“The infant, still undeveloped intellectually, is exposed to an onrush of problems and questions.  One of the most bitter grievances we come upon in the unconscious is that these many overwhelming questions, which are apparently only partly conscious and even when conscious cannot yet be expressed in words, remain unanswered.  Another reproach follows hard upon this, namely, that the child could not understand words and speech.  Thus his first questions go back beyond the beginnings of his understanding of speech”(Klein 188).

        Language:  extremely simple or impossibly complex?  Both:  at once and separately:  language unifies and desiccates every aspect of anthropomorphic culture through naming and interaction.  To possess language implies the capacity for power in its assumed representational ability, as the absence of language surely is relational to helplessness within a cultural context:  helplessness not only for infants but for larger strata of culture, including socioeconomic, racial and gender issues.  As Klein’s quotation implies, infants do not grasp what can be characterized as Structured Language, that is, language definable linguistically as a recognized language such as English, French etc., a network of audiovisual signifiers inter-related within a semiotic matrix.  Infants, however, do seem to possess a language, albeit an unrecognizable language in perhaps adult, Structured Language terms.  The language of infants could be likened to the realm of Dream as opposed to phantasy, within the specific context of swimming through temporally defined experiential postures that are impossible to translate into Structured Language without bastardizing the experience or the language in and of itself.  Dream, to be both identified with and distinguished from the sleeping, nocturnal realm of dream or any particular dream in and of itself, Dream is a place, maybe spatial, maybe not, where Structured Language is impotent to describe meaning even in an elementary sense of the word.  Dream is a pseudo definable realm that is utterly Other.  By expanding on Klein’s inference of pre-structured language, we are forced to acknowledge this place:  Dream.
 

“The ego then finds itself confronted with the psychic reality that its loved objects are in a state of dissolution . . . there is anxiety how to put the bits together in the right way and at the right time; how to pick out the good bits and do away with the bad ones; how to bring the object to life when it has been put together; and there is the anxiety of being interfered with in this task by bad objects and by one's own hatred, etc.”(Klein 269).

         Dream is inescapably fragmented as the application of Structured Language to Dream attempts to force totalizing, representational meaning on an untranslatable sense of the experiential object(s).  It is not that Structured Language cannot depict a framework of Dream, but that, for a framework, without the guts of the whole, meaning is forever elusive.  As the ego fights the impending dissolution, coming to terms with a reintegration of the bits into a definable object, it is assumed that the object, once manufactured will exist, suspended in memory – eternal.  There is no anxiety once the object is, though the object is permitted to evolve, perhaps age, the bits and pieces are constitutive of that object no matter what.  Yet, this seems a disservice to the object – even to representational meaning as the object becomes no more than a pose, grows stale and cannot flourish unless exposed to Dream.
 

 “The baby's impulses and feelings are accompanied by a kind of mental activity which I take to be the most primitive one:  that is phantasy-building, or more colloquially, imaginative thinking . . . such primitive phantasysing is the earliest form of the capacity which later develops into the more elaborate workings of the imagination”(Klein 308).

        Klein seems to apply a valuation toward Structured Language as opposed to the space of Dream that I am proposing, and further implies that the realm of Dream is developmental, one “grown out of” so to speak.  As Structured Language is universally accepted as essential and proceeds with its illusion of stable representational meaning, it can also be characterized as comfortable.  Dream is by no means developmental, rather it manifests itself until death and is very uncomfortable, elusive and frightening:  Dream is Gestalt.  As a child moves from Dream to Structured Language there must be repression of the acutely experiential aspect of Dream by default in the referential quality of Structured Language.  Although dualistic thinking is usually repugnant, it is logical that there be a hierarchy of Structured Language over Dream as the two can rest at opposite ends of a spectrum, though specifically, Structured Language is the inherent byproduct of acceptable cultural behavior.  Survival within the realm of Dream in and of itself could be difficult unless one was institutionalized.  This seems to open the question of the ties between Creativity and Dream, as individuals who seem to be adept at suppressing the questioning mode of Dream may excel within culture's bureaucracy and be characterized as “successful”, therefore solidifying the normative artistic stereotypes that imply anti-social, Dream realm driven individuals who “suffer for and through their art”, though more importantly there is the implication of the controllessness that artists have over their Inspiration, as in invoking the Muse, thereby reducing the artist into a tool of Otherness that flows from an Unknown realm rather than from within the artists themselves.  Of course Creativity is inextricably linked with Dream though perhaps more subtly than an either/or proposition.  Maybe certain individuals can access the realm of Dream more readily than others and it is distinctly possible that many individuals would not only deny the existence of the realm of Dream, but would resentingly begrudge the intrusion of nocturnal dreams themselves.
 

“Many wishes and phantasies can never be satisfied in childhood, not only because they are impracticable, but also because there are simultaneously contradictory wishes in the unconscious mind.  It seems a paradoxical fact that, in a way, fulfillment of many infantile wishes is possible only when the individual has grown up”(Klein 316).

        Yet the precursor to definable infantile language as Structured Language seems contradictory since it is located in an unspeakable place, a place that seems inherent, resident from birth and only conceivable after the appropriation of Structured Language if one is willing to let go of the controlling factors of representational meaning and would stand on the edge of the abyss of Dream.  It seems very sad to lose the entire dis-readability of Dream, though as Structured Language is also related to conformity, cohesion and ideology, it is understandable that Dream is completely relegated to the unconscious as culture would dictate.  As dreams of the nocturnal nature are specifically related to Dream regarding the un-translatability of the experiential forms in recounting the dream itself, the realm of Dream pokes its autonomy from beneath representational meaning for almost every human, and, though not particularly relevant here, dogs seem to experience similar physiologic experiential aspects, which are inaccessible through our Structured Language.  As several cultural groups embrace dreams as having representational meaning in and of themselves, including psychoanalysis, it would seem to be a jumping off point to discuss dreams within the realm of Dream, though again, the constitutive framework of Structured Language in its definability of meaning:  this dream means X, as related to metaphor rather than using Dream as a rich place of inquiry.  In this way, dreams are reduced from their original form, which of course dissipates upon waking, though the residual memory of the original form, since that is all we have left to work with, is of issue here as a turning away from the Other, the Unknown, by applying Structured Language to its description as plot or story line which directly relates to our psycho-social world rather than a place of Other.  Dreams can also be considered fanciful and/or escapist to some, rather than an unconventional opportunity to question reality through the space of Dream.  Also, in the previous quotation, Klein uses the word fulfillment within a context of absolutism, as if fulfillment is always possible provided every “I” is dotted and “T” is crossed as the cliché goes.  Fulfillment seems to refer to happiness as well, which is as fleeting as representational meaning within the realm of Dream but also within the tenets of Structured Language.  Happiness as a Twentieth Century Capitalist term is assumed to be accessible, solid, fixed and desired.  Unfortunately, the masses are mislead as the transience of happiness is inevitable within any given moment.  Again, Structured Language attempts to own meaning and keep it bound to an illogical structure which seems to if not negate, severely suppress aspects of Dream.
 

 “More helpful in my view is Winnicott’s emphasis on the unintegration of the early ego.  I would also say that the early ego largely lacks cohesion, and a tendency toward disintegration, a falling into bits.  I believe that these fluctuations are characteristic of the first few months of life”(Klein 4).

        It is this illusion of cohesive meaning, of a solidified object that culture craves because it seems definable and therefore manageable, controllable – living.  This state of pre-structured language, again, cannot be constrained to an early developmental stage which disappears forever, yet it would seem a betrayal to stability, i.e. the will to live, etc. to accept the possibility of “falling into bits” on a regular basis regarding the stability of meaning through Structured Language as illustrated in Dream.  As psychoanalysis discusses the loved object in terms of loving the object only in concert with its possible absence – the death of the object – it seems as if Structured Language attempts to ward off the death/absence of the individual as opposed to the death/absence of the object itself.  Within a Narcissistic lens of re-approaching absence/death, this is supremely relevant in describing the transnational cultural fear and/or denial of death/absence.  Structured Language is the proverbial linguistic Fountain of Youth, whereas Dream shatters the illusion of never ending longevity.  As the realm of Dream is a complex unendingly more-than-multifaceted space, it has so much more longevity per se though it is a space without ownership and naming.
 

 “It is in phantasy that the infant splits the object and the self, but the effect of this phantasy is a very real one, because it leads to feelings and relations (and later on, thought processes) being in fact cut off from one another”(Klein 6).

        Does the infant separate object from self or is it Structured Language that forever drives the wedge between self and object as the framework of language is inadequate in providing a totality of depiction from the experiential realm of Dream?

Klein, Melanie.  "Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict." Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921 - 1945.  New York:  Delacorte Press, 1975.

-----.  "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States."  Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921 - 1945.  New York:  Delacorte Press, 1975.

-----.  "Love, Guilt and Reparation."  Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921 - 1945.  New York:  Delacorte Press, 1975.

-----.  "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms." Envy and Gratitude & Other Works 1946 - 1963.  New York:  Delacorte Press, 1975.