51 - “My argument is that Winnicott’s theory lacks the resources to explain the degree of organized hate and aggression we have seen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Melanie Klein provides a more useful way to think about hate and aggression. Honneth integrates Winnicott to his account of mutual recognition. Klein resists integration. In many respects, this resistance is good.”
- “Klein’s account is fundamentally liberal: about the individual psyche in a world of individuals. Nevertheless, the reparative element in Klein is strong and provides the intellectual and emotional resources to build a more just world. Winnicott’s account is, on the surface, better suited to the reconciliation that has been the goal of three generations of the Frankfurt School: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse in the first generation; Jürgen Habermas in the second; and Axel Honneth in the third.”
52 - “It is unnecessary to posit a death drive, as Freud does, in order to explain this violence, but any critical-theoretical account must take humanity’s propensity toward hatred and violence seriously.” 63 - “Unlike stages of development, positions are never outgrown. The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions vie with each other throughout life.” 66 - “Both Winnicott and Klein recognize childish destruction that persists into adulthood. But for Winnicott destructiveness is ultimately a form of creativity, one that helps make a world. For Klein, the infant’s first encounter with the outside world comes from sadistic attacks on the mother’s body (Klein 1975a:276). For Klein, the child’s sadism also makes a world, but not one we should want to live in, populated by antagonistic and destructive part objects threatening both self and loved ones.” 69 - “Recall Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic, Moral Man and Immoral Society (2013). Unlike individuals, nations find it impossible to feel contrition for their sinfulness. Klein has been called a theorist of original sin. It’s an exaggeration, but it is true that hate and fear comes before love, as the paranoid-schizoid position precedes the depressive position.” 70 - “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.” Questions: How does one prove or disprove Klein’s theory of “original sin”? I think one of the things I find most difficult about psychoanalysis, is that some of these theories feel incredibly obscure and difficult to prove. It is hard to hypothesize the essence of humans. With that in mind, does the author oversimplify patriotism etc. by relating it to Klein’s theory of the paranoid-schizoid position?