ABSTRACT

One of the reasons why contemporary literary theory has tended to overlook Melanie Klein rests with the idea that her theories of art and symbolization are both too heavy-handed and too normative to be of any use to literary study. Klein begins with a therapeutically oriented discussion of the role of anxiety in the 'neurotic inhibitions of talent.' Klein asserts that priority when, several pages later, she writes: 'We may suppose that for a sublimation to be inhibited it must have actually come into existence as a sublimation'. Klein traces the history of the infant's attempts to deal with the anxieties engendered by a sexuality that is born as aggression. Biological death accomplishes, or literalizes, the annihilation of others that Proust tirelessly proposes as the aim of our interest in others. Gilles Deleuze has compared Proustian essences to Leibnizian 'monads,' each of which expresses the world from a distinctive point of view.