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Reason and reparation
FRED ALFORD
Department of Government and Politics, The University of Maryland
The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not
go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contra-
Historically there was no contact at all between Klein and the Frank-
furt School, even as their dates overlap. In 1925 Klein was invited by
Ernest Jones to give a series of lectures on child analysis in England.
Two years later she emigrated there from Germany, where she re-
mained for the rest of her life. For a number of years during and im-
mediately after the Second World War, Klein was the leading intellec-
tual force in the British Psycho-Analytical Society.6 Her seminal paper,
"A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,"
appeared in 1935, twenty years prior to Marcuse's publication of Eros
and Civilization.7 Yet, the Frankfurt School shows no awareness of her
work. The reasons are complex, but the most important is surely that in
America, where most of the members of the Frankfurt School found
haven, psychoanalysis took a different turn than in England. In Amer-
ica, psychoanalysts such as Karen Homey and H. S. Sullivan aban-
doned much of Freudian instinct theory, particularly the Todestrieb
40
("death instinct"). At the same time in England, however, Klein and her
followers, such as Joan Riviere and Susan Isaacs, were applying devel-
opments in Freud's late metapsychology (precisely those developments
that Marcuse turns to in Eros and Civilization, such as Freud's specula-
tions about life and death "beyond the pleasure principle") in a clinical
setting, using this clinical experience to develop Freud's theory further.
Unlike Freud, who sees the Oedipus conflict as the crucible of psycho-
logical development, Klein focuses upon the infant's earliest emotions,
41
Beginning as early as six months, says Klein, the young child comes to
recognize that the bad mother who frustrates him, and whom he has
destroyed in phantasy a thousand times, is also the good mother who
tenderly meets his needs. It is this recognition that good and bad object
are one (the term "object,"a legacy of Freudian drive theory, in which
drives have objects, rather than relationships, is used to connote that
the young child at first relates to aspects of people, rather than whole
persons) that is the foundation of what Klein calls the depressive
position. Klein calls it the depressive position because attempts to
restore the damaged object to wholeness, in order to make reparation
for the harm caused it in phantasy, are coupled with depression and
despair, as the young child doubts that it is powerful enough to make
whole all that it has destroyed. Though Klein's emphasis on interpreting
aggression is generally stressed (she has been called an id psychologist),
the central role of love and reparation in her thinking should not be
overlooked. Joan Riviere, one of Klein's earliest and most well-known
associates, argues that her studies on reparation are "perhaps the most
essential aspect of Melanie Klein's work."12Just as much as hatred and
aggression, love and concern for others - particularly as this is ex-
pressed as wanting to mitigate their pain and suffering - is an inherent
feature of the child's earliest relationships, as well as those of adults.
But even the ultimate advent of freedom cannot redeem those who died in
pain. It is the remembrance of them, and the accumulated guilt of mankind
against its victims, that darken the prospect of a civilization without re-
pression.14
Eros or love ?
Why does Marcuse not just come out and say it: that the goal is a soci-
ety in which love triumphs over hate, and that for love to do so it must
gain pleasure from the welfare of others, sometimes even sacrifice for
them? Instead, Marcuse tries to derive these ideals from eros. In part
the answer has to do with the role of eros in founding a biological basis
for socialism, as Marcuse calls it. In part too the answer has to do with
a reductive tradition within psychoanalysis, in which eros comes to
include every relationship of care, concern, esteem, and affection.
There are not qualitatively different types of love, only degrees of in-
hibition of original aim. Freud, and presumably Marcuse, sees such a
comprehensive view of love as an advantage.
As for the "stretching"of the concept of sexuality ... anyone who looks down
with contempt upon psychoanalysis from a superior vantage point should
remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides
with the Eros of the divine Plato.'5
Socrates stress the way in which eros wants not merely to experience
beauty, but to own, possess, and control it, now and forever (Sym-
posium, 203b-e). Socrates goes on to employ an interesting personifi-
cation. The parents of Eros, he says are Contrivance and Poverty. For
this reason, Eros is always poor, and far from being sensitive and
beautiful, is hard, weather-beaten, shoeless, and homeless, taking after
his mother. However, as his father's son he schemes to get what is
beautiful. He is bold, always devising tricks, a lover of wisdom, a
magician, a true sophist (203b-e). Eros, it appears, is so intensely
needy that it can never be satisfied, and so desperate that it will scheme
and deceive to get all it can, and more. Too much is never enough. Eros,
it appears, is not truly concerned with the object - the person - in
itself, but with the object only as it is, or may become, a source of satis-
faction to human needs and desires (Phaedrus, 252d-e). If this is so,
how in the world can the project of the Frankfurt School, a project
based upon concern for those who cannot meet or defend their own
legitimate needs, be successfully grounded in eros? The psychoanalyst
Donald Meltzer compares the Freudian view of love with a capital
investment aimed at making a profit. You do not invest your libido
unless you hope to get back more than you give. "You cannot exactly
think of yourself as a benefactor of mankind when, by loving you set up
a factory, as it were, rather than endowing a charity."'6 Because it is
often the case that those who suffer cannot give back anything (and
those who have died never will), why bother investing in them? To feel
better about oneself, it could be argued in reply. But there are so many
more pleasant ways of doing so than confronting suffering and guilt,
and Eros is an expert in finding every one of them.
In her early writings, Klein links the desire for knowledge, the clumsily
termed "epistemophilic impulse," with the desire to appropriate the
mother's body, and its imagined contents, such as babies. In fact, it
could be argued that Klein's work began with the study of the "epis-
temophilic impulse." As Meltzer points out, so much of what is revolu-
tionary in Klein's work stems from her taking seriously, often literally,
young childrens' phantasies about the inside of their own and their
mothers' bodies.24 From the Kleinian perspective, the desire to know
and the desire to own and control the contents of the mother's body are
virtually identical. "So the epistemophilic instinct and the desire to take
possession come quite early to be most intimately connected with one
another...," she states.25 For Freud, the desire to know and childhood
curiosity about sex, particularly parental intercourse, are linked. Intel-
46
The ego's excessive and premature defence against sadism checks the estab-
lishing of a relation to reality and development of phantasy-life. The further
sadistic appropriation and exploration of the mother's body and of the
outside world (the mother's body in an extended sense) are brought to a
standstill, and this causes the more or less complete suspension of the
symbolic relation to things and objects representing the contents of the
mother's body and hence of the relation to the subject's environment and to
reality.27
Less this all seem particularly unlikely, Klein notes that no less a
Freudian than James Strachey has shown that reading has the uncon-
scious significance of taking knowledge from mother's body. Converse-
ly, anxiety and guilt about robbing her is a significant factor in inhibi-
tions in reading.28
day, while looking at some pencil shavings, Dick said of them "Poor
Mrs. Klein."29 For Dick the wood shavings did not represent Mrs.
Klein. They were Mrs. Klein, after Dick had expressed his aggression,
so that she was reduced from a whole object to pieces and fragments.
Yet, even this symbolic equation represented progress for Dick. Earlier
he had been unable to make even this terribly rigid and concrete equa-
tion, so anxious was he about his aggression. Of course, most intellec-
tual inhibitions are not this severe. Nevertheless, what the Frankfurt
School calls instrumental reason is characterized by a comparable,
albeit less extreme, symbolic rigidity. Like Dick, what Adorno calls
identity thinking virtually equates the object with the particular symbol
chosen to express it. I shall call this the rigid symbolic equation, in
order to suggests its linkage to intellectual inhibition associated with
paranoid-schizoid anxiety.
Normally, as internal phantasies come into contact with reality they are
modified by it. This is the way we make contact with reality. It is the way
we learn all we will ever know about reality. Freud made a similar point,
arguing that everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage.
For Kleinians, this unconscious stage is unconscious phantasy, and the
link to the external world is established through symbolism. In finding a
symbolic expression for his unconscious phantasy, the child - and the
adult too - learns to explore and relate to the world. Originally the
symbolic connection between internal object and external reality is
terribly concrete: "inner A = outer B." Gradually, as phantasy is modi-
fied by contact with external reality, the symbolism is loosened, be-
coming more abstract. Not only an outer B (mother's body), but an
outer C, D, and so on (i.e., other aspects of the world) can represent an
inner A, and vice versa. Furthermore, the symbolic equation itself
becomes looser. Rather than "inner A = outer B, C, and D," one might
write the equation as "inner A outer B, C, and D," in which =, the
mathematical symbol for congruence, is interpreted to mean that while
the elements of the equation are not identical, they stand in har-
monious agreement. One element represents another, because the
elements resemble each other in significant ways, without being iden-
tical. Otherwise expressed, an internal object may come to stand for a
number of external objects, and vice-versa, in a shifting pattern that
changes as we learn more about the world, and ourselves. I shall refer
to this as the loose symbolic equation. It represents thought becoming
48
less identical with its objects. It does not represent the end of intellec-
tual aggression, a point that I expand below.
have come to terms with death and separation that we are cognitively
able to see discoveries made under the influence of instrumental reason
("a positive problem-solving spirit") as part of a larger depressive
(referring to the emotional integration of good and bad that occurs in
the depressive position) whole.
That signs ever refer to the external world has, of course, become a
controversial proposition in recent years. "There is nothing outside the
text," argues Culler in his book on Roland Barthes, echoing a position
held by Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionist critics.37Texts are
always and only about other texts, the doctrine of intertextuality as it is
called. Otherwise expressed, all our knowledge is like the abstract
painting to which Goodman refers, in which symbolic juxtaposition -
difference - is everything. Obviously this raises a number of difficult
issues that cannot be addressed here. I can only clarify the position
taken in this paper, which is essentially that of Raymond Tallis in Not
Saussure, who argues that it is the impossible demand for perfect,
unmediated access to reality (presence) that creates the counter reac-
tion: all is language. It is not, continues Tallis, accidental that Husserl is
a major target of Derrida, for Husserl is the theorist par excellence of
unmediated presence. Because this is impossible, Derrida - in a giant
synecdoche - concludes that presence itself is impossible, confusing the
impossibility of absolute, unmediated presence with all presence - that
is, all contact with reality.38 Seen in this light, the early Frankfurt
Theorists look pretty good. For while holding to the ideal of unmedi-
ated presence, they recognize that it can never be achieved - this is
what the critique of identity thinking is about. Yet, this did not lead
them either to equate the world with the text, or to see the text as a
prison. The real world remains a presence in their work. While seeking
to reformulate their approach to this presence, the approach taken here
shares their concern with it.
It is for this reason that the ego frequently resorts to other defenses.
The ego, says Klein, sometimes "tries (by means of projection on to the
outer world) to demonstrate its independence from ... [itsl imagoes by
rebelling against all influences emanating from real objects.'39 If it is the
interaction of inner world with outer that modifies internal phantasy,
leading to knowledge of reality, then this rebellion against the influence
of reality must also impinge on intellectual development. Expressed in
philosophical terms, this rebellion is tantamount to idealism. Nietzsche
argues that "to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression
of hatred for a world that makes one suffer: the ressentiment of meta-
physicians is here creative."And Adorno, one of the few who could put
it more trenchantly than Nietzsche, writes of "idealism as rage" at a
world too sparse to be dominated.4" A Kleinian perspective requires
only a slight modification of this insight. Idealism is a defense against
rage, in which one's dependence upon the external world is denied, as
though the world of phantasy were self-sufficient.
Most fascinating are Keller's case studies, such as "The Force of the
Pacemaker Concept in Theories of Aggregation in Cellular Slime
Mold," revealing the empirical as well as theoretical advantages of
"dynamic objectivity." Relevant here, however, is only the relationship
between dynamic objectivity and reparative reason.
54
They are similar but not identical, for the same reason that Klein's per-
spective is not identical with that of Benjamin and Chodorow. The
latter pair see psychoanalysis almost exclusively in terms of the issues
of separation and connection. Psychoanalysis becomes the study of the
way in which individuals are unconsciously part of each other. Cer-
tainly this is a central issue in Klein's account as well, and it would be
mistaken to overemphasize the difference. What Klein adds is a greater
appreciation of the problem of aggression. For Klein, hatred and
aggression are not only reactions to threatening connections with
others, as Keller, following Benjamin and Chodorow, would have it.45
Rather, hatred and aggression are primary, passions so powerful that
they threaten to overwhelm the subject and all he cares about, unless he
projects them outwards into the world - into the project that the
Frankfurt School called the domination of nature. Klein is not guaran-
teed correct, of course, though she does seem to take the intensity of
our passions more seriously. What Klein's perspective does do is pro-
vide better access to the problem of instrumental reason as it was for-
mulated by the Frankfurt School. For it is ultimately over the problem
of aggression that their account stumbled.
that using words made her lose the illusion of possessing and being at one
with an endless, undivided world: 'when you name a thing you really lose
it."47
In using words - symbols for things - the woman had to recognize her
own separateness from these things, and at the same time confront her
own aggressiveness. Because she could do neither, the woman could
not write.
But, this is not reparative reason either. Sometimes we must break the
bones to find out where the joints are (what Feyerabend calls
57
"counterinduction"), and sometimes where the joints are for us may not
be where they are for the object, if in fact there are any objective joints
at all. Once again, the trick is not to become so fixated on a particular
symbolic equation, a particular model of the joints, as to fail to experi-
ment and play with others. In fact, Adorno's use of this "parable"(when
seen in the context of his work as a whole) is itself a rather rigid sym-
bolic equation. To suggest that most intellectual activity is like bone-
crunching, rending everything it thinks about as though it were a dead
body, recalls the sources of intellectual inhibition in the desire to pro-
tect the good object from one's own aggression. In reality, thought
always leaves its objects untouched. Incomplete in itself, this insight is
as true as its bone-crunching opposite. Critical theory has always
understood itself as carving out a midpoint between idealism and mate-
rialism, rejecting dualistic epistemologies of all stripes. Conversely, the
dialectic of Enlightenment is the inability to sustain a viable midpoint.
Adorno's position, though, reflects not so much a midpoint but a col-
lapsing of any distinction between thought and action, as though enter-
taining an aggressive thought for even a moment must lead to destruc-
tion. I address another way to think about the midpoint that the Frank-
furt School valued, but found so difficult to characterize, in the conclu-
sion.
Conclusion
Regarding the first objection, Klein argues that we seek to make repa-
ration out of genuine concern for the object. Reparation is truly an
object-related passion, motivated by our relationship to the object, our
love for it. Reparation may reduce guilt and anxiety, but this is an effect,
not a cause.53 But, if reparation puts the object first, there is nonethe-
less an individualistic cast to the Kleinian account missing in Benjamin
and Chodorow. For Klein, we care for others not because they are part
of us, but because they are different, and we are concerned about them.
In a certain limited sense the other remains an object, not in Freud's
sense of an object of our drives, whose humanity is unimportant, but as
a person who is distinct and separate from ourselves. This does not
make reparation selfish. It does make it an expression of individuality,
not its denial or transcendence.
Acknowledgments
Notes
17. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1961), 54-55.
18. Martin Jay addresses some of the Frankfurt School's concerns regarding the limits
of eros, and instinct theory generally, in The Dialectical Imagination (Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1973), chapter 3, 103-110. Marcuse was, of course, the
Frankfurt School member least troubled by the limits of eros, in part because he
"historicized" the concept.
19. Jessica Benjamin, "Authority and the Family Revisited: or, A World Without
Fathers?", New German Critique 13 (Winter, 1978): 35-57. "The End of Internali-
zation: Adorno's Social Psychology," Telos 32 (Summer, 1977): 42-64. Benjamin's
more recent The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon, 1988), addresses many of
these issues more fully, but in a different context, less related to the concerns of the
Frankfurt School.
20. Chodorow, "Beyond Drive Theory," Theory and Society 14, no. 3 (1985): 271-
319.
21. Flax, "Critical Theory as a Vocation," Politics and Society 8, no. 2 (1978): 201-
223, 217, her emphasis.
22. Benjamin, "Authority and the Family Revisited," 50-51.
23. Chodorow, "Beyond Drive Theory," 307.
24. Klein, Writings, vol. 1, 188, 222. Meltzer, "The Kleinian Expansion of Freud's
Metapsychology," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 62 (1981): 177-184,
178.
25. Klein, Writings,vol. 1, 188.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 232.
28. Ibid., 241. James Strachey, "Some Unconscious Factors in Reading," International
Jr. of Psycho-Analysis 11 (1930): 322-331.
29. Klein, Writings,vol. 1, 137.
30. Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), xiii-xiv.
31. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3-42.
32. Beyond Formal Operations: Late Adolescent and Adult Cognitive Development, ed.
M. Commons, F. A. Richards, and C. Armon (New York: Praeger, 1984), xiii-xiv.
33. "The Emergence of a Sense of Purpose: A Cognitive Case Study of Young
Darwin," in Beyond Formal Operations, 15.
34. Ibid.
35. The fallibilism of Karl Popper best exemplifies this ideal, The Logic of Scientific
Discovery (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
36. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis and N.Y.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967),
226-230,252-255.
37. Jonathan Culler, Barthes (London: Fontana, 1983), 81. Quoted in Raymond Tallis,
Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Macmillan,
1988), 17.
38. Tallis, Not Saussure, 202-205, 229-231. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's
attempt, in Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), to
carve out an experientialist midpoint between "The Myths of Objectivism and Sub-
jectivism" is similar to Tallis's approach, and delightfully jargon-free (185-194).
39. Klein, Writings,vol. 1,245.
40. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New
York, 1967), 519. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 22-24.
61
41. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London and New York: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1984), 6.
42. Feyerabend, "Two Models of Epistemic Change: Mill and Hegel," in his Philo-
sophical Papers, 2 vols. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), vol. 2, 73.
43. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: NLB, 1975), 30. Science in a Free Society
(London: NLB, 1978), 169.
44. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1985), 117.
45. Ibid., 124.
46. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 247.
Willkuer covers an enormous range of possibilities, from free will to arbitrary
action. With such a wide range of dictionary meanings available, the translator must
obviously choose according to the context.
47. Segal, "A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics," in New Directions in Psycho-
Analysis, ed. M. Klein et al. (London: Tavistock, 1955), 395.
48. Klein, "Love, Guilt and Reparation," in Love, Hate and Reparation, 102-110.
49. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 192-
199.
50. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976), 105-106.
51. In two books and one article I have argued at length that Marcuse idealizes deindi-
viduation, so I shall not repeat that argument here. See Alford, Science and the
Revenge of Nature: Marcuse and Habermas (Gainesville: University Presses of
Florida, 1985), chapter 3. Narcissism: Socrates, the Frankfurt School and Psycho-
analytic Theory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 138-143.
"Eros and Civilization After Thirty Years: A Reconsideration in Light of Recent
Theories of Narcissism," Theory and Society 16 (1987): 869-890.
52. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 43. The pagination from the Phaedrus is 265e.
53. Klein, "Love, Guilt and Reparation," in Love, Hate and Reparation, 101-110.