Radical Violence Inside Out: Woolf, Klein, and Interwar Politics

Abstract

So Mrs Klein absolutely flourished here because for some reason terrain was very, very receptive. --Hanna Segal (200) The history of ideas is a dead study if it proceeds solely in terms of 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 Fictions of Psychoanalysis that brings into sharp relief important issues raised by 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 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 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 conventional idea of 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 violence that it at same time prohibits (7). Indeed, one crucial issue of original controversy surrounding Melanie Klein stemmed from her repeated contention that should be regarded as no less sadistic than id, whereas was generally assumed by orthodox Freudians as a cultural agency to repress or domesticate id. (2) Klein maintained that superego's severity is an outcome of destructive impulses of subject (Psycho-Analysis of Children [PC] 197) and that the becomes something which bites, devours, and cuts (Love, Guilt, and Reparation [LGR] 187). The unnerving implication of Klein's theory is that superego, far from being a cultural repression/sublimation of id, is a form of same primal sadism as id. The id/violence can be radical core of superego/ culture, an ominous example of Freud's paradox of uncanny: what seems most alien can be most familiar, and vice versa. In short, conventional opposition of culture vs. violence is deconstructed by Klein in a uniquely psychoanalytic way. Stonebridge elucidates decisive impact of 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 context of another war--the after war (Hynes 353-82)--that is, severe class struggle in Britain in 1920s. (3) I will attend especially to political (a term of crucial importance in Kleinian theory) on part of (upper) middle-class intellectuals caused by [a]dmission of to 'liberal polity' (Lawrence 5), a sense of apprehension about the masses that made boundaries of 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 that operates in Kleinian psychic topography and that of interwar British middle-class body politic. …