Inner Work Notes

Tag: klein

  • Someone Praised You and It Didn’t Land

    Someone said the thing you had wanted to hear. You heard it. You said thank you and meant it. Ten minutes later nothing of it is left: your mood has not lifted, and there is nothing to go back to and feel again.

    Meanwhile a careless put-down someone made three weeks ago is still with you, down to the tone of voice.

    This usually gets filed under low self-esteem. But that is not an explanation. It only gives what just happened another name. Telling a person with a temperature that they have a fever says nothing about why the fever is there.

    There is an actual reason praise does not stay. Once you can see it, you will also see why years of encouragement have never once worked on you.

    At first, good and bad are kept apart

    The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described a baby’s mind in its first months like this: the baby does not take in experience as one whole. From the start, experience comes in split into two parts, and the parts are stored separately. A baby does not have one mother. He has two — the one who feeds him and the one who leaves him hungry — and he keeps them in separate places and never puts them together. He does the same to himself: there is a good me and a bad me, and those are kept apart too.

    Later the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg laid this out as two pairs: the mother who feeds him is paired with a good me, and the mother who leaves him hungry is paired with a bad me. It is one baby and one mother, but each is stored in two separate places.

    Klein did not see this as the baby getting things wrong. He is simply not yet strong enough to bear knowing that the mother who feeds him and the mother who leaves him hungry are the same person. So he keeps them apart. Psychoanalysts call this splitting. Keeping them apart protects the good: his anger at the mother who leaves him hungry cannot reach the mother who feeds him and destroy her.

    So splitting is not a mistake. It is a solution: dividing the mother into a good one and a bad one is how the baby keeps from losing the good one.

    A drop of ink in a glass

    Why can’t the good and the bad simply be put together? It is easiest to see with water.

    Here is a glass of clear water and here is a bottle of ink. One drop goes in and the glass is ruined. There is no clear water left anywhere in it, not even a mouthful; it has all turned grey. Nothing in that glass survives the mixing.

    So if this one glass is all the clear water you have, you will not let the ink in. You will guard the glass. Keeping the ink out is not stubbornness. It is the only way to keep any clear water at all.

    Now pour the same bottle into a river. The river takes it and stays a river. You would have trouble finding where it went.

    It depends on how much good there is, not on how hard you try

    This is the heart of it. Whether a person can hold the good and the bad in one place and bear it is not a matter of insight or willpower alone. It depends on how much good the person has known, in themselves and in other people. There has to be enough of it that one bad experience does not wipe it all out.

    When there is plenty of this good, the bad goes in the way the ink goes into the river: it mixes in, and the good is still there. Psychoanalysts call this integration. Put into words, it sounds like this: I am a person with faults. My mother loved me and also let me down. My friend is decent and occasionally careless.

    But where there is only about as much good as bad, the person has a glass, not a river. Then the two cannot be put together, because putting them together would spoil all of the good. So they stay split. That is not a symptom to argue someone out of. It is what is holding that person together right now.

    This is why being told you should try to see the good in yourself can feel like an insult rather than a comfort. The advice asks a person to put the good and the bad in themselves together, in one place. If they have only one glass of clear water, that means pouring ink into it.

    Where a compliment gets stopped

    The split into a good me and a bad me does not end with infancy.

    Someone who grew up hearing mostly about what they had done wrong comes into adult life with a picture of themselves as someone who falls short. They also bring a habit of mind that expects criticism and goes looking for it. So when another person says something to them, they are already listening for the criticism in it before they have even weighed whether it is true. This happens the moment the words reach them.

    Picture five people at a table. Four say your presentation went well; one says the middle section was confusing. For the rest of the evening, all you can think about is the middle section. That is not because that person put it harshly, and not because you are unusually thin-skinned. It is because theirs was the only remark that had a place already waiting for it inside you.

    Praise, on the other hand, has to get past that habit of mind first. On the way in, you answer it in your head: “They are just being polite. They want something. They have not seen the real me.” Long before the praise can reach you, it has been written off.

    Criticism does not have to get past anything, because it fits what you already believe: “Something is wrong with me.” So it goes straight in and is remembered in detail.

    So the problem is not simply a poor memory that lets only the good things slip away. There is a place ready for the bad words, and none for the good ones.

    Maturity does not come with age alone

    Here, maturity means one specific ability: taking in what is actually in front of you as it is, instead of through the habits of mind formed when you were small, like the one that expects criticism. The more mature a person is, the more they can take in this way.

    This ability does not come automatically with age. A person of sixty or seventy who has not grown up on the inside still sees the people around them the way they learned to see people in the family home they left fifty years ago. If they were criticized in that home, they feel criticized by the people around them now. A colleague’s compliment does not come through as a compliment; the old habit of mind gets to it first and colors it on the way in.

    There is a simple way to tell how much of this ability you have, and it is not whether you believe the good thing someone said. It is whether you can let it stand for one day, just as it was said, without adding your own “yes, but.”

    Where the water comes from

    If the problem is how much good there is next to the bad, then the answer is not to attack the ink. Most people have already spent years trying to argue their bad picture of themselves down to size, and it has not shrunk. The work is adding water.

    The water comes from real relationships, not only from encouraging things you tell yourself. One compliment is easily brushed off. What makes the difference is hundreds of ordinary hours with people in which nothing bad happens: you make a mistake and no one humiliates you; you turn down a request and the relationship does not end. Slowly those hours add up to evidence against the old picture you have of yourself. As that evidence builds, a criticism can be heard as a comment on one thing you did, not as proof that you are bad through and through.

    So the next time something kind is said and slides straight off, you have not failed at receiving it, and there was no technique you were meant to apply. Your glass is just small for now. More clear water comes from outside, slowly — mostly from staying a little longer with people when you would rather get up and leave.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — splitting, and what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position: the baby’s earliest state of mind, in which good and bad are kept apart.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — what Klein called the depressive position (not depression in the everyday sense): the later state of mind in which good and bad can be held together in one person.
    • Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson. — the inner pictures of a good and a bad self and of good and bad others (self and object representations).

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me

    Something goes wrong and the heat climbs — past annoyed, past angry, all the way to the top. For one second you want the whole world in pieces on the floor. And if you made a list of everything you want to smash, you would find yourself somewhere on it. Then, before you even notice, the rage can start to turn into a different feeling: that someone is out to hurt you.

    What you actually want to break

    Real rage is not tidy. It feels like your body might come apart at the seams. You want to take the room, the day, the person in front of you, and break all of it into small pieces. And you want to break yourself into pieces along with it.

    Most people carry that quietly, because it sounds like something only a cruel person would feel. So you say nothing and wait for it to pass.

    But it is not something only cruel people have. Every one of us is born with this destructiveness, you included.

    What makes rage like this so frightening is what you find inside yourself. If that much destructiveness is really in you, it might not stop at breaking the room. It might break you too, until nothing of you is left. So what you fear most is not the damage around you. It is being wiped out yourself.

    Because the rage feels dangerous inside you, you quickly start seeing the danger in somebody else. You hear contempt in your partner’s tired tone; you hear an attack in a colleague’s disagreement. Once the threat seems to be coming from them, your own urge to destroy feels like self-defence. This shift — from something dangerous is happening in me to you are dangerous to me — is not a lie you tell on purpose. It happens before you have even noticed your own feeling. Psychoanalysts call it projection: a feeling you cannot bear to accept as yours is felt as if it came from someone else.

    The first thing a baby ever meets

    A baby does not meet a whole person first. He meets the breast — one part of his mother, not the whole of her. Psychoanalysts call it a part-object. An “object”, in their language, is whatever our love and anger are aimed at — usually a person, and here only one part of a person. At the start the breast is simply good. It keeps him alive, keeps him warm and comforts him.

    But the breast is not always there the moment he wants it. When he is left waiting, his hunger and frustration can become too much. He is flooded with his own rage, and that rage is too frightening to keep inside. So it is projected onto the breast, and now the breast itself seems to be attacking him. The breast that felt entirely good while it fed him now feels like a monster that could destroy him. He may turn away from the very breast he wanted a moment earlier, because to him the source of comfort has become the source of danger. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein saw this as one of the most basic ways the human mind works: the rage is pushed outside, and then it seems to come back as an attack. Adults still fall into it under pressure.

    What Klein meant by the paranoid-schizoid position

    Klein gave this state of mind a name: the paranoid-schizoid position. The words sound clinical, but what they describe is simple.

    The “schizoid” part means split: the mind keeps good and bad strictly apart, and nothing is allowed to be both at once. For the baby, the breast is all good while it feeds him and all bad while he is left waiting. In adults, this splitting shows up as seeing someone as either an angel or an enemy. Then comes the “paranoid” part: all of the badness is out there, and I am the one being attacked.

    Notice the word “position”. It is not a place you leave behind for good when you grow up. It is a place where anyone can be standing: a baby before he has any words for it, or you, this afternoon, in a meeting.

    Listen to who your sentences are about

    Here is what it looks like in adult life. You are already in a bad mood, and the person nearest to you gets the brunt of it. Think back to what actually comes out of your mouth on days like that.

    “You’ve got no sense at all.” “Why can’t you ever see how people feel?” “Why can’t you think any further than that?” “You’re so selfish.”

    Every sentence is about the other person, but the bad mood was already in you before they spoke. Some ordinary mistake of theirs gives the mood an explanation: I feel this bad because you are selfish, insensitive, or dismissive. Once the bad feeling has been pinned on them, you no longer have to notice what you brought into the room.

    So when you are in the middle of blaming somebody, you are standing exactly where the baby stood when he turned away from the breast. It is the same paranoid-schizoid position, only now it has adult words: all the badness is over there, and I am the one under attack.

    When someone brushes you off, where is the brush-off, exactly?

    Let me ask you a single question, and I would like you to answer it slowly.

    When you say “she brushed me off”, where is the brush-off? Point to it. Is it stuck to her face, or sitting somewhere in her tone of voice?

    I think much of it is already in you. If you walked into the room already afraid of being overlooked, a distracted glance can feel like proof that you do not matter. You read the brush-off into her face, then react to her as though she put it there on purpose. What began as a fear inside you now feels like an attack from outside.

    Admitting that is uncomfortable. That is why most of us would rather leave the brush-off where we see it: on her face. And as long as we leave it there, we spend one more day standing in the paranoid-schizoid position.

    The other place you can stand

    Some people do something different with the bad feeling. They do not push all of it onto the other person; they let part of it stay theirs. Klein called the place where they stand the depressive position.

    The name does not mean clinical depression. In the depressive position you see that some of the badness is on your side too: you can be angry even with someone you love, and you have harmful sides as well as good ones. Facing that brings sadness and guilt, and that is where the word “depressive” comes from. It feels heavier than blaming someone else. Still, it is a more grown-up place to stand.

    The difference between the two positions comes down to two sentences. One says: the badness is entirely theirs. The other says: some of it came from me. The person who can say the second sentence can bear knowing this about themselves.

    Owning your part is not the same as attacking yourself

    I want to be careful here, because this gets misread constantly. Remember the list at the start — everything you wanted to smash, with you somewhere on it. It is easy to hear “some of it is mine” and turn that into one more reason to attack yourself.

    That is not what it means. It does not mean hating yourself for having the rage in the first place. It means you stop insisting that every bad thing lives out there, without piling every bad thing onto yourself instead. You apologise for the hurtful thing you said, and you set a boundary where the other person overstepped.

    Try it on something small. A colleague answers you in a flat voice, and the heat starts. In the paranoid-schizoid position, you have decided before you say a word: she brushed me off, and that is simply what happened. In the depressive position, there is a pause first, and in that pause you can tell yourself: “Some of this is hers. Some of it is what I walked in carrying.”

    Owning your part feels heavier because you can no longer solve the problem simply by proving the other person wrong. Yet it also gives you back some control. If all the danger belongs to them, you must keep watching and defending yourself. If part of the reaction came from what you carried in, you can soothe that part, check what actually happened, and respond to the person in front of you rather than only to the fear you brought in.

    Before you argue, check which position you are in

    The heat will come back — maybe tomorrow, maybe later this week. It will arrive with the same flat certainty: she brushed me off.

    When it does, take your eyes off her face for a moment. Before you work out what to say to her, work out which position you are standing in.

    There are two: the one where all the badness is hers, and the one where some of it is yours. Which one are you standing in right now?

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — the paranoid-schizoid position.
    • Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — the depressive position.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board