Yes, I'm blogging about breasts. But not like you might think. Putting aside the erotic, what do we have as an image? Nurture, kindness and provision, of course. Plus, there's another take.
Melanie Klein, a psychodynamic theorist, engendered the theory of "splitting". Klein believed the child suckling at the breast was learning how to interpret its world. When the child has a good feed, so the theory goes, she believes there's a "good breast" that can always be relied on. When, however, the child has a bad feed, she learns that there's also a "bad breast". The poor kid can't bear the thought that one breast (or one mother) can provide both beauty and difficulty -- in other words, that life is a mix, and nothing's entirely reliable. So she uses a defense mechanism known as "splitting". The good breast is the good mother, who's different to the bad breast, or bad mother. Literally, she registers them as two separate objects. That way, the world is safer to judge. And so we learn to see a thing as either "good" or "bad", rather than a mix.
Sure, it's only a theory, and Klein was of her time, but there's evidence that we do this. For instance, young writers often view someone as either an enemy or friend. To see that person as a total mix is harder, more painful. And maybe that's why it takes us time to learn that complex characters can be more real. The tendency to create a total baddie, or an absolute goodie, is one I've seen often. As a teacher, I've tried to convince beginning writers to go for the complexity, to see the real mix. Even vampires benefit from a frightened or tender side. Is there such a thing as pure evil?
In truth, the wonder of breaking from the split is this: By learning to love our characters for their mistakes as well as their triumphs, or for the side we think is unloving or messed-up, we learn, in essence, to love ourselves more fully, accepting our human mix. Through this, we learn to love society and thus we all grow.
That's my theory.
Oh, and another reason why Klein fascinates? What a way to balance out the all-powerful phallus that Freud came up with. Aha!
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