Affecting Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Between the years of 1910 and 1939 Klein was a younger contemporary of Sigmund Freud, reading his findings and essays as he wrote them. She would be known for emphasizing aspects of Freud’s theories—the life and death drives, anxiety and melancholia, and the mental agencies of id, ego, and superego—while significantly revising their developments with the subtle distinctions of infantile emotional life. Klein first observed in her practice with very young children and with adults, a mind-world composed of active object relations, multiple emotional dramas, affect scenarios, personifications of organs at war, and what she came to group under the terms of phantasies. As early as 1921, Klein believed that the object of child analysis was psychoanalytic understanding and not, as many of her child analyst colleagues argued at the time, helping the child achieve a stronger sense of reality by providing instructions in a psychoanalytic pedagogy. It was listening for the child’s unasked questions Klein felt, that must be interpreted as an appeal to freedom. Two dilemmas follow: What can knowledge mean psychoanalytically? And, how could Klein garner enough understanding to narrate with children and adults what she would simply call “a time before?” One can say that Klein’s theory of the emotional world is, above all, a theory of phantasy that has as its destiny the development of the mind beholden to both the fate of internal object relations and the imagination so needed to think. Her theory of learning to live, then, remains radical and for education proposes deep existential dilemmas on the nature of knowledge, love, authority, thinking, and relationships in teaching and learning.