Introduction to Kleinian Theory 5

Depressive position. Depressive anxiety or concern. Depressive vs. persectory guilt. Manic Defences,

[@feddundas]

This series is GOLD, loving this part 5

[@doncarveth]

Well in dialectical thinking both/and thinking ultimately try amps over either/or thinking. Because we need both both/and end either/or thinking. So ultimately D is privileged over PS. Therefore to lose touch with D and succumb excessively to PS is regressive.

[@jiminy_cricket777]

Thank you again for this series, Don. The move into D is an important achievement worth pondering, and pondering again, in order to live a fuller life. I would want to say though, that I think while some things about PS are important - passion, awe, reverence, as you put it so well - one can quickly lose oneself entirely in these states, and not in the good way of forgetting oneself in play a la Winnicott. So I really like Ogden's way of talking about this in The Primitive Edge of Experience, where he described, yes, an oscillating between PS and D as you say, but also a model where each position, or, as he usefully re-frames them, mode of experience, each position or mode of experience, subtends and dialectically interacts with the others (plural because he also included his proposed third position, the autistic-contiguous) - each subtends and dialectically interacts with the others such that each mode of experience is a necessary condition of the existence of the others. When read in this way, then, to be in PS enough to enjoy passion, awe, reverence, and to be able to recognize one's real enemies and react to real danger, these uses of splitting, circumscribed as they are, suggest an underlying, or background of personality organization that exists primarily in a depressive mode. And by the same token, perhaps it could be said in your examples of why and how life suffers when one is too much in D, that is that one can be excessively dispassionate and unable to stop fence sitting, that this has a quality to it of not really properly depressive mode functioning. Actually, the stuckness that this connotes brings to mind most readily the equilibrium, or psychic retreat in between PS and D described by Betty Joseph and John Steiner and some other Kleinians. You rightly say that it is important for analysts to stop splitting about PS and D, but I think you might need to push that idea further in your own thinking about this, or perhaps I'm mistaken and you already see things this way and didn't want to digress too far in a class lecture on earlier Kleinian theory. And I will soon have that Derrida text to you as promised.. it seems I overestimated how much free time I would have while moving my life 2000 miles from the USA where my wife is from, back to Toronto during a global pandemic.. But we're very close to being settled in again here. Looking forward to hearing what's been on your mind lately in your next talk. Also sorry about the repetition in the first part of this, I was trying to include a lot of stuff but minimize how much you'd need to rewind to make sense of it as you listen.

[@doncarveth]

I pretty much agree with what you say here. In several publications I have indicated that ultimately Hegel’s both and trumps Kierkegaard‘s either or, because both both and and either or, both D and PS are subsumed in a higher level D.

[@jiminy_cricket777]

@@doncarveth yes, but Kierkegaard's either/or is not so much the subject of Derrida's work, at least as I understand it. Derrida was more interested in what Kierkegaard had to say about acting ethically as a temptation, and how sometimes one must act in ways that seem immoral to others in order to serve some higher value, as Kierkegaard perhaps thought of Abraham as doing in being willing to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. I have been meaning to write you and go into a little bit more detail about this with reference to Derrida's text (I re-read the book) but I've not quite had time to actually put my thoughts into words yet. Derrida's perspective seems to have quite a lot of parallels with your distinction between conscience and superego, so I didn't mean this stuff about Derrida to have anything to do with a discussion of splitting and PS and D. I just felt compelled to mention that I still had that in mind. I guess it was confusing to put that all in one comment, my apologies.

[@Cocomoc.]

:) wonderful lecture, lots of thinking to do …thank you. taboo on tenderness is what i sit on today. Yet living 20 years in USA, somehow i find myself loosing the ability to care. How is that possible. I come from former soviet countries, where capitalism was non existent and society was more caring. So so different from what i find living here.

[@doncarveth]

Something to do with the radical individualism of the culture of narcissism produced by consumer capitalism

[@superopus4]

Hello, Wonderful series! How can regression to PS position occur within a dialectal approach to these two positions?

[@panteasafaee3659]

Dr Carveth, you once said that one of Freud's erors was after 1923 wich he considers Super ego as Conscience and as something that should be in a mild way.Is that true?

[@ulm81gtr]

Im working through your series, thank you very much for these videos I enjoy them. In this video there is a part that is not clear to me, where its about the shift from persecutory anxiety to depressive anxiety. Have you maybe mixed up some words here or is there something I dont get? It's that you tell about the fear that the good self may be destroyed but then you tell it's now precisely not the fear for the self being destroyed for it's about this shift. 13:17 - 13:40 "the fear that my hate and destructive impulses may destroy the good: the good object and the good self - the bad object and the bad self I fear will destroy the good object and the good self. So it's no longer that the self will be destroyed but that the object will be destroyed"

[@doncarveth]

You are right, that’s misleading. Even when we move into D we fear not just destruction of the object, but also the good self. What Winecott calls the capacity for concern and client calls depressive anxiety is concern both for the good object and good self. The good self may be destroyed by the bad object or the bad self. The good self may be destroyed by the bad object or the bad self. But in D the leading anxiety is not persecutory but depressive, reflecting genuine concern for both the other and my good self. I hope that helps.

[@ulm81gtr]

​@@doncarveth Thank you, now this shift seems clearer to me. Seems like for D the concern for the good self might employ different coping (more reality based self efficacy, such as doing sports as an adult or using good relations) when compared to PS persecutory anxiety.

[@Sammylicksrian]

Splitting kind of reminds me of that new Bob Dylan song "I Contain Multitudes"

[@doncarveth]

But someone who splits contains two, not multitudes.

[@henryvaughan757]

Joyful tears?