References To Pathological Organisations In ‘Melanie Klein Today’

REFERENCES TO PATHOLOGICAL ORGANISATIONS AS DESCRIBED IN ‘MELANIE KLEIN TODAY’, with footnotes and an addition.

Many authors have contributed to the development of the concept of ‘pathological organization’. Within psychoanalysis , the word ‘organization’ has been in use for some time, first as ‘narcissistic organization’ (Rosenfield 1971 and Sohn 1972), then as ‘defensive’ organization (O’Shaughnessy, 1981). More recently Steiner used the term pathological organization.

Segal (1972) describes a ‘constellation of defences’ when an uneasy equilibrium between the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is maintained. These ‘positions’ have been repeatedly described.

Riesenberg-Malcolm (1981a) use of ‘expiation’ as a defence seems to be a description of a pathological organization. Joseph (1982) describes an ‘addiction to near death’, suggesting the working of a pathological organization.

Rosenfield elaborated on the working of such an organization which is based on destructive narcissism, where a bad self is idealized, a process with a perverse quality; when the bad self is triumphant in seducing the good self. The bad self contains omnipotent destructive parts ¹ that are idealized, and are aimed at destroying any positive libidinal object relationship and any part of the self which experiences a need for an object to depend on so that external objects are permanently devalued. This is done to avoid the perception of an object as separate from the self, and therefore the defeat and hurtful humiliation that the external object contains valuable qualities, are not faced. When this avoidance lessens, envy consciously emerges and the concomitant feelings of rage and resentment at the loss of omnipotent narcissism are experienced.

Rosenfield links the reality of facing dependency to a realization of oedipal creativity in the form of the joint separate other as a source of life that cannot be controlled omnipotently. The Bionian concept of internally linking feelings and mind, as a symbolic representation of the parents coming together in procreation, which can be envied and admired and identified with, seems a further corollary of the process of negotiating separation, where there can be attempts to omnipotently control through splitting, or the facing of separateness, with feelings of guilt and creative reparation.

Sohn’s concept of the ‘identificate’ describes the formation and maintenance of the bad self. His concept relates to a triumphant and omnipotent identification, which envelops the whole self as well as the object, in order to avoid separateness, dependence and envy. ²

O’Shaughnessy (1981) describes how a defensive organization is established and re-established against external and internal objects that are intensely anxiety provoking and particularly overladen with infantile anxieties. This establishment- in-process is unlike defences which are transient and recurrent and form part of normal development, while the former is more on the level of a fixation when underlying anxiety is intolerable, and as a consequence object relations become fixed and devoid of anxiety, while open to exploitation and abuse.

Joseph (1981) in her description of ‘addiction to near-death’, as a type of defensive organization, suggested that this state is different from a longing for Nirvanian peace ³ and definitely more deadly, that is, to know and be satisfied by one’s own destruction. This implies that a powerful masochism is at work with considerable libidinal satisfaction and its concomitant concretely experienced painful excitement with which no ordinary pleasure can compare: ‘….. no ordinary pleasure, genital, sexual or other, offered such delight as this type of terrible and exciting self-annihilation which annihilates also the object..’(p.315).

Steiner (1984) describes the pathological organization as basically narcissistic and reflects the preponderance of projective identification which creates objects which are controlled by parts of the self-projected into them. Splitting tends to create multiple objects which are then assembled into a highly organized structure. It is particularly when defences become organized into complex systems that they seem to give rise to lasting pathological states, which are extremely damaging to development and which can be very resistant to change. A pathological organization functions as a defence, not only against fragmentation and confusion but also against the mental pain and anxiety of the depressive position. It acts as an intermediate area between the two positions and offers a retreat from either intolerable paranoid or depressive anxieties. The pathological organization functions as a kind of pseudo-integration under the dominance of narcissistic structures, which can masquerade as the true integration of the depressive position and which gives the illusion of stability and relative freedom from anxiety and pain.

An observation of a ‘state of transition’ as a highly idealized state, both internally and externally can be described as another example of a pathological organization. Deadly anxious excitements are consciously felt through the external process of being- in- transit, of belonging elsewhere, as long as the transitory state of being- on- the- way- there, remains, and elsewhere is never, or only temporarily, reached. Its infantile libidinal roots seem to lie in rocking movements which were erotogenic, with particularly strong oral, anal and urethral fixations and provided stimulation and excitement in a rather desolate external environment, where mostly self-feeding experiences dominated the initial interpersonal domain. Solitary self-feeding with rocking movements from the waist up was secretively maintained well into latency and defended intolerable early anxieties of being annihilated and abandoned. Surface compliance and a preference for temporary spatial arrangements where movement could be observed, made way for the manipulation of being- on- the- move and the re-arrangement of temporary external spaces, the latter preferably with a suggestion of continuous fluctuation in the intensity of light or darkness; as few objects as possible, and a closeness to water. Such spaces represented an internal world devoid of permanent objects, which had to maintained by the use of excessive splitting and omnipotent control and were positively overvalued, with an extremely negative evaluation of an external world that is perceived as deceiving and ruthless.

Themes of nowhere in contrast to elsewhere revealed an underlying splitting of omnipotent grandeur from annihilation and death, defended by a ‘state of transition’ as a known inner state or retreat, within which the splitting was maintained, while its anxious quality appeared deceptively close to depressive anxiety.

End Notes

1 Freud in his paper ‘Anxiety and Instinctual life’ reported: …”we may regard the self-destructiveness as an expression of a ‘death instinct’, which cannot fail to present in every process “p.140, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’. In ‘Civilization and its Discontents’(p.121) Freud stated:” It must be confessed that we have much greater difficulty in grasping that instinct; we can only suspect it, as it were, as something in the background behind Eros, and it escapes detection unless its presence is betrayed by its being alloyed to Eros”. He continued: “we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence”p.121.

2 The ‘thetic’ phase of Kristeva , where the subject is able to attribute differences and signification, rather than ‘pulse’ in ceaseless heterogeneity, seems to be a comment on the awareness of being separate, and a ’subject-in-process in the symbolic order’. In ’The portable Kristeva’ Ed. Kelly Oliver (1997).

3 McDougall in ‘The Many Faces of Eros, A Psychoanalytic Exploration of human sexuality’(l994), described a ‘final defense’, namely a destruction of affect or ‘disaffectation’, implying the loss of meaning in relationships, with an addiction to ‘neoneeds and neoreality' and is interpreted by her as protective barriers against disaffectation and a wish for a Nirvanian state. McDougall seems reluctant to link disaffectation to the death instinct, however, mentioned that messages and their meaning are destroyed and no affect can be mobilized by word representations and there is a regression to the pre-verbal world of the Kristevian ‘chora’, or ceaseless heterogeneous pulsions, predominantly, oral anal and also semiotic in character, in contrast to the symbolic of the thetic phase.

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