Abstract
This chapter explores the core resistance to love and wisdom within the psyche. It deals with the real world that remains once the novels are over and develops an understanding of the dynamics in the psyche that drive our destructive impulses in love–but that can also lead us to a potential for creative union. A parallel is developed between mental irony and emotional anxiety, both being located at the core of human experience, and both needing to be addressed and processed within a process of accessing our inner sources of creativity. Paranoia and mania, tendencies that have negative connotations, are explored for their potential positivity, as are the death drives and life instincts that underlie our relations to ourselves and to others. The suggestion is made that, just as Socrates never achieves pure wisdom, but rather always remains in tension with idiocy, so we are never able to achieve pure love, always remaining in tension with its negative element.
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Notes
- 1.
This notion can be found in many of her papers. See especially “On the Development of Mental Functioning” (1958), where she writes that “the perpetual interaction between life and death instincts and the conflict arising from their antithesis (fusion and defusion) govern mental life,” that “the dynamics of the mind are the result of the working of the life and death instincts,” and finally that “the interaction of the life and death instincts will be seen to govern the whole of mental life” (Gratitude and Envy, 243, 245).
- 2.
- 3.
Klein (1975a) 29.
- 4.
Gregory R. Beabout (1988).
- 5.
Lear (2011) 94, 116–117.
- 6.
Lear (2011) 94, 116–117.
- 7.
Lear (2011) 95.
- 8.
Klein (1986c) 149, 236n.
- 9.
- 10.
See note 2.
- 11.
Klein (1975a) 41.
- 12.
Klein (1975d) 265, 58.
- 13.
Klein (1975d) 266.
- 14.
Klein (1986e) 227.
- 15.
Klein (1967) 115.
- 16.
Klein (1986e) 218.
- 17.
Klein (1975a) 35.
- 18.
Klein (1975a) 35.
- 19.
Klein (1986c) 162.
- 20.
- 21.
As Klein (1975a) writes: “…from the beginning of early life the ego tends towards integrating itself and towards synthesizing the different aspects of the object” and its “urge toward integration and organization clearly reveals its derivation from the life instinct” (34, 57).
- 22.
As Klein (1975c) writes: “Integration …depends on the preponderance of the life instinct and implies in some measure the acceptance by the ego of the working of the death instinct” (245).
- 23.
Plato (1954), 71a–72b.
- 24.
Klein (1986e) uses the word “gift” to refer to the gratitude that an infant can feel in return for a gratifying feed (215).
- 25.
Klein (1975a) 35.
- 26.
Klein (1975a) 37–38.
- 27.
Klein (1975a) 37.
- 28.
Klein (1996) 169.
- 29.
Klein (1986e) 216.
- 30.
- 31.
Klein (1996) 164.
- 32.
Klein (1975b) 58.
- 33.
Klein (1975c) 245.
- 34.
- 35.
Breillat (2007) 20. All references to the original French edition. English translation by Marie-Claire Merrigan and David Stromberg.
- 36.
Breillat (2007) 21.
- 37.
Breillat (2007) 15.
- 38.
Breillat (2007) 16.
- 39.
Klein (1967) 89.
- 40.
Klein (1975b) 59.
- 41.
Klein (1975c) 225.
- 42.
- 43.
Klein (1996) 172.
- 44.
For discussions of the difference between Klein’s and Freud’s understanding of the death instinct, and its influence on her reception in the intellectual history of psychoanalysis, see Juliet Mitchell (1986).
- 45.
Klein sometimes uses the drive for reparation and the drive for integration synonymously, though integration could also lead to manic rather than depressive responses. Consider, for example, when Klein (1975b) writes: “Opposed to the drive toward integration and yet alternating with it, there are splitting processes” (57). Reformulated, the sentence suggests that the drive toward splitting processes opposes and alternates with the drive toward integration processes. This can be seen where Klein (1975d) also writes: “the still incoherent ego is driven to reinforce splitting processes” (264, my emphasis). That she also refers to sublimation as being the result of a drive, and even related to reparation, can be seen when Klein (1975b) writes that “depressive anxiety and guilt” can affect the ego by “spur[ring] it on toward reparation and sublimations” (58). The verb “spur” can be seen as synonymous with “drive.”
- 46.
James Grotstein (2006) writes: “As time passed, Klein switched from stating that the infant must ‘work through’ the depressive position to the infant must ‘achieve’ the depressive position, thereby transforming the latter from a pathological position to a sublimated one” (107).
- 47.
Klein (1986c) 163.
- 48.
Klein (1986c) 163–164.
- 49.
Klein (1986c) 163–164.
- 50.
Klein (1986c) 152.
- 51.
Klein (1986c) 152.
- 52.
Klein (1996) 173.
- 53.
Klein (1986b) 142.
- 54.
Klein (1986b) 142.
- 55.
Klein (1996) 172.
- 56.
Klein (1996) 172.
- 57.
Klein (1986a) 107.
- 58.
Klein (1986e) 225.
- 59.
Klein (1986e) 225.
- 60.
Klein (1996) expresses this in more complex terms elsewhere: “…fluctuations between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions always occur…modification is a gradual process and the phenomena of the two positions remain for some time to some extent intermingled and interacting” (173).
- 61.
Klein (1986c) 155.
- 62.
Klein (1986b) 143–44.
- 63.
Klein (1986c) 155.
- 64.
Klein (1986c) 154.
- 65.
Klein (1986a) 106.
- 66.
This is why Klein (1986c) repeatedly speaks of the effect of “strengthening” the ego through synthesis (155).
- 67.
Klein (1996) 177.
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Stromberg, D. (2020). Anxiety and Wisdom. In: IDIOT LOVE and the Elements of Intimacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42695-8_6
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