The Play of Interpretation and Resistance in Melanie Klein's
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Complicating Disorder: The Play of Interpretation and Resistance in Melanie Klein’s Narrative of a Child Analysis Hilary Clark, University of Saskatchewan, What is disorder? The prefix “dis-” conducts research in psychoanalysis and the indicates that disorder is the reversal of, or, literature of depression and trauma. She has more strongly, negation or absence of, order, been working on a SSHRC-funded project on when order is understood as the regular and issues of interpretation and symbolization in harmonious functioning of things (OED). The British child psychoanalysis. Recent work order/disorder binary—like other binaries includes an edited volume, Depression and such as mind/body and reason/passion—has Narrative: Telling the Dark, and a chapter on structured thinking, at least in the West, about shame, death, and masks in J. Kauffman, disease and “madness,” seeing them as ed., The Shame of Death, Grief, and Trauma. dangerous and anarchic, as the absence of health and sanity. Feminist critique has Abstract deconstructed such binaries foundational to This essay explores the challenge to the Western medical and psychiatric discourses order/disorder binary offered by the dynamics in order to expose their operation in of the psychoanalytic session, specifically reinforcing normative therapeutic practices one of Melanie Klein’s child analyses. It and perpetuating the power relations—the argues that the perception of psychoanalysis systemic inequalities of gender, sexuality, as normalizing is considerably complicated by race, and class—that characterize these the play of interpretation and resistance practices. This article investigates the between analyst and child. meaning of disorder—the vicissitudes of the order/disorder binary—in the context of Résumé psychoanalysis as a practice. The Freudian Cet essai explore le concept binaire de model of psychosexual development has normal/trouble offert par la dynamique de la been attacked, of course, from a gendered session psychanalytique, plus particulièrement perspective as pathologizing non-masculine l’une des analyses sur l’enfant de Melanie and non-hetero sexualities. As well, one line Klein. Il argumente que la perception de of critique regarding psychoanalysis as a normalisation de la psychanalyse s’avère therapeutic practice has seen it as considérablement compliquée par le jeu normalizing: its interpretation of individual d’interprétation entre analyste et enfant. neurotic and hysterical symptoms as manifestations of disorder reduces the potential meanings of these “texts” to those sanctioned by the psychoanalytic institution and a society intolerant of mental difference, all in the interests of returning the patient to docile health or adaptation. While such a critique has been necessary in feminism’s work of analyzing patriarchal structures, I do think that it tends to overlook the complexity of psychoanalysis as a practice and the many directions it has taken in its evolution up to the present time. However, my purpose in this essay is not to defend psychoanalysis but rather to explore 30 www.msvu.ca/atlantis ■□ 35.2, 2011 what happens to the meaning of disorder, Oedipal interpretations—all take part in the and indeed to the order/disorder binary itself, analysis, an “uncanny encounter” (Kristeva in the analytic situation. I will argue that the 2001, 144) that can never be controlled perception of psychoanalysis as a normal- entirely. Jacqueline Rose argues that izing and disciplinary practice is considerably analysis “makes of the analyst a fool and a complicated by the emotional dynamics of an fantast” (1993, 169‒70); to explore what actual analysis, with its interplay of transfer- happens to the meaning of disorder, and ence and counter-transference—of interpret- indeed to the order/disorder binary itself in the ation, resistance, and counter-resistance— relationship between analyst and analysand, I between analysand (patient) and analyst. will argue that the perception of psychoanalysis It is true, of course, that analysis— as a normalizing and disciplinary practice is especially child analysis—is grounded in a considerably complicated by the emotional structure of authority; it is an unequal dynamics of an actual analysis. relationship, ensuring that the analyst, as a Before turning to Klein’s Narrative, I will well-trained professional, is presumed to be look briefly at some meanings of interpret- the one who knows what is “normal” and what ation, resistance, transference, and counter- is not. In this relationship, the analyst is the transference, and at the interplay of these one who interprets the patient’s unconscious processes in the analytic situation. Freud’s phantasies, who “reads” the symptoms for thinking about these concepts developed their latent meanings. And the analyst is the over his years of clinical experience, and as one who conveys this knowledge to the psychoanalytic practice in general has evolved patient and helps her or him emerge from and changed, as in Klein’s development of illness. Drawing upon Melanie Klein’s the play technique and child analysis, so have Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961), an the meanings of these concepts. However, the account of Klein’s analysis in 1941 of understanding of interpretation as the process Richard, a ten-year-old boy, I will suggest, of apprehending and making explicit latent however, that in the moment-by-moment meanings, of “render[ing] the unconscious unfolding of analysis as she practised it, the conscious,” has remained much the same question of who knows and who doesn’t (Segal 2008, 123). In his essays on psycho- (want to) know, who interprets and who analytic technique, Freud addresses the resists is not always easily answered. Klein’s transferential relation-ship that develops Narrative is a very detailed and lengthy between analyst and patient. The aim of reconstruction of a child analysis based on analysis is therapeutic insight: put simply, the the extensive notes she made after sessions; analyst interprets the unconscious meanings it allows one to follow a child’s analysis, with of the patient’s associations or play and its interplay of resistance and interpretation communicates these insights. Ideally, the on both sides, over the course of many patient becomes conscious of repressed sessions. By drawing on examples from the phantasies and desires, and of the un- case, I will focus on how the child, Richard, conscious defences by which she or he has responds to and often resists Mrs. K.’s kept these repressed. Such knowledge graphic Oedipal interpretations of his play emerges in the dynamic interplay, often conflict, and drawings, how Mrs K. responds, and how of the patient’s and analyst’s perspectives. Klein as author frames Richard’s resistance Central to this interplay is the patient’s in her narrative of the analysis, reconstructing transference to the analyst of unconscious it years after the event and not long before love and hatred, which was originally ex- her death. I will suggest that this narrative perienced in relation to the earliest objects, can be read for its moments of disavowal of the parents. For Freud, transferences are “new the patient’s resistance, that is, its own points editions or facsimiles of the tendencies and of counter-resistance. Richard, his analyst phantasies which are aroused and made Mrs K., the author Melanie Klein—and to conscious during the progress of the analysis; these I would add the reader of Narrative, but they have this peculiarity...that they re- responding emotionally to frequently shocking place some earlier person by the person of www.msvu.ca/atlantis ■□ 35.2, 2011 31 the physician” (1905, 116). This process of 294).They may run resistance by asking her making “facsimiles,” of making the present personal questions or by “distorting” her analyst a copy of a past person and interpretations. They may “act and talk as if transferring the phantasies associated with stupid” (1983, 295) or, on the other hand, that person onto the analyst, is central to the offer their own interpretations, “convinced that therapeutic relationship in which change can they should be psychotherapists or analysts” occur. At the same time, however, inasmuch themselves (297). Joseph sees such patients as it repeats the past, the transference is the as “deeply encroaching,” although she does patient’s means of resistance to insight, not consider here that in their “anti-under- change, and movement into the future; thus, standing” or resistance, patients might them- it is “the most powerful medium of resistance” selves be defending against psychic encroach- to success (Freud 1912a, 101). ment, resisting the trauma of “internaliz[ing] Freud suggests that in seeking ...the analyst’s interpretive function” (Bass insight into the sources of the patient’s 2000, 251). distress, “we [analysts] enter a region in While their clinical experience may lead which the resistance makes itself felt....It is at analysts to feel that, as Adam Phillips puts it, this point, on the evidence of our experience, “the only ambition that sustains people is the that transference enters on the scene” ambition to repeat the past” (Freud 2002, xxiv) (1912a, 103). Giving up one’s infantile and to resist understanding, analysts are phantasies is resisted, not surprisingly. As people, too, and they are not exempt from being Freud puts it, “The resistance accompanies caught up in this process of unconscious the treatment step by step....[E]very act of the repetition, that is, the counter-transference.