A Whole Climate of Critique: Psychoanalytic Politics between Vitality and Obsolescence

Abstract

ndoubtedly, one of the most important post-Freudian psychoanalytic developments was Melanie Klein’s theorization in the 1940s of the two “positions,” her term for the stages of psychosexual development through which the “normal” infant passes. The first, which Klein termed the “paranoid-schizoid position,” is active from the beginning months of life and is characterized essentially by the splitting of things in the infant’s environment into good and bad parts: in Klein’s paradigmatic example, the mother’s breast “is split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast.” The world for the paranoid-schizoid is essentially one divided between ideal, flawless, good things and evil, persecutory, bad things. It is only in the second position, the “depressive” position, that this split world gives way to one with more gray areas, where the distinction between good and bad is less pronounced, and where “objects” (the psychoanalyst’s unfortunate term for other people) can be perceived as whole. Freed from schizoid projection, the object comes to be regarded in a new, disabused light: neither purely good nor purely evil but rather a complex and inevitably frustrating combination of both. The depressive position thus signals the developing subject’s attainment of a new stage of psychic maturity, one marked by the novel capacity to tolerate moral ambiguity and the ambivalence it gives rise to. An analogy might be drawn here between the Kleinian theory of the two positions and the difficult maturation that