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IV. THE BRITISH CONTRIBUTION
IV. A. Kleinian perspective The work of Melanie Klein contributes to the development of the concept of ‘transference’ in three ways: Klein senses that the transference onto the analyst originates in the same processes as the ones which determine object relations at their earliest stages; secondly, she stresses the importance of unconscious phantasy; and lastly, she theorises a technique in which the unconscious elements of the transference are being inferred on the basis of the whole of the presented material, which she refers to as the ‘total situation’. Klein posits object relations as the origin of the transference. Freud understands the transference as a direct reference to the analyst in the analytic session and as a re-enactment of the past. For Klein, the primitive internal object relations are at the origin of the transference and she views psychic life as a constant changing and reshaping of internal imagos. Through her work with very young children, she comes to understand that the material displayed in play therapies is not a re-enactment of a distant past, but of an immediate present, for the traumatizing events appear to be living on. Klein takes children’s play seriously: it is their way of relating to themselves, to their own fears and anxieties as well as to their deepest desires. The child expresses his effort to encompass experiences and phantasies through the relations enacted in the play session with the analyst. In the same way, the transference in adult analysis becomes a re-enactment of current phantasy experiences, made out of unconscious and conscious phantasies, internal objects and the interplay of emotions directed at them as well as the defences protecting them. The object is always at the heart of emotional life from the very start, as it is in the transference situation, and defence mechanisms are from the beginning indelibly linked with object relations. Object-seeking is considered by Melanie Klein to be fundamental, constituting a prerequisite for psychic life whereas, for Freud, the satisfaction of drives is independent of object-seeking. These differences produce a profound divergence in their respective theories of transference: whereas, in Freud’s view, transference is mainly based on drives seeking discharge and on the reconstruction of the past, for Klein, the evolution of the transference becomes the centre of attention. “[…] fundamental changes (in analysis) come about through the consistent analysis of the transference; they are bound up with a deep-reaching revision of the earliest object relations and are reflected in the patient’s current life and altered attitudes towards the analyst.” (Klein, 1952, p. 438). Klein does not favour ‘here-and-now’ interpretations that would be disconnected with the patient’s past but she recognizes that the patient projects an internal world determined by past experiences onto the analyst and the structure of this internal world evolves throughout the process of transferential reliving. The discovery of splitting mechanisms in the 1920’s enables psychoanalysts to conceptualize transference as experienced by psychotic patients: the splitting into good and bad objects which dominates very early childhood bears directly on the understanding of transference as the interconnection of positive and negative feelings of love and hate. The
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