Concept
Depressive position
Melanie Klein's name for the constellation of anxieties, defences and object relations that she first described in 1935 and dated to around the middle of the first year of life. In it the infant comes to experience the mother as a whole person who is both loved and hated, rather than as split good and bad part-objects. This brings guilt over its own aggression, mourning for the object it fears it has damaged, and the wish to make reparation. Klein saw the position as never finally achieved: it is reworked throughout life and alternates with the paranoid-schizoid position.
Development
1935
introduced by Melanie Klein
Klein first used the term in this 1935 paper and elaborated it in 'Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States' (1940).
In A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States (1935)
1952
developed by Hanna Segal
Segal carried Klein's depressive position into new fields: she made the mourning and recreation of the lost object the source of artistic creation and aesthetic experience (1952), and the condition for forming true symbols as opposed to symbolic equations (1957).
In A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics (1952);Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (1964);Notes on Symbol Formation (1957)
1986
reworked by Thomas H. Ogden
For Ogden the depressive position marks the birth of a historical subject: a self that experiences itself as the author of its thoughts and feelings and can live in time with a history. He held that it exists in continuous dialectical tension with the more primitive modes, never replacing them.
In The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue (1986);The Primitive Edge of Experience (1989)
1987
reworked by Julia Kristeva
In Soleil noir Kristeva reads melancholia as a failure of the depressive position: the subject cannot carry out the necessary matricide and symbolise the loss of the mother in signs.
In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987)
Relations
- 1935 introduced by Melanie Klein
Klein first used the term in this 1935 paper and elaborated it in 'Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States' (1940).
- 1952 developed by Hanna Segal
Segal carried Klein's depressive position into new fields: she made the mourning and recreation of the lost object the source of artistic creation and aesthetic experience (1952), and the condition for forming true symbols as opposed to symbolic equations (1957).
- 1952 gave rise to Basic assumption
Bion's 1952 re-view places the anxieties that basic-assumption life defends against in both of Klein's positions, the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive.
- 1986 reworked by Thomas H. Ogden
For Ogden the depressive position marks the birth of a historical subject: a self that experiences itself as the author of its thoughts and feelings and can live in time with a history. He held that it exists in continuous dialectical tension with the more primitive modes, never replacing them.
- 1987 reworked by Julia Kristeva
In Soleil noir Kristeva reads melancholia as a failure of the depressive position: the subject cannot carry out the necessary matricide and symbolise the loss of the mother in signs.
Works
- 1961
Experiences in Groups and Other Papers
Bion's book gathers his writings on groups from the 1940s and early 1950s. It opens with a 'Pre-view', the 1943 Lancet paper written with John Rickman on the first Northfield experiment, in which Bion ran the training wing of a military psychiatric hospital so that the soldiers' own disorganisation became a problem for the group to study and tackle. At its centre are seven papers, first published in Human Relations between 1948 and 1951, on the small therapeutic and study groups he took at the Tavistock Clinic after the war. There Bion declined the leadership the members expected of him and addressed his interpretations to the group as a whole, watching how it treated him and the task it had met for. From these observations he concluded that every group works on two levels at once. As a work group it cooperates on its declared task, keeps in touch with reality and can learn from experience; at the same time it behaves as if its members shared one of three unspoken basic assumptions: that they have met to depend on a leader who will sustain them, to fight an enemy or flee from it, or to pair off in the hope that a saviour will be born. Each basic assumption carries its own emotions and calls for its own kind of leader; only one is active at a time, and the others are held in what he calls a protomental system, where bodily and mental events are not yet told apart. Individuals combine with these assumptions spontaneously, in proportion to what he names their valency, and the group mentality they produce runs against their individual aims and against development. Certain institutions, he suggests, are work groups that harness one assumption for a task: the Church dependence, the army fight-flight, the aristocracy pairing. The closing 'Re-view', 'Group dynamics: a re-view' (1952), restates these findings in the light of Melanie Klein's work: basic-assumption life is a defence against the psychotic anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, the group evokes very primitive phantasies about the mother's body, and the therapist's sense of being made to play a part in the group's phantasy is explained by projective identification. In dialogue with Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Bion argues that group phenomena are not created by bringing people together but are latent in every person, who is by nature a group animal, and that the family pattern Freud found in groups overlies more primitive mechanisms.
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- 1987
Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
Kristeva's study of depression and melancholia as the most archaic expression of a narcissistic wound that can be neither named nor symbolised. The melancholic remains bound to the lost maternal 'Thing' and cannot complete the separation, a symbolic matricide, through which loss becomes signs. Drawing on Freud, on Klein's depressive position and on her own clinical cases, she reads Holbein's Dead Christ, Nerval, Dostoevsky and Duras as ways in which art and language give form to sorrow. Leon S. Roudiez translated it into English as Black Sun (1989), and Keren Shemesh into Hebrew (Resling, 2006).
- 2005
See also
References
- The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue1986Evidence for a relation
- The Primitive Edge of Experience1989Evidence for a relation
- A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States1935Evidence for a relation
- A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics1952Evidence for a relation
- Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein1964Evidence for a relation
- Notes on Symbol Formation1957Evidence for a relation
- Basic Assumption2005Evidence for a relation
- Experiences in Groups and Other Papers1961Evidence for a relation
- Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia1987Evidence for a relation