The Seba library treats Manic Defence in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Klein, Melanie, Winnicott, Donald, Abraham, Karl).
In many people excessive anxiety from these sources led to a powerful denial (manic defence) of the objective danger-situation
Klein explicitly names the manic defence as a powerful denial of objective danger, arising when excessive anxiety is not analytically worked through but instead repudiated.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
Manic-depressive swings. Manic-defence (denial or negation of depression). Elation, and paranoid and hypoc
Winnicott classifies manic defence as a discrete clinical phenomenon within adolescent affective disorders, distinguishing it as denial or negation of depression rather than a full bipolar swing.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis
Whereas the melancholiac exhibits a state of general inhibition, in the manic patient even normal inhibitions of the instincts are partly or wholly abolished. The saving of expenditure in inhibition thus effected becomes a source of pleasure
Abraham provides the libidinal-economic foundation for understanding manic states as pleasure derived from the abolition of inhibition, a substrate upon which later object-relational accounts of the manic defence were built.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
depressive anxiety is closely bound up with guilt and with the tendency to make reparation
Klein’s account of depressive anxiety as tied to guilt and reparation establishes the precise constellation that the manic defence operates to evade.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting
the connection between manic-depressive illness and the unresolved persecutory and depressive anxieties of the infantile depressive position which begins at four to five months
Klein’s explanatory note situates manic-depressive pathology — and implicitly the manic defence — within the unresolved anxieties of the infantile depressive position.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting
a mitigation of the fear of the bad object by the trust in the good one and depressive anxiety only arise in fleeting experiences
Klein’s account of early ego integration and the alternation between persecutory and depressive anxiety provides the developmental matrix within which manic defences become comprehensible as emergency operations against overwhelming affect.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting
All the factors in development which I have touched upon, though they mitigate the sense of loneliness, never entirely eliminate it; therefore they are liable to be used as defences
Klein notes that developmental achievements can themselves be deployed defensively, a broader principle that contextualises the manic defence within a general theory of defensive transformation of positive states.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957aside
the paranoidschizoid position… had been only broadly outlined in ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935) as a contrast to the depressive position
The editorial note identifies Klein’s 1935 paper — in which the manic defence was first elaborated — as the originating contrast between the two developmental positions.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957aside