Klein's Bottle

I know about as much about Melanie Klein and her partial objects as you do.  I think Deleuze introduces them here just to give some more tangible way to think about the paradox inherent in virtual objects.  Remember our working hypothesis is that the virtual object is a mirror image of something that doesn't exist before the mirroring; it's an image created from two mirrors facing one another.  To see how Klein's ideas are going to help though, we have to do a bit of background work. 

Fortunately, we already know Freud backwards and forwards, amirite?  Klein's position appears to be a modification of his idea that sexual drives have an external object, and that ego-drives and simply ones that have taken the self as their erotic object.  For Klein, the drives are aimed at objects that are only a part of what we would normally term a real object (apparently this idea also had some precedent in Freud).  Then later, when the ego begins to form and take itself as a narcissistic object, this does not represent the ego relating to itself as an external object (which in Klein's theory has become partial and hence not really a good model for the ego's wholeness and unity) but as the contemplation of a collection of internal objects.  At least, that seems to be how this paper describes her ideas. 

Klein further developed the notion of internal objects, and this was central in the expanded role of objects in her own and Fairbairn's work. In her early papers she had described more and more complex phantasies in young children concerning their mothers' "insides." The latter were believed to contain all varieties of substances, organs, babies, etc. During the late 1920's, Klein began to write of parallel phantasies which the child develops concerning his own insides, a place similar to his mother's interior, also populated by body parts, substances, people, etc. In contrast to Freud's super-ego concept, Klein suggests that these phantasies of internal presences begin in the first months of life. As development proceeds, Klein suggests, representations of all experiences and relations with significant others also become internalized, in an effort to preserve and protect them. This complex set of internalized object relations is established, and phantasies and anxieties concerning the state of one's internal object world become the underlying basis, Klein was later to claim, for one's behavior, moods, and sense of self. Klein conceives of the drives as more tightly bound to objects, both internal and external, than did Freud, and hence she rejected the notion of "primary narcissism."  The infant, Klein argued, has a much deeper and more immediate relation to others than previous psychoanalytic theory has credited him with.  This rejection of the concept of "primary narcissism" was no mere theoretical refinement. Narcissism had been applied, within classical psychoanalysis, as an explanatory concept with regard to many clinical phenomena, ranging from tics to schizophrenia, and as a tool for understanding rigid resistances within the psychoanalytic situation itself.  Klein and her collaborators took issue with these explanations. They argued that seemingly narcissistic manifestations like tics, schizophrenia and extreme resistances in analysis are not objectless states (i.e., with only the ego as object), but reflect intense relations to internal objects. For Klein, the content and nature of relations with objects, both real people in the outside world and phantasized images of others imagined as internal presences, are the crucial determinant of most important psychical processes, both normal and pathological.  She argued that Freud's "narcissistic libido" reflects not a cathexis of the ego itself, but of internal objects, and thus replaced Freud's distinction between narcissistic libido and object libido with the distinction between relations to internal vs. relations to external objects.

Here you can start to see why Deleuze calls these internal objects virtual.  They are the phantasies (with a "ph" to distinguish it from fantasy), images, projections that are taken back within.  And, since they relate to the self-fulfilling habits of passive local egos (aka drives), they are like hallucinations that spontaneously bring themselves into being.  In fact, for those local egos, it would make sense to talk about a "primary narcissism".

The fact that these egos should be immediately narcissistic is readily explained if we consider narcissism to be not a contemplation of oneself but the fulfilment of a self-image through the contemplation of something else: the eye or the seeing ego is filled with an image of itself in contemplating the excitation that it binds. It produces itself or 'draws itself' from what it contemplates (and from what it contracts and invests by contemplation). This is why the satisfaction which flows from binding is necessarily a 'hallucinatory' satisfaction of the ego itself, even though hallucination here in no way contradicts the effectivity of the binding.

It seems like one way to describe these internal objects is as symbols that indicate how parts of the world makes parts of us feel.  Of course, the relationship does not have to be one-to-one; our parts can feel differently about a given part-object, which goes towards explaining our global ego's unconscious ambivalence to many things.  One real object can contain many virtual objects, and one virtual object can appear as part of many different real objects.    

Klein posits the view that the real others in the infant's external world are constantly internalized, established as internal objects, and projected out onto external figures once again. Klein does not seem to consider such internalization to be a defense mechanism per se, but rather a mode of relating to the outside world. "The ego is constantly absorbing into itself  the whole external world".  Internal objects are established corresponding to real external others, as "doubles." Not just people, but all experiences and situations are internalized. The child's internal world "… consists of innumerable objects taken into the ego, corresponding partly to the multitude of varying aspects, good and bad, in which the parents appeared to the child's unconscious mind … they also represent all the real people who are continually being internalized".

Deleuze's description of the relationship between virtual and real objects quickly gets more complicated than what Klein appears to be saying here.  From the little I've read it does not seem that she focused on the mirroring aspect implicit in her definition of internal objects -- the way they internalize an aspect of something only to project it back onto that thing in an endlessly circulating self-fulfilling prophecy.  To better understand that we will need to discuss Lacan next time.  

But we can end here by examining what Deleuze says about the way virtual objects are incorporated into real ones, since it specifically refers to Klein.

Conversely, these virtual objects are incorporated in the real objects. In this sense they can correspond to parts of the subject's body, to another person, or even to very special objects such as toys or fetishes. This incorporation is in no way an identification, or even an introjection, since it exceeds the limits of the subject. Far from opposing itself to the process of isolation, it complements it. Whatever the reality in which the virtual object is incorporated, it does not become integrated: it remains planted or stuck there, and does not find in the real object the half which completes it, but rather testifies to the other virtual half which the real continues to lack. When Melanie Klein shows how many virtual objects the maternal body contains, it must not be thought that it totalises or englobes them, or possesses them, but rather that they are planted in it like trees from another world, like Gogol's nose or Deucalion's stones.

[First off, Gogol's nose is a reference to Nikolai Gogol's short story The Nose, which you can read in full here.  It's an amusing little satire of a low level bureaucrat who wakes discover that his nose is missing.  Horrified, he goes in search of it, only to discover that it has taken on a life of its own and is evading him.  The point is that the nose can show up anywhere.  It's an autonomous part of the world, a piece of Major Kovalyov (the noseless hero) that he finds wandering around outside himself.  

And Deucalion is some forgotten Greek hero (being the son of a God just ain't what it used to be) who repopulated the earth after the flood:

Once the deluge was over and the couple had given thanks to Zeus, Deucalion (said in several of the sources to have been aged 82 at the time) consulted an oracle of Themis about how to repopulate the earth. He was told to "cover your head and throw the bones of your mother behind your shoulder". Deucalion and Pyrrha understood that "mother" is Gaia, the mother of all living things, and the "bones" to be rocks. They threw the rocks behind their shoulders and the stones formed people. Pyrrha's became women; Deucalion's became men.

Again, the theme is of mobile objects sprouting out of a fixed one.]

So the overarching point here seems to be that the virtual objects are parts, but, strangely, they are not really parts of a whole.  Added together they don't sum up to the full real object.  Likewise, they are parts of an ego that doesn't exist yet; a collection of drives is not a person.  In both cases, they are inherently incomplete, they lack the whole to which they would be the corresponding parts.  I believe this is what Deleuze is trying to get at when he says that the incorporation of the virtual object into the real complements, instead of opposing the isolation, or the carving out, of the virtual object from from the real one.  

We see both that the virtuals are deducted from the series of reals and that they are incorporated in the series of reals. This derivation implies, first, an isolation or suspension which freezes the real in order to extract a pose, an aspect or a part. This isolation, however, is qualitative: it does not consist simply in subtracting a part of the real object, since the subtracted part acquires a new nature in functioning as a virtual object.

The isolated part can't be identified with the real object, and even when it is reincorporated into it, it doesn't complete the circle and reform the whole.  Conversely, the whole real object cannot be internalized (or introjected) because it would require an already formed ego to serve as its representative, and all we have so far is a collection of local passive egos.  Hence an introjection would, "exceed the limits of the subject".  The virtual object is split between two sides -- an internal and an external one -- and each of these sides is itself partial or fragmentary.

The virtual object is a partial object - not simply because it lacks a part which remains in the real, but in itself and for itself because it is cleaved or doubled into two virtual parts, one of which is always missing from the other. In short, the virtual is never subject to the global character. which affects real objects. It is - not only by its origin but by its own nature - a fragment, a shred or a remainder. It lacks its own identity.  The good and the bad mother - or, in terms of the paternal duality, the serious and the playful father - are not two partial objects but the same object in so far as it has lost its identity in the double.