Little Sadists
Of the violent wishes held by children Melanie Klein is unequivocal: “The child’s dominant aim is to possess himself of the contents of the mother's body and to destroy her by means of every weapon which sadism can command.” And not only of mother: “the child's sadistic attacks have for their object both father and mother, who are in phantasy bitten, torn, cut or stamped to bits.”
I read Melanie Klein with rapt horror and a kind of salacious incredulity (perhaps I wish to destroy my own parents); but my sober mind tends to roll off these passages like water off a duck: I cannot believe it; I have no memory of ever wishing such a thing (obviously, due to repression, not even the child remembers it). After further reading I become incensed: “she is projecting her own sadism into the children!” I declare; for everyone knows that Melanie Klein had a cruel mother (this argument, I think? is sound: that sadism, far from being universal in children, is rather a local phenomena, delivered by the parent; what comes around goes around—of course we must admit that a lot of sadism goes around).
Nevertheless it is true that the rational mind cannot accept half of what you read in the psychoanalytic literature, especially Klein and all her gothic imaginary; your own adult defenses won’t allow it. And yet who can deny that certain children are little sadists? Have you witnessed the baby biting the breast? Or the cruelties of the playground? Why can’t we allow that children too, are all too human? (this is not to say that they are just small adults, far from it). To say this in reverse: why is it so difficult to see the child in the adult?
The heretical power of Melanie Klein’s demonology cannot be overstated. Its power to shock is inverse to how tight you cling to the bourgeoise (read Christian) notion that children are little angels. “Where do children go when they die, mommy?” I asked as a child. “Straight to heaven!” my mom said. This preciousness, this lingering halo still surrounds the family unit with a false innocence, preordained by God (a blessed family unit that has no shortage of horrible adults I might add). It is a preciousness that repels even the idea of a “sexual satisfaction in violence.” But one has only to read the newspaper to be reminded daily of just how much sadism is rampant in history. Is not this history merely a long and bloody catalogue of these “satisfactions” made scalable by technology? A mechanized sadism…?
see also:
Melanie Klein’s Transcendental Breast
