Yes, I do agree — and it’s a profound and sharp observation.
In fact, your statement that Melanie Klein went the farthest in terms of “more Thanatos than Eros,” besides late Lacan, captures something essential about Klein’s ontological orientation — one that sees aggression, envy, and psychic disintegration not as secondary disturbances, but as primordial forces shaping the psyche from the start.
Let’s explore why this reading holds, and what it reveals.
🩸 1.
Thanatos at the Beginning: Klein’s Infantile Psyche
Freud introduced the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), but he still framed it as something emerging over time, or co-existing with libidinal development.
Klein took a radical step further:
For Klein, the infant is born not into a world of attachment and nourishment, but into a world already saturated with aggression, splitting, fear of annihilation, and paranoid phantasy.
In Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, the infant:
- Projects unwanted elements outward (splitting),
- Experiences the breast as good or bad,
- Fears retaliation, persecution, disintegration,
- And is driven by envy and destructive impulses.
This is not just developmental turbulence — it’s a structural account of Thanatos as the psyche’s origin point.
💀 2.
Envy, Destruction, and the Attack on the Good Object
Perhaps no concept reveals Klein’s Thanatic core more than her theory of envy:
“Envy is the feeling that the good object possesses something good — and the drive is to spoil or destroy it.”
This goes beyond frustration or ambivalence (as in earlier Freudian models).
It is a primitive, pre-Oedipal force:
- Not aimed at taking in the good, but obliterating it.
- A Thanatic impulse that arises before love is possible.
This is not sadism for pleasure (as in early Freud), but a destruction rooted in unbearable dependency and helplessness.
🧠 3.
Eros in Klein? Yes — But It Comes After
Klein does acknowledge Eros — the life drive that binds, re-integrates, repairs, and allows for reintrojection of the good object.
But:
- Eros is not dominant at the start.
- It appears in the depressive position only after the devastation of the paranoid-schizoid stage.
- Even then, it’s fragile, conflicted, and haunted by guilt and reparative fantasies.
So:
Klein’s Eros is reactive — it comes after Thanatos, not before.
📌 4.
Comparison with Lacan: A Different Path to the Same Abyss
|
Concept |
Melanie Klein |
Late Lacan |
|
Dominant drive |
Thanatos (destruction, envy, splitting) |
Thanatos (jouissance, repetition, Real) |
|
Eros |
Reparative, late, fragile |
Structural impossibility (nonrelation) |
|
Subject |
Fragmented infant in battle with internal objects |
Split subject alienated in language and jouissance |
|
Symbolism |
Phantasy, part-objects, internal world |
Lack, signifier, objet a |
|
Tone |
Tragic-maternal |
Tragic-structural |
Both Klein and Lacan are haunted by Thanatos, but:
- Klein locates it in the earliest maternal relation, the body, the internal object world.
- Lacan finds it in the symbolic deadlocks, the impossible jouissance, the Real.
They approach Thanatos from different starting points — Klein from the breast, Lacan from the signifier — but they arrive at the same fundamental wound.
✨ Conclusion:
Yes — Melanie Klein went the farthest into Thanatos,
further even than Freud, whose Thanatos was abstract;
further than Winnicott, who sought to hold it;
and perhaps even further than Lacan, whose Thanatos is structural,
while Klein’s is visceral, envious, bloody, and intimately maternal.
Her vision is one in which love is hard-won, always under siege by forces that precede it.
Would you like to explore this further in a piece titled “Black Milk and Broken Objects: Klein and the Thanatic Psyche”? Or a dialogue: “Lacan and Klein at the Threshold of Death”?
