Radical violence inside out: Woolf, Klein, and interwar politics

  So Mrs Klein absolutely flourished here because for some reason the
  terrain was very, very receptive.
  --Hanna Segal (200)

  The history of ideas is a dead study if it proceeds solely in terms of
  the abstraction of influences.
  --Raymond Williams (71)

In The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism, Lyndsey Stonebridge offers a critique of Elizabeth Abel's Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis that brings into sharp relief important issues raised by the recent "return to Melanie Klein." (1) Stonebridge argues that Abel's study is flawed by its rather offhand idealization of Klein's idea of reparation, understood as a cultural sublimation of chaos and violence into art. This sort of idealization characterizes what Leo Bersani calls the "culture of redemption" marked by a "tendency to think of cultural symbolizations as essentially reparative" (7). Following Bersani's critique of this tendency, Stonebridge writes: "What is so upsetting about Klein's theorization of psychic life is her image of an aggressivity" where "culture is not always connoted as a benevolent concept of creativity"; it can be much more "cruel" than Abel assumes (64). Against such a culture of redemption, we ought to read Melanie Klein for her insistence on a primal violence that even art and culture can sometimes express.

Important to this argument is Stonebridge's critique of the conventional idea of the superego as a cultural prohibition and sublimation of violence. In its place, Stonebridge describes a "superego which does not simply repress murderous desires but draws from them and repeats their ferocity with all the violence that it at the same time prohibits" (7). Indeed, one crucial issue of the original controversy surrounding Melanie Klein stemmed from her repeated contention that the superego should be regarded as no less sadistic than the id, whereas the superego was generally assumed by orthodox Freudians as a cultural agency to repress or domesticate the id. (2) Klein maintained that the superego's "severity is an outcome of the destructive impulses of the subject" (Psycho-Analysis of Children [PC] 197) and that "the superego becomes something which bites, devours, and cuts" (Love, Guilt, and Reparation [LGR] 187). The unnerving implication of Klein's theory is that the superego, far from being a cultural repression/sublimation of the id, is a form of the same primal sadism as the id. The id/violence can be the radical core of the superego/ culture, an ominous example of Freud's paradox of the uncanny: what seems the most alien can be the most familiar, and vice versa. In short, the conventional opposition of culture vs. violence is deconstructed by Klein in a uniquely psychoanalytic way.

Stonebridge elucidates the decisive impact of the First World War on Klein, British psychoanalysis, and several modernist writers, exploring their intertextual dialogues about "the destructive element." Taking my cue from her, I will reconsider Woolf and Klein in the context of another war--"the war after the war" (Hynes 353-82)--that is, the severe class struggle in Britain in the 1920s. (3) I will attend especially to political "anxiety" (a term of crucial importance in Kleinian theory) on the part of (upper) middle-class intellectuals caused by "[a]dmission of the masses to the 'liberal polity'" (Lawrence 5), a sense of apprehension about "the masses" that "made the boundaries of the body politic hard to define" (Tratner 61).What makes Klein's theories, especially her concepts of "phantasy" (4) and projective identification, relevant to this anxiety is their primary concern with psychic inside and outside. Such theoretical preoccupations with psychic topography can be contextualized in (and regarded as a radical critique of) a contemporary middle-class urge to make a clear demarcation between itself and "the masses." That is, there is a striking analogy between the "anxiety" that operates in Kleinian psychic topography and that of the interwar British middle-class body politic. As I will argue, what Klein would have termed the "sadistic superego" plays a crucial part in the psychoideological "phantasy" of the British middle classes between the wars.

This position can be seen as an elaboration of Joseph Schwartz's argument about the "paradigm shift" in the 1920s that "began to emerge with the psychoanalysis of children associated with the name of Melanie Klein" (193). Schwartz argues that "Klein's account of infancy," dominated by "a maelstrom of threats and deprivation, of destruction, of fears of retaliation, of an ever-present malevolence, of terrible anxiety, of terror" (197), was a theoretical/clinical response to "middle-class fears" in Europe immediately after the First World War, caused by "revolutions in Germany, Hungary, and Russia and the still poorly understood effects of the post-war restructuring of the Western world's political and economic map" (199). Melanie Klein's "vision of the terrors of the child's inner world was as situated in the uncertainties and brutalities of the aftermath of the First World War as was the literature, the movies, and the architecture."