Mutilation and Reparation: Writing in Melanie Klein

Abstract

Throughout her own written texts (recently republished in four volumes by Hogarth Press)1 Melanie Klein sporadically but persistently is attentive to psychopathology of writing, seen both as a literal, graphic activity and as a form of significant discourse. Although in her analysis of children she may seem to have encouraged play of signifier not so much through words as through toys (those same toys which an incensed Deleuze will later accuse her of having preloaded, as trains and tunnels, with debilitating Oedipizing significance),2 Melanie Klein does in fact look hard and perspicaciously at marks, letters, words and sentences which her patients trace before her. In a fragmentary Contribution in 1927 she writes: I pointed out in my papers and lectures that child differs in its mode of expression from adult by fact that acts and dramatizes its thoughts and phantasies. But that does not mean that word is not of great importance in so far as child commands it (III, 314). Command of word and word's commands continuously provoke her interest and inform her theoretical work. In configurations of letters, distortion of handwriting, displacement and denial of meaning, she locates anxieties, idealizations and repressions which compose scene of child's psychic life, and is within this scene that writing originates. The process of symbolization, including speaking, reading and writing, is decisively affected and marked by child's relationship to part-objects, to its own body and, particularly, to inner and outer space of mother's body. Part-objects, on which ego and superego are modelled, exist as real or phantasized, present or absent; these objects, primarily breast, penis and faeces, are consistently characterized as good or bad, depending on nature of associations and indentifications connected with them. (The words good and bad are always to be read as being enclosed in quotation marks; henceforth this is to be taken for granted.) The primary relationship between child and mother is based on a relation to a part-object: this objectrelation is not only with real breast but also involves the infant's emotions, phantasies, anxieties and defences (III, 51). The part-object becomes introjected as a mental concept, and takes on qualities associated