Melanie Klein's Transcendental Breast
The galaxy of psychoanalysis has many planets, chief among them is Planet Narcissist; we all live there. One might claim that narcissism is the central dilemma of human psychology: why does the human choose to live in a state of either abject loneliness and self-hatred (the depressed person) or sociopathic and toxic megalomania?
Lacan has given an entire order in his tripart system to narcissism and the mirror, calling it the Imaginary. The school of modern psychoanalysis (to which I attend) likewise holds it as axiomatic that the human is narcissistic until proven otherwise. Freud debated over the course of his career regarding the scale of narcissism, referring variously to primary and secondary narcissisms, while attributing to the self-possessed person a long series of symptoms and inward stabbing energies; the libido turned back upon the self can produce self-love that turns in an instant into self-destructive hate. Though the origins of narcissism shift over the course of Freud’s work, it can be argued that Freud’s late view of oceanic feeling is that of primary or primitive narcissism; the infant, having no concept or language with which to organize their experience, finds no differentiation between their world and themselves; rather it is all world (or all sensation); other people do not, strictly speaking, exist. Infantile narcissism, in this view, is degree-zero for conscious awareness. The tradition of Non-philosophy, invested in the psychoanalytic model, has likewise referred to human aloneness as radical solitude. Oceanic feeling then, may be first and foremost the lack of division in the infant’s sensorial bath of pure unconceptualized intensities; the experience of the incommunicable real as myself alone.
And yet Melanie Klein, following hard upon Freud’s discoveries, vehemently disagreed. She found in this view of infantile narcissism a typical male erasure of the female body. For Klein, the relation between mother and child is always already active, weirdly preceding even the existence of the baby or the mother. Her observation is as obvious as it is profound. The survival of the infant is dependent on their immediate recognition of the mother’s body; the just-born infant’s first task is to find the breast. This has been observed and is known as the primal crawl. In other words: the mother’s body exists in the mind of the infant before the infant’s mind exists. The image of the mother’s breast is coded into the quasi-immortal phylogenetic material of humankind.
While this revelation by no means absolves further narcissistic development (of which Klein’s analytic mastery is second-to-none), the transcendental image of the mother’s breast possessed by every infant immediately invalidates any such notions of solipsism or the pure narcissistic state. Baby’s first urge, even before they exist, is the urge to rely on another human. As Klein demonstrates with her idea of the bad breast, it is when this primal urge to relate is neglected or denied that toxic narcissism begins.
Melanie Klein c 1900
