Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse

In this short paper, published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1929, Melanie Klein reads two works of art for what they show of the earliest anxieties. The first is Ravel's opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges, to a libretto by Colette; the second is Karin Michaëlis's account of the painter Ruth Kjär. In both she finds the child's sadistic attack on the mother's body and the dread of retaliation that follows it, which she treats as the earliest anxiety situations. She places the source of the creative impulse in the wish to restore the damaged mother. The Melanie Klein Trust reads the paper as marking a shift from the dread of attack to fear concerning the loved object, and as Klein's first mention of reparation, the idea she later developed at length. The paper was later collected in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, the first volume of The Writings of Melanie Klein.