ABSTRACT
The link between Klein’s writing and the concerns of moral philosophy and ethics is a paradoxical one. She scarcely addressed herself explicitly to writings on this subject, other than those occurring within the field of psychoanalysis itself. Unlike Freud, she only rarely referred to or engaged with recognised works or classics of philosophy, literature or other fields of scholarship in her reflections on human nature and its moral propensities. Yet on the other hand, her work is saturated with investigations of human dispositions and states of mind which have a deeply ethical significance. She writes, for example, about greed, jealousy, envy, gratitude, guilt, love, hate and reparation, as central themes of her work – all of these are concepts of obvious moral significance, since they refer to normatively framed ways in which human beings relate to one another, in their thoughts, emotions and actions. The psyche in Klein’s account is organised through its relations to what it experiences as good and bad. Her account of the psychological development of human beings from infancy gives a large significance to the emergence of a moral sense, although she describes this in terms of emotions, dispositions and orientations towards others, and not in the language of philosophical ethics. Klein believed that a capacity for love and concern for others was innate in human beings, although it always co-existed with opposed dispositions to hate and to injure. Her account of the form taken in the earliest stages of life of the impulses to love and hate – their oral and anal dimensions, their passion and infantile ferocity – shocked many readers, as it challenged (as Freud had done) commonly held notions of the essential innocence of infants. The starkness of her descriptions may have contributed to the misleading view of Klein as giving excessive emphasis to the destructive dimensions of human nature, when this is far from the central perspective of her work. Her theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions challenges Freud’s account of the origins and nature of the moral sense. The idea of morality as embodied in the functions of the superego, as a form of internalised coercion or repression, is radically supplemented in Klein’s account by the idea of the normal emergence, in the development of the ‘depressive position’, of concern for the well-being of the object and of desire to make reparation for harms inflicted (in phantasy and reality) upon it. In essence, in Klein’s view, the moral sense arises both from a primitively internalised fear of punishment and retribution, and, in healthy development, from the emergence of a concern for the well-being of others motivated by love, which Klein thought of as the ‘normal’ superego (O’Shaughnessy, 1999).
