Critique on the Couch by Amy Allen;

Author:Amy Allen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Love thus stands in a complex relationship to reparation. Reparation is made possible by love: first, in the sense that depressive guilt emerges as a response to the infant’s fear that they have attacked and destroyed the object that they love, and, second, as I discussed more fully in chapter 1, in the sense that the move to the depressive position is made possible by the primary caregiver’s love for the infant. More fundamentally still, however, reparation is made possible by love inasmuch as love is the unifying force that enables the psychic integration characteristic of the depressive position.

However, Klein’s account of love is deeply ambivalent. To relate to the object as a whole object is to accept that the good breast that one loves and idealizes is one and the same as the bad breast that one hates and feels persecuted by—and to continue to love that object all the same. This dynamic sets up a challenge for the subject, who must, as Klein puts it, “find the way to bear inevitable and necessary frustrations and the conflicts of love and hate which are in part caused by them: that is, to find his way between his hate which is increased by frustrations, and his love and wish for reparation which bring in their train sufferings of remorse.”63 Even if love is the only force that can mitigate and repair the damage unleashed by aggression and destructiveness, depressive love is also in large part about living with, managing, and withstanding ambivalence. For Klein, ambivalence cannot be overcome precisely because the death drive is ineliminable. This is another way of saying that, for Klein, unlike for Marcuse, there is no possibility of complete and final reconciliation, no possibility of wholeness.64

Klein’s distinction between manic and genuine or mature forms of reparation, discussed briefly in chapter 2, sheds further light on how her account differs from the strong notion of reconciliation envisioned by Marcuse. In manic reparation, the subject attempts to put the shattered object back together perfectly, as if it had never been destroyed, and in so doing denies its own responsibility for having attacked or destroyed the object in the first place. In this mode, reparation manifests as an obsessional need to control the object. As Klein puts it: “The reparative tendency, too, first employed in an omnipotent way, becomes an important defence. The infant’s feelings (in phantasy) might be described as follows: ‘My mother is disappearing, she may never return, she is suffering, she is dead. No, this can’t be, for I can revive her.’”65 Genuine reparation, by contrast, requires, as Hanna Segal explains, “learning to give up omnipotent control of this object and accept it as it really is.”66 If manic reparation is the attempt to restore the object in an omnipotent way, without admitting guilt or the reality of loss, genuine or mature reparation is, according to Segal, “the very reverse of a defense, it is a mechanism important both for the growth of the ego and its adaptation to reality.

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