Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“According to Melanie Klein (1975a), aggression is an expression of envy, hate, and sadism, all of which are manifestations of the death instinct. Since the death drive is innate, so too are envy, hate, and sadism, even in the newborn infant”“For Winnicott, on the other hand, the mother hates the baby before the baby hates the mother (1958). There is no need for reparation, as Klein calls it, for there is no place for sadism, primary envy, and the evil that takes pleasure in destruction for its own sake. For Winnicott, aggression is an expression of creativity and a way of acknowledging the reality of the external world.”“It is the destructive drive that creates the quality of externality. This is central in the structure of my argument,”“Maturity is about destroying the object in fantasy so that one can use it in reality. “The price that has to be paid [for the reality of the external world] is acceptance of the ongoing destruction in unconscious fantasy”“For Freud, the otherness of reality is infuriating. Otherness comes first. For Winnicott, it is the destructive impulse that creates the quality of externality or otherness, and it is this externality that makes the object available for satisfaction. With the term creates, Winnicott means something like Kant’s synthetic a priori: destructiveness allows us to discover in nature what our minds allow to be there, the real separateness of the object.”“Particularly important is the caregiver’s ability to help the child regulate its emotions, as when the child is overexcited, and mother holds her or him calmly. Eventually, the child will internalize these experiences, learning to contain her or his own  emotional state. At other times, mother will mirror the child’s emotions, as discussed earlier. Both are necessary for human emotional development.”-Ah the development of themes that leads to theories of secure base and safe haven with parent-child relationships“the depressive position, in which the infant and young child desperately desires to make reparation to his mother for all the harm he has caused her, at least in phantasy.3 Eventually, reparation comes to include genuine love and concern for the other. Originally, reparation too is a selfish impulse, as the infant is motivated by fear that he has destroyed the source of life itself (Klein 1975b).”“the goal is not so much interpretation of anxiety as it is the containment of anxiety, in which the analyst uses the “transferencecountertransference,” as it is called today, to experience the patient’s anxieties in a more mature way, returning them in less terrifying form”“Human destructiveness stems from an attempt to alienate psychotic anxiety (that is, anxiety that threatens to annihilate the core self) in others, and fighting it there”-the tensions that arise due to the inevitability of death“If so, then attachment theory, particularly as developed by Ainsworth (1968), looks different from a Kleinian perspective. Not only are we attached to others, but these others contain parts of ourselves: horrifying parts, and good parts too, as well as an otherness we envy. Kleinian theory is not merely an alternative to attachment theory. Hers is an elaboration of attachment as defense against paranoid/schizoid anxiety as well as an opportunity and motive to make reparation. Indeed, it is the connection between attachment theory and Klein that makes her the first object relations theorist.”“Love, we learn early, may be translated into patriotism and loyalty, fear into obedience and the corruption of national spirit in diverse ways, from militarism to appeasement. But what of hatred? Hatred infiltrates and corrupts all the political virtues, such as patriotism, community, loyalty, tolerance, and citizenship. What is needed is the analysis of the way in which each of these virtues has its dark side, its correlate rooted in hatred, as when loyalty to one’s own nation depends on hatred of others.”