown, but is either the leading or trailing edge of experience. Trauma doesn’t cause the return of the paranoid-schizoid position. Trauma intensifies paranoid-schizoid experiences of reality that were always present, always pressing to be heard, but were subordinate to depressive experiences, by which Klein means an orientation of care, concern, and responsibility for the world, or one’s small part of it.

The destruction of symbolism

There is a way in which the Kleinian account comes close to a contemporary account, that of Cathy Caruth, who argues that the traumatic experience is so overwhelming that it cannot be symbolized, and so remains unavailable to narrative. Instead, the traumatic experience is a pre-symbolic inscription on a mind unprepared to receive it.

A Kleinian perspective sees the world in a similar fashion. Symbolism arises from the child’s need to protect those he loves from his or her own hatred, so that the symbol can be destroyed instead of the reality. Under the press of the death instinct, the ability to symbolize is compromised, resulting in a terrifying world in which reality cannot be distinguished from fantasy.

For both Caruth and Klein, trauma compromises the ability to symbolize, and so construct a narrative account of one’s experience. The difference is that Klein sees symbolism arising from love of the good. There’s not much place for love in Caruth’s account.

Love

In the end, Klein is a theorist of love. Not a pure love, but one arising from guilt and regret. As Juliet Mitchell puts it,

Guilt for wishing the good object’s destruction, the desire to make reparation, and gratitude to the good object (an idea developed in her later work) are what Klein means by love. (p. 125)

Perhaps only Judith Herman makes love and care such an important step in the recovery from trauma. For Herman, without loving connections the severely traumatized person is at risk of inner death (p. 194). Klein would understand.

References

Marygrace Berberian, Communal rebuilding after destruction: the world trade center children’s mural project. Psychoanalytic Social Work, vol. 10 (2003), pp. 27-41.

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Max Hernandez, “Winnicott’s Fear of Breakdown”: On and beyond trauma, Diacritics, vol. 28 (1998), pp. 134-143

Jeffrey Masson, editor. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. (The letters are available at http://www.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/ffliess.html.)

Juliet Mitchell, editor, The Selected Melanie Klein. New York: The Free Press, 1986.

Hanna Segal, A psycho-analytical approach to aesthetics. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 33 (1952), pp. 196-207.

Hanna Segal, Melanie Klein. New York: Penguin, 1981.