Gains and Risks of Bridging the Seemingly Unbridgeable

Being a devoted fan of the works of Melanie Klein and feeling that she is not as nearly appreciated as she deserves to be, while simultaneously, it feels almost by necessity, being drawn to Lacanian psychoanalysis, together with its immense influence over humanities in the widest sense, I was very excited to encounter this book. And indeed, conceptually this is a very impressive text, both in its content (offering a comparative analysis of Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which are generally considered to be incommensurable) and its form (it comes to us as a dialogue between the two authors, one strongly based in Lacanian theory, the other much closer to Kleinian psychoanalysis). Moreover, its ambition is to trace the influence these two psychoanalysts had for the broadly conceptualized critical theory, as well as to suggest some ways in which this encounter can and should be yet more productive. Finally, as the authors themselves announce at the very opening, they offer us this book as an accessible introduction to these two schools of psychoanalysis. In this review, my attempt is to give a brief overview of the main topics covered, while also offering my own modest assessment of how successful the book is in achieving the goals it set for itself.

However, it might be worth first introducing the authors briefly (in the way they introduce themselves at the beginning of their dialogue), because their backgrounds play an important role and, in a way, it seems, an initial impetus for this book. Amy Allen is the Kleinian out of the two, with a strong training in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, including its most recent developments, such as its Habermasian investment in the category of rationality. She is also an expert in Foucault. Mari Ruti represents Lacanian side of this dialogue, with her general background being what she terms “contemporary” or “progressive” theory: French poststructuralism, authors such as Foucault and Agamben, but also cultural studies, ethnic studies, queer and feminist theory etc. All these perspectives inform their dialogue, some more, some less explicitly.

The book is structured around seven topics: subjectivity, fusion, anxiety, affect, love, creativity and politics, each of them occupying one chapter; expectedly, as this is unavoidable, these concepts often enter each other’s chapters. It is very convenient, or maybe even necessary, that the category of subject comes at the very beginning of their dialogue. This is a frequently debated and, as of late, strongly contested concept in progressive theory, which does not seem to think it is possible to uncouple it from its Western-centric and human-centric roots. However, both Ruti and Allen are unwilling to give up on it completely as it does not seem there is an adequate political alternative to it, which is why they both appreciate psychoanalysis so much: it offers incomplete, fractured and fragmented subject, but nonetheless the subject as an operating political category. Here, when it comes to subjectivity, the point at which Lacan and Klein differ the most has to do with the ego or, more specifically, with Klein’s claim that the goal of analysis is strengthening the ego. This is the point Lacan was very critical of because for him, on the contrary, the goal of the therapy should be to weaken the ego, as the ego is nothing but a narcissistic deception that stops the unconscious from entering the consciousness, which is the only way to become a subject. Therefore, in order to become a subject, one needs to diminish the ego, rather than integrate it.

Let’s look at how Allen and Ruti resolve this conflict, because it is very symptomatic for the rest of the text. Or rather, it announces the formula through which the rest of Lacan-Klein conflicts are being resolved throughout the book. In addition, because the question of subject comes almost as the birthplace of all the other disagreements Klein and Lacan have, or at least it bears some important implications for them, to solve the question of the subject is to already somewhat minimize the overall gap or discrepancy between these two authors. First of all, what seems to be happening here is that Lacan is offering a very limited, maybe even unfair, reading of Klein: he first simplifies her argument by equating it with ego psychology, which he deeply and openly despises, and then just rejects it as both ridiculous and dangerous. Instead of simply accepting this, Allen and Ruti explain us, we ought to look more closely at what Klein means by integration, as it is very far from the ego psychology take on psychoanalytic tradition. For Klein, integration of the ego is far from an attempt to generate a complete, or completely integrated ego, as this is simply impossible. Rather, the goal is to expand the ego and by doing this to allow it to incorporate disparate and conflicting attitudes (including previously split unconscious material, which Lacan attaches to the subject), to assume affective ambivalence towards object(s) and, in the final instance, towards social reality as such. Moreover, unlike Anna Freud and her followers, who believed that superego should be strengthened as well, Klein was very clear in her position that superego is too rigid and too violent and should be lessen instead of encouraged. Therefore, it might as well be that what Klein means by “ego” is what Lacan means by “subject.” Furthermore, the authors write, we can even claim that the two would agree on the moment which initiates the process of subjectivation – for Lacan it is the lack or das Ding (depending on our perspective, as these two are mutually implicated), and for Klein it is the primary loss. I am somewhat simplifying the very nuanced argument here, but I am not very far off. In other words, the constant attempt of Allen and Ruti is to show us that the gap between Klein and Lacan is not that huge at all; that they very often represent same ideas, but they simply articulate them differently.

It seems that the two agree in many things. Both Klein and Lacan reject Freudian idea of primary fusion between the infant and the caregiver: for Klein, object relations are operating from the get-go, therefore there must be at least rudimentary ego from the very start; for Lacan, in a similar fashion, the intersubjectivity (mediated by the symbolic order) is always already there. They both consider death drive as one of the most important contributions of psychoanalysis and the crucial psychic force in our lives (although they evaluate its role differently). What Lacan understands by “language” somewhat corresponds to what Klein means by “phantasy.” There is even a certain analogy between Klein’s positions and Lacan’s registers: individuals shift between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive position throughout their lives, just as they shift between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. The two also “converge on the idea that love is anything but harmonious insofar as it requires—in Kleinian terms—tolerating ambivalence and—in Lacanian terms—loving what is inadequate, wounded, or disorienting about the other” (xvi). The list goes on.

To be fair, there is at least one crucial point in which Klein and Lacan disagree to a degree that is unbridgeable, and that is the position of the therapist. Klein believed that the analyst should play a role of the good object for the analysand, as this is a way for the analysand to get to a more integrated ego. Lacan saw things very differently: the analyst should be an enigma, not allowing analysands to get to a point of comfort in therapy, but to make them guess constantly. The analysand should accept that the analyst does not possess the answer; moreover, that there is no ultimate answer that leads to a cure, to a completeness: this is the goal of therapy. After Allen and Ruti detect this elemental clash, they simply leave it there, without really exploring some possible further implications coming out of it. Is it an important disagreement? It certainly seems so. Is there a fundamental division that brought Klein and Lacan to these very different takes on the role of the analyst? There must be, and the authors rightly detect that this is strongly related to the already addressed (and presumably solved) dilemma of bringing about the subject versus strengthening the ego, as for Lacan strengthening the ego and being the good object for your analysand are pretty much the same thing, and it is a very bad thing. However, it does not seem that this point relativizes the author’s previous claim that this disagreement is almost nothing but a matter of different terminology.

The two aspects of this book which I find the most impressive are its engagement with affect theory and its passionate call for progressive theory to re-examine its attitude towards psychoanalysis. Although I do not necessarily agree with all of the observations and conclusions in regard to affect theory (for example, Ruti’s assertion that affect theory tends to be cynical about the idea of social change on a wider level), I still find it a very needed and very creative attempt to explore the relationship between affect and psychoanalysis. Just like they did with the category of subject, the authors try to convince us, and at least with this reader they succeed very well, into a position that would be critical of the concepts of agency, normativity and political revolution - and pay more attention to everyday, mundane moments of affective politics - without necessarily discarding them as regressive and violent. In addition, there are many jewels scattered around this chapter (and, indeed, within the book in general), for example a very interesting take on Adorno as a proto-affect theorist, or thinking about Klein’s projective identification as somewhat akin to Brennan’s transmission of affect. I strongly appreciate these moments, as I generally believe that the relationship between affect theory and psychoanalysis is something that needs to be urgently addressed.

Allen and Ruti assume similar approach in their attempt to push critical theory towards paying more attention to psychoanalysis, as this is indeed a line of thought that can offer a more complex understanding of the category of universalism as something that is always in-between intrapsychic and intersubjective - in Kleinian terms – or, to translate it into Lacanian language, as something that should always account for both constitutive and circumstantial lack, the second one being particularly felt by the deprivileged ones.

Therefore, there is no doubt that this book comes as a very good critical introduction to Klein and Lacan and the implications their concepts and theories have and, more importantly, might or should have for the contemporary critical theory, taken in the widest sense. Allen and Ruti are clearly experts in Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis respectively; moreover, they are creative readers of their theories, unafraid to push them further, towards lines of thinking in which Lacan and Klein were never directly invested. The text is scattered with interesting, sometimes even provocative, points and ruminations. It is a pleasure to read, and I most definitely benefited from it. It also offers a persuasive argument as to why should critical theory (including contemporary progressive theory) still engage with psychoanalysis. However, I am not entirely sure the book succeeds in another of its ambitions (and, sadly, it happens to be the one I was most excited about), which is to adequately explore the complex relationship between Kleinian and Lacanian theory.

As I already announced, very often some of the differences are brushed over and similarities are over-emphasized. This is a trap of synthetic thinking: if we bent things a bit, if we assume a particular perspective, if we read it creatively enough, if we put some things to the fore, while keeping some others in the brackets, we can easily show that the gap between different theoretical positions is, after all, not that big. There are many sentences that come as clear signals of this ambition, and maybe even of the struggle to achieve it, such as: “The second type of anxiety, the fear of being suffocated or deprived of lack—I wonder if there’s an analogue for it in Klein” (82); or: “I’m trying to think about how to connect your explanation to Klein’s account of love” (141). Moreover, this type of approach is not limited to Klein and Lacan; in the very introduction of the book, Allen claims that bridging the gap between opposing theories is the approach she always assumes, and Ruti asserts that Lacan and Foucault “lead more or less to the same conceptual place” (xiii). It seems that this approach is simply taken for granted, offered as an axiom that does not even need to be justify. The idea that insisting on the differences and zooming in on the reasons for these differences might be at least as productive as an attempt to bridge the gap is completely absent from these pages. To be fair, this might be because the discrepancy between Klein and Lacan is something that gets constantly re-iterated and by now taken for granted, so Ruti and Allen decided to offer us an alternative. I deeply appreciate this, as I find it very needed. Still, I think that the opportunity to investigate the said differences once more, in a more nuanced and creative way, is somewhat of a missed opportunity of this book.

In this context, it is useful to briefly compare this volume with a (relatively) recent book by Alenka Zupančič, titled What is Sex?, in which she compares Lacan with a series of authors and theoretical schools (Butler, Deleuze, Badiou, new materialism and posthumanism), only to always conclude that, although there are significant moments of convergence, there remains something distinctively Lacanian in Lacan and, predictably (Zupančič is a devoted Lacanian after all), he always comes out as a winner. This is a very different approach from the one Ruti and Allen assume, in which the specificities of particular authors almost melt into a shared set of broader points and arguments. To be clear, my claim is not that we should assume one or other approach (admittedly, I myself am too often prone to the synthetic thinking as well). The point is, rather, that we should know why we do what we do, and we should be very clear with the reasons for doing it. In other words, what I find somewhat lacking in this book are the points in which authors are getting explicit with the benefits we can reap if we decide to bridge the gap between Klein and Lacan. I am not saying that the benefits are not here (they, after all, largely depend on those who read the book and then try to do something with it); I am simply confessing I would very much appreciate if the authors themselves were clearer about this.

More important objection, at least for this reader, has to do with what occasionally starts to feel as a somewhat unfair general setup of the authors’ approach, in which it too often seems as if Klein is being defended from Lacan; even worse, at times the impression is that the authors are trying to justify Klein’s theory by pushing it closer to Lacan. In a way, this might make sense: Lacan was explicitly critical of Klein and (what he considered) Kleinians, whereas we do not have examples of Klein directly engaging with Lacan’s theory. Therefore, it is not surprising that, on occasion, the impression is that it is Klein who is put on trial here. Also, to be fair, there is at least one moment, mentioned above, in which Lacan’s reading of Klein is called out as being “misleading” (26). Moreover, both authors consider Klein’s concept of reparation as something that can, politically, take us beyond the Lacanian deadlock that stops at diagnosing the problem, not offering any solution (because to offer a solution would be, in strictly Lacanian terms, to offer a narcissistic illusion). Through reparation we can think beyond the current social relations, arranged around the mechanisms of punishment and retribution, and try to establish communities on the basis of reparative justice, which might be more healing in the long run.

This all being said, it still feels that it is Lacanian theory that has the final word here, most likely because it comes to us as more sophisticated. I guess what I am getting at here is that it seems that one of the assets of Klein’s writings somehow remained under the radar of this book: it is what Sedgwick might call ‘weak theory,’ and what Mitchell termed as “somewhat confused,” with the confusion arising “because her theory is really more a descriptive phenomenology that stick close to the complexity of her clinical material” (Mitchell 1991, p. 30). In other words, another opportunity that I feel was missed here is to appreciate Klein’s writing as something that comes to us a series of observations, conclusions and sometimes even passing remarks that do not attempt to generate an ambitious and unified theory the way Lacan’s writings did. I believe there is a value in this aspect of Klein’s work. Instead, it feels that she too often fails because her theory is a more rudimental. It also feels, to relate this with my previous objection, that the enormous influence that poststructuralist linguistic turn in humanities had for psychoanalysis is in this book threated as a terminological, rather than deeply theoretical issue. These objections notwithstanding (and at least to some extent, as it happens, they are more about a book this reader hoped for) this is an ambitious and very valuable text, which I can strongly recommend to anyone who has even the slightest interest in psychoanalysis or, indeed, in contemporary theory as such.