Exploring the mother’s geography

On Klein’s settler unconscious

Abstract

This article argues that Kleinian theory is underlined by a ‘settler unconscious’ by which the trajectory from love, guilt, and reparation is informed by a trajectory defined by seized or taken spaces. Theoretically, the subject is able to reflect on the destruction they caused from the standpoint afforded by an ‘external reality,’ which in many ways is construed, however implicitly, as dominated space. Politically, we see Klein referring to colonial explorers and settler colonialism to describe psychic development in ways that clearly speaks to how she tacitly internalises settler attitudes to space. Two texts, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’, and ‘Early Analysis’, are read for how they overlap in settler spatial themes, forming the basis for us to post a settler unconscious in Kleinian thought.