“Six Degrees of Separation”: The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–1945

Abstract

We turn to the arguments for and against Klein’s theory and technique that occurred under the auspices of the British Psychoanalytical Society in London between the years of 1941 and 1945, known as “The Controversial Discussions” between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. We do so not only to take a pulse of the reception of Klein’s theory during these contentious debates. Our larger purpose examines the emotional dynamics of dissension in educational organizations. We suppose that just as education initiates longstanding unconscious predicaments for the learner, institutions as well experience comparable crises associated with the nature of infancy, truth, knowledge, authority, criticism, and freedom of thought. Educational institutions are made from group psychology and the demand for a leader tends to rely on the defenses of confusion, splitting into good and bad, and idealization of tradition. So we ask, what is proper to the intelligibility of a field of thought? For those who participated in the Controversial Discussions, the choice first presented as blunt. After the death of Sigmund Freud in London in 1939, the question of the future of psychoanalysis was urgent. Who would take the reins of psychoanalytic theory? Would it be the Kleinian baby and its inner world of object relations or, the Freudian baby who springs from the pleasure principle and the drive for satisfaction? Beneath the surface of theory wars was something more disturbing: Dissention raises the question of the fate of free association. Could the British Psychoanalytical Society tolerate internal conflict? Here we approach contentious history with the question, what difficult knowledge does education inherit? Thus we pay attention to the introjection of the historical context. The Controversial Discussions occur in the midst of the devastation of World War II. All that people most cared for—indeed, life itself—was under threat of destruction.