CRIMINAL TENDENCIES IN NORMAL CHILDREN1

BY MELANIE KLEIN.

ONE of the bases of Psycho-Analysis is Freud's discovery that we find in the adult all the stages of his early childish development. We find them in the unconscious which contains all repressed phantasies and tendencies. As we know, the mechanism of repression is mostly directed by the judging, criticizing faculties the super-ego. It is evident that the deepest repressions are those which are directed against the most

unsocial tendencies.

As the individual repeats biologically the development of mankind, so also does he do it psychically. We find, repressed and unconscious, the stages which we still observe in primitive people: cannibalism and murderous tendencies of the greatest variety. This primitive part of a personality entirely contradicts the cultured part of the personality, which is the one that actually engenders the repression.

Child-analysis and especially early-analysis, by which is meant the analysis of children between three and six, gives a very illuminating picture of how early this fight between the cultured part of the personality and the primitive one starts. The results I have obtained in my analytical work with small children have proved to me that as early as in the second year we find the super-ego already at work.

At this time the child has already passed through most important stages of its psychical development; it has gone through its oral fixations, wherein we must distinguish between the oral-suckling fixation and the oral-biting fixation. The latter is very much connected with cannibalistic tendencies. The fact that we can observe often enough that babies bite the mother's breast is one of the evidences of this fixation.

In the first year, too, a great part of the anal-sadistic fixations take place. This term, anal-sadistic erotism, is used to denote the pleasure derived from the anal erotogenic zone and the excretory function, together with the pleasure in cruelty, mastery, or possession, etc., which has been found to be closely connected with anal pleasures. The oralsadistic and the anal-sadistic impulses play the greatest part in those tendencies which I intend to examine in this paper.

1 A paper read before the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society, March 23, 1927.

I have just mentioned that as early as in the second year we find the super-ego at work, certainly in its developing stage. What calls this into being is the advent of the Oedipus-complex. Psycho-analysis has shown that the Oedipus-complex plays the largest part in the entire development of a personality, as much in persons who will become normal as in those who will become neurotic. Psycho-analytic work has demonstrated more and more that the whole of character formation, too, is derived from the Oedipus development, that all shades of difficulties of character, from the slightly neurotic to the criminalistic, are determined by it. In this direction-the study of the criminal-only the first steps have been made, but they are steps which promise far-reaching developments 1.

It is the subject of my present paper to show you how we can see criminal tendencies at work in every child and to make some suggestions as to what it is which determines whether those tendencies will assert themselves in the personality or not.

I have to go back now to the point from which I started. When the Oedipus-complex sets in, which, according to the results of my work, happens at the end of the first or the commencement of the second year, the early stages I mentioned-the oral-sadistic and the anal-sadisticare fully at work. They become connected with the Oedipus tendencies, and are directed towards the objects around which the Oedipus-complex develops: the parents. The little boy, who hates the father as a rival for the love of the mother, will do this with the hate, the aggression and the phantasies derived from his oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic fixations. Phantasies of penetrating into the bedroom and killing the father are not lacking in any boy's analysis, even in the case of a normal child. I should like to mention a special case, that of a very normal and in every respect satisfactorily developed boy of four years, named George. This case is very illuminating in many respects. George was a very lively and seemingly happy child in whom no anxiety had ever been noticed, and he was only brought for analysis for prophylactic reasons.

During the course of the analysis I found that the child had undergone intense anxiety and was still under the stress of this anxiety. I shall show later on how it is possible for a child to hide his fears and difficulties so well. One of his anxiety-objects we ascertained during the analysis was a beast which only had the habits of a beast, but in reality was a man. This beast, which made big noises in the next room, was the father from whom the noises emanated in the adjoining bedroom. The desire

1 See Freud, Collected Papers, vol. IV, p. 342; and Reik, Geständniszwang und Strafbedürfnis (Intern. Psychoanalyt. Verlag).

of George to penetrate there, to blind the father, to castrate and to kill him caused a dread that he would be treated in the same way by the beast. Certain passing habits, such as a movement of the arms, which analysis proved to be a pushing off of the beast, were due to this anxiety. George had a little tiger and his great affection for this animal was partly due to the hope that it would protect him from the beast. But this tiger proved sometimes to be not only a defender but an aggressor. George proposed to send the tiger into the next room to fulfil his aggressive desires on the father. In this case too the father's penis was to be bitten off, cooked and eaten, which desire derived partly from the boy's oral fixations and partly as a means of fighting the enemy, for a child, having no other weapon, in a primitive manner uses his teeth as a weapon. This primitive part of the personality was in this case represented by the tiger, which, as I ascertained later on, was George himself, but a part of him which he would have liked not to realize. But George also had phantasies of cutting his father and mother into pieces, these phantasies being connected with anal actions, with dirtying his father and mother with his faeces. A dinner-party he arranged after such phantasies proved to be a meal in which he and his mother were eating the father. It is difficult to illustrate how such a warm-hearted child as this one was in particular suffers through such phantasies, which the cultivated part of his personality strongly condemns. This boy could not show enough love and kindness to his father; and here we see a strong reason for his repressing, his love for his mother, who somehow is the cause of such phantasies, and remaining attached to the father in a redoubled fixation which might form the basis for a permanent homosexual attitude later on.

To mention briefly the analogous case of a little girl. The rivalry for the father, the wish to take the mother's place in his love, also leads to sadistic phantasies of the most varied nature. Here the wish to destroy the beauty of the mother, to mutilate her face and her body, to appropriate the mother's body for herself-this very primitive phantasy of biting and cutting and so on—is connected with a strong feeling of guilt, which strengthens the fixation to the mother. At this age, between two and five years, we often see little girls excessively affectionate to their mothers, but this affection is partly based on anxiety and a feeling of guilt, and is followed by a turning-away from the father. Thus this complicated psychical situation becomes still more complicated by the fact that, in defending itself against those tendencies which its super-ego condemns, the child appeals to its homosexual tendencies, strengthens them and develops what we call the 'inverted' Oedipus-complex. This

is the development which shows itself by a very strong fixation in the little girl to her mother, in the little boy to his father. Just one step more, and we arrive at the stage where this relation, too, cannot be maintained and the child withdraws from both. This is surely the basis of an unsocial personality, for the relation to father and mother determines all subsequent relations in life. There is another relation which plays a fundamental rôle. This is the relation to brothers and sisters; every analysis proves that all children suffer great jealousy of younger sisters and brothers as well as of older ones. Even the quite small child, which seemingly knows nothing about birth, has a very distinct unconscious knowledge of the fact that children grow in the mother's womb. A great hate is directed against this child in the mother's womb for reasons of jealousy, and as typical of the phantasies of a child during the mother's expectancy of another one-we find desires to mutilate the mother's womb and to deface the child in it by biting and cutting it.

Against the new-born child, too, sadistic desires are directed. Moreover, these sadistic desires are also directed against older sisters and brothers, because the child feels itself slighted in comparison with the elder children, even when this is not actually the case. But these feelings of hate and jealousy also give the child a strong feeling of guilt, which is apt to influence its relationship to brother and sister for ever. Little George, for example, possessed a small doll which he nursed most tenderly and often bandaged. It represented his small brother whom, according to his strict super-ego, he had mutilated and castrated while the brother was in his mother's womb.

In all these situations, so far as his feelings are negative, the child reacts with all the power and intensity of the hatred characteristic of the early sadistic stages of development. But, since the objects it hates are at the same time objects of its love, the conflicts which arise become very soon unbearably burdensome to the weak ego; the only escape is flight through repression, and the whole conflicting situation, which is thus never cleared up, remains active in the unconscious mind. Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the result of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psycho-analysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these early ones, and that every child in the first years of its life goes through an immeasurable degree of suffering.

It is not to be denied that appearances speak against these statements. Even though on close observation one can note signs of difficulties, the child seems to overcome these more or less easily. The question how the difference between appearances and the actual psychical situation is to be explained will be answered later, when we are dealing with the various ways and means the child uses to overcome its difficulties.

I have to return to the point where I spoke about the negative feelings of the child. These are directed against the parent of the same sex and the brothers and sisters. But, as I mentioned, the situation is more complicated through the fact that negative feelings are also directed against the parent of the opposite sex, partly because of the frustration this parent too imposes, and partly because in its efforts to escape the conflict the child withdraws from his love-object and changes the love into aversion. But the situation is still more complicated through the fact that the child's love-tendencies are coloured by sexual theories and phantasies typical of the pre-genital stages, just as its negative feelings are. A great deal about the infantile sexual theories has been discovered from the analysis of adults; but to the analyst who deals with children themselves an astonishing variety of sexual theories is revealed. I will just say a few words about the way in which this material is obtained from the child. When from our psycho-analytic point of view we watch the child at play and use special technical measures to diminish its inhibition, we can bring out these phantasies and theories, find out the experiences the child has had, and see all the child's impulses and its reacting criticizing faculties both at work. This technique is not an easy one; it requires a great deal of identification with the phantasies of the child and a special attitude towards the child, but it is extremely productive. This technique leads us to depths of the unconscious which are even to the analyst of the adult. Slowly the analyst, by interpreting to the child what his play, drawings and whole behaviour means, resolves the repressions against the phantasies behind the play and liberates those phantasies. Tiny dolls, men, women, animals, cars, trains and so on, enable the child to represent various persons, mother, father, brothers and sisters, and by means of the toys to act all its most repressed unconscious material. It is not possible within the limits of this

surprising,

paper to enter more fully into the details of my technique. I must confine myself to the statement that I get this material in so many different performances and in such variety that an error about its meaning is impossible; which is proved, too, through the resolving and liberating effect of the interpretations. Both the primitive and the