ABSTRACT
In the more than four decades since Klein’s death Kleinians have applied her account of the dynamics of individual development to the dynamics of groups, or even entire societies. Freud and Freudians assume that groups are bound by attachments to leaders that are rooted in feelings for the father.1 Kleinian social theorists, in contrast, have explored the way in which the relationship between the individual and the group reproduces the relationship between the child and its mother.2 ey have argued that individuals unconsciously experience groups as simultaneously gratifying and frustrating mothers that inevitably evoke their gratitude and their rage. us the group that is loved is also necessarily the group that is hated. e development of the group demands that its members learn to respond reparatively to the anxiety and guilt aroused by this ambivalence, that is, that they come to understand that their group is neither all-good nor all-bad but nonetheless worthy of care. But this happy outcome is always threatened by the temptation of individual members to defend against the group equivalent of depressive anxiety and guilt, either by denying one’s dependence on the group (the group analogue of manic denial) or by denying one’s rage against it (the group analogue of idealization). Manic denial leads to dropping out of the group but oen entails an obsessive preoccupation with, and denigration of, the very group from which one has dropped out. (ink of the former Leist and now militantly right-wing David Horowitz!) Idealization creates a demonized out-group that unwittingly becomes a target for all the rage that cannot be expressed within the in-group. us the Kleinian message is at once hopeful and ominous. It reassures us that harmonious relations among groups are possible if group members cultivate their capacity to acknowledge and work through, rather than defend against, the ambivalence and guilt that inevitably accompany membership in their group. But is also warns us that the failure to cultivate this capacity can culminate in exploitative, even murderous relations between groups. Group development, in short, is possible but precarious.
