PSYCHOANALYSIS, SOCIETY, AND THE

INNER WORLD

Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World explores ideas from psychoanalysis that
can be valuable in understanding social processes and institutions and in particu-
lar how psychoanalytic ideas and methods can help us understand the nature and
roots of social and political conflict in the contemporary world.
Among the ideas explored in this book, of special importance are the ideas of
a core self (Heinz Kohut and Donald Winnicott) and of an internal object world
(Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn). David Levine shows how these ideas, and
others related to them, offer a framework for understanding how social processes
and institutions establish themselves as part of the individual’s inner world and
how imperatives of the inner world influence the shape of those processes and
institutions. In exploring the contribution psychoanalytic ideas can make to the
study of society, emphasis is placed on post-Freudian trends that emphasize the
role of the internalization of relationships as an essential part of the process of
shaping the inner world.
The book’s main theme is that the roots of social conflict will be found in
ambivalence about the value of the self. The individual is driven to ambivalence
by factors that exist simultaneously as part of the inner world and the world out-
side. Social institutions may foster ambivalence about the self or they may not.
Importantly, this book distinguishes between institutions on the basis of whether
they do or do not foster ambivalence about the self, shedding light on the nature
and sources of social conflict. Institutions that foster ambivalence also foster con-
flict at a societal level that mirrors and is mirrored by conflict over the standing
of the self in the inner world. Levine makes extensive use of case material to
illuminate and develop his core ideas.
Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World will appeal to psychoanalysts and to
social scientists interested in psychoanalytic ideas and methods, as well as students
studying across these fields who are keen to explore social and political issues.
David P. Levine is Professor Emeritus at the University of Denver. He holds
a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and a Certificate in Psychoanalytic
Scholarship from the Colorado Center for Psychoanalytic Studies. He has
published extensively in the fields of economics and political economy and
on the application of psychoanalytic ideas to social issues and to the study of
organizations.
PSYCHOANALYSIS,
SOCIETY, AND THE
INNER WORLD
Embedded Meaning in
Politics and Social Conflict

David P. Levine
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 David P. Levine
The right of David P. Levine to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

PART I

1 Applied psychoanalysis 7

2 Object relations 18

PART II

3 Relating and not relating 35

4 Ambivalence about the self 48

5 Moral order and moral defense 61

6 The power of words 72

vi Contents

PART III

7 Social movements and the method of introspection 85

8 Hate in groups and the struggle for individual identity 97

9 Affordable care 110

10 Truth in politics 123

Index 133
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Matt Bowker for his suggestions on early drafts of several
chapters and Pam Wolfe for her editorial work on the manuscript. Material in
chapters 9 and 10 appeared originally in Organisational and Social Dynamics 3, 2
(2003) and 15, 1 (2015) edited by Laurence J. Gould and Paul Hoggett (published
by Karnac Books in 2003) and is reprinted with kind permission of Karnac Books.
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION

In this book, I explore ideas from psychoanalysis that I think are important in
understanding social processes and institutions. These include, in particular: the
idea of a core self (Heinz Kohut and Donald Winnicott), the idea of an internal
object world (Melanie Klein), the ideas of a moral defense and a closed system
(Ronald Fairbairn), the ideas of impingement and the isolation of the true self
(Winnicott), and the idea of the use of projection as an alternative to thinking
(Wilfred Bion). Together, these ideas offer a framework for understanding how
social processes and institutions establish themselves as part of the individual’s
inner world and how imperatives of the inner world influence the shape of those
processes and institutions. Of equal importance, these ideas can help us under-
stand the struggles over social institutions and social policy that occupy so much
of public life in the contemporary world. In exploring the contribution psycho-
analytic ideas can make to the study of society, I have found post-Freudian trends
that emphasize the role of the internalization of relationships as an essential part
of the process of building psychic structure of considerable value. In this book,
I attempt to bring out more fully the potential of these trends for the study of
society.
To do so, I begin, in chapter 2, with a discussion of how internalized relation-
ships are involved with the way we relate to others. I follow up on this discussion
in chapters 3 and 4, where I indicate how relating to others can be considered not
simply an expression of man’s innate natural endowment, but a developmental
achievement. Important trends in psychoanalysis going back to Freud and con-
tinuing into the present (drive theories, attachment theory, and the application
of neurobiology) emphasize the search for biological foundations. Here, by con-
trast, I emphasize the suspension of natural imperative and the developing impor-
tance of subjectivity in establishing the basis for social processes and institutions.
2 Introduction

Related to this, in chapter 4, I consider the important matter of not relating as

something made possible by the provision during the development process of an
appropriate environment, including an appropriate experience of relating.
In chapters 5 and 6, I focus specifically on the nature and consequences of
what I refer to as ambivalence about the self. My main theme is that the roots of
social conflict will be found in ambivalence about the value of the self. The in-
dividual is driven to ambivalence by factors both internal and external, or, more
precisely, by factors that exist simultaneously as part of the inner world and the
world outside. Social institutions may foster ambivalence about the self or they
may not. A main theme of the book is that distinguishing between institutions
on the basis of whether they do or do not foster ambivalence can shed light on
the nature and sources of social conflict. Institutions that foster ambivalence also
foster conflict at a societal level that mirrors and is mirrored by conflict over the
standing of the self in the inner world.
Ambivalence about the self is rooted in the experience of the self as a de-
structive force. In the language of object relations, this experience of the self
as a destructive force is spoken of as its identification with, or perception as, a
“bad object.” Ambivalence about the self has a special connection with the de-
velopment of social arrangements around a moral core and their constitution as
a moral order. A moral order is a particular kind of social arrangement that both
fosters ambivalence as the animating force of the inner world and expresses the
prevalence in its members of ambivalence as the decisive aspect of psychic organ-
ization or structure. The idea of a moral order organized around what Fairbairn
refers to as a “moral defense” is important for understanding destructive forms
of endemic conflict in society. In chapters 9 and 10, I explore some examples of
this connection.
An important implication of the emotional life of the individual as it develops
in a moral order is rejection of reason and thinking in favor of more primitive
mental processes. In chapters 6 and 10, I explore the important matter of the
dominance of these more primitive mental processes in shaping public life and
the way social relations and institutions assure dominance of primitive mental
processes in the psychic lives of individuals. Of special importance is the stasis
associated with the dominance of these processes, in other words their tendency
to block movement and change and make social processes the site of repetition
rather than creativity.
In the end, the forces that lead to repetition and reenactment are the true
conservative forces in social institutions and processes. The imperative to repeat
rather than create can be built into social institutions and embedded in the indi-
vidual psyche through the shaping of early relationships. When this is the case,
there will be significant resistance to the kinds of change that free up the indi-
vidual to shape a life not already determined. In chapter 8, I consider this matter
of social change and its relationship to psychoanalytic methods.
Methodologically, my premise in the book is that psychodynamic processes
and social processes are not two distinct or opposed phenomena, but two levels
 Introduction 3

on which the same processes work themselves out. This means that psychody-
namic processes do not determine the functioning of social systems, nor are those
processes “socially determined” if by that we mean governed by factors originat-
ing at the macro-social level. Rather society and the inner world are two sites on
which common sets of dynamic processes express themselves.
Throughout the book, I seek to combine general discussion of ideas with
examples and case studies. I should emphasize that my intent is not to use the
examples and cases as evidence in support of the general propositions, but as aids
to the reader in his or her effort to understand the ideas and to see more clearly
what their implications might be.
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PART I
This page intentionally left blank
1
APPLIED PSYCHOANALYSIS

When I began my formal study of psychoanalysis, it was not with the purpose
of becoming a clinician, but rather with the expectation that I would gain val-
uable insight into phenomena taking place outside the clinical setting. In brief,
I had it in mind to do what is sometimes referred to as “applied psychoanalysis.”
I no longer consider this a helpful way to speak about the use of psychoanalytic
ideas outside the clinical setting. After all, analysts engaged in clinical work are
themselves “applying” psychoanalytic ideas. As I thought about it, the important
distinctions had to do not with whether psychoanalytic concepts were being
“applied” but with how those concepts were being used. In making distinctions
about the way psychoanalytic concepts are used, the following possibilities now
strike me as important.
The first possibility is that what the individual does in the name of applied
psychoanalysis is simply to use psychoanalytic terms. Thus, observing genera-
tional conflict, we might refer to what we see as, for instance, oedipal conflict,
and we might do so regardless of whether we have any real knowledge of the
inner world of those engaged in what we refer to in this way. Similarly, we might
use the term countertransference to describe an emotional experience we have in
the presence of another person or while visiting an organization even though
we have no real basis for assessing the origin of the emotional experience or the
character of the transference, if in fact transference is in some significant way
implicated.
If countertransference is defined simply as the emotional experience provoked
by the presence of another or by entering into an organizational setting, we
might reasonably ask: why have a special word for this experience if no addi-
tional insight is provided by invoking the word? We might begin to answer this
8 Applied psychoanalysis

question if we bear in mind that when psychoanalytic terms are invoked in this
way the intent is not to analyze, but to label. And labeling has its uses.
One such use is as a weapon in an emotional (and sometimes political) strug-
gle against a chosen enemy who, once labeled, has also been diminished by the
negative connotations of the label now attached to him or her. Another use of
psychoanalytic terms as labels is to lend credibility to a conception of ourselves as
people connected to the psychoanalytic enterprise. There is in this use of words
something of the symbolic equation as described by Hanna Segal in her classic
paper (1957). In other words, there may be the belief that word and thing are
synonymous and therefore saying the word creates the presence of the thing. The
confusion of words with things exemplified in this first way of using psychoan-
alytic language suggests that using words has been confused with understanding
the phenomena to which those words are applied. Then, the ability to use words
substitutes for the ability to understand and therefore also for the thinking pro-
cess to which the term understanding applies.
Attachment to words may represent attachment to a group, perhaps one that
is considered to have a psychoanalytic expertise. Then, use of words is meant to
indicate expertise whether or not any real expertise has been gained through a
process of learning and development. Words can play a special role in group life,
as when the group is held together by the special use of words available only
to its members. Wilfred Bion draws our attention to this phenomenon when
he considers how joining a group can be used as an alternative to development
(1961: 89).
The second possibility for use of psychoanalytic terms is that the individual
uses psychoanalytic terms to invoke or represent concepts. This happens when,
to continue the example, the term oedipal conflict is used to refer to a complex,
especially unconscious, process resulting from a specific developmental situation
and experience. The presence of intergenerational conflict is not, then, assumed
to be synonymous with oedipal conflict any more than having an emotional
experience stimulated by the presence of another is assumed, in itself, to indicate
that what we experience is an instance of countertransference.
The use of psychoanalytic concepts as distinguished from the use of psychoan-
alytic terms represents a considerable advance. We can see evidence of movement
in the direction of use of concepts when we observe that the individual is able
to convey his or her meaning without the use of the terms referring to the con-
cepts. In other words, psychoanalytic thinking is present even when recognizably
psychoanalytic terms are not. Indeed, this is the first indication that meaning
results from a thinking process. Communication indicates that the concept is
understood by the individual using the term when the term is used in such a way
as to establish that the phenomenon to which it is applied has the relevant quali-
ties, and reasons to think this is the case are offered consistent with the complex
connotations of the concept.
Too great a dependence on technical terms suggests a weak understanding
of concepts. Because of this, the inability to communicate without technical
 Applied psychoanalysis 9

language can indicate a weak understanding of that language. This is not to say
that use of technical terms ought to be avoided. Doing so would no doubt be
cumbersome and awkward; it might even undermine the effort to speak rigor-
ously and precisely. Without the use of technical terms, we would be placed in
the position of having to reproduce the idea to which the term refers every time
we wished to use it. The point is not that we ought to avoid use of technical
terms, but that excessive reliance on them indicates a lack of understanding of
the concepts to which they refer.
The possibility that there might be an application of psychoanalytic concepts
without this excessive dependence on psychoanalytic terms suggests a third pos-
sibility for applying psychoanalysis. I will refer to this third possibility as the
internalization of an idea. Through internalization, the idea is woven into the
individual’s thought process in a way that makes it inseparable from that process.
At this point, the term application becomes to some degree inappropriate because
the individual no longer confronts phenomena with a tool box of terms and con-
cepts choosing among them those he or she has reason to believe can be usefully
applied to the task at hand. While there may be something like a tool box of
this kind, there is also something more. This something more is a shaping of the
thought process, indeed the thinking organ, by an integrating idea. This third
possibility is closely linked to the second, but takes it one additional step. This
step involves integrating internal experience, including that experience we refer
to by the term thinking, or thinking about.
For this third alternative to make sense there must be a distinction drawn be-
tween ideas and the simple hypotheses about the world sometimes equated with
them. The term idea used in the way I have used it refers not to a simple cognitive
construct that might be set against reality and evaluated, but rather to a complex
integration of concepts implicit in thinking and relating. Most importantly, it
refers to the integrating principle that makes the object of the thinking process
not to have thoughts but to integrate them. One way to capture this use of the
notion of an integrating idea is to speak of the development of a capacity. The
result of internalizing an idea is the reshaping of mental processes in a way that
enables the individual to do something he or she would otherwise be unable to
do. In other words, the product of the internalization of an idea is a capability.
To clarify what I have in mind, consider for a moment an example from an-
other discipline, that of statistics. What makes someone a statistician is not that
he or she knows the steps required, for example, to do a t test on the assumption
that by doing such a test he or she has done statistical analysis. Rather, a statisti-
cian is someone who understands stochastic processes and can judge what sorts
of tests, if any, suit the available data and how suitable data might be acquired.
But, more than this, a statistician knows something important about the limits
of knowledge gained from the analysis of data. He or she also knows how eager
people are to reject the null hypothesis and embrace the truth of hypotheses that
coincide with their beliefs even though the empirical support is weak. Knowing
this, the statistician is able to resist that temptation because of an internalized
10 Applied psychoanalysis

ideal that runs counter to it. It might even be said that a statistician is someone
who is reluctant to reject the null hypothesis not only when doing statistical
analysis, but as a basic way of relating to the world.
Similarly, those who have internalized the psychoanalytic idea understand
how eager people are, themselves included, to externalize responsibility for their
emotional states. Those who have internalized the psychoanalytic idea under-
stand that the use of psychoanalytic terms provides no protection against the
proclivity to which I have just referred. They understand that, because of this,
self-analysis is an important part of the process that internalizes a psychoanalytic
orientation. It is not, then, access to technical terms but training in and develop-
ment of psychoanalytic habits of mind that offers a measure of protection against
the impulse to externalize responsibility for what originates inside and enhances
sensitivity to the presence of that impulse in others.
What I refer to above as the internalization of an idea can also be considered
the development, or perhaps elaboration, of an interest of a special kind (Caper
1999: 118). The presence of a psychoanalytic interest leads the individual to
favor that which, to adapt a phrase from Heinz Kohut, we might refer to as the
“method of introspection” (Kohut 1982). Without the method of introspection,
we do not have full access to the inner world and cannot really come to know
it. This is a knowledge that requires a distinct method of inquiry, which is the
method Kohut refers to in the language of empathy. In the use of this method,
the capacity for empathy plays a special role.
Empathy offers a good example of the distinctions introduced above. This
is because it is clearly possible to use the term (1) without understanding the
concept to which it refers and (2) without having a sharply tuned capacity for it.
When used in the first way, the term participates in the labeling activity to which
I refer above. In some cases, this labeling is linked to the use of the term to estab-
lish a wished-for self and to make real the fantasy that the individual is attuned
to emotional communication, when this is not in fact the case. The dependence
of empathy on an emotional-cognitive capacity to receive, interpret, and convey
to others an interpretation of emotional communication suggests that neither
the use of the term nor the cognitive understanding of the concept is enough to
establish that the internalization of the idea has taken place.
In light of what I have said so far, it might be useful to note an important
meeting point between the method of introspection and the discipline of sta-
tistics. Both psychoanalytic interpretation and statistical analysis are methods
designed to free the individual from his or her attachment to a set of prior as-
sumptions about the world established in an essentially subjective way. Both seek
to free us from the conviction that what we wish were true is true, what we
hope is possible is therefore possible, and what we fear must be must be. In other
words, both seek to enable us to engage with objects over which we do not exert
control of the kind that assures they behave in ways consistent with our fanta-
sies about them. Thus, both psychoanalysis and statistical analysis begin with a
negative moment, the moment in which what we already know, want to know,
 Applied psychoanalysis 11

or believe we know is suspended, though each offers its own distinct method for
arriving at this moment and proceeding from there.
Let me offer a brief example. Some years ago, I found myself in my office
waiting for the scheduled time of a faculty meeting. Because I did not have much
to do, I began, in a casual way, to review an enrollment report. At the time, my
faculty was under the impression that enrollments had been increasing steadily as
interest in our field grew. This was, however, the first time I had been provided
with a time series of relevant data. So, I entered the data into a computer program
and began to produce charts and graphs, none of which supported the assumed
trend in enrollment that had become an article of faith in my School.
When I put together a brief memo including the results of my informal anal-
ysis of the data, the head of my unit dismissed my effort in a somewhat hostile
way by attacking me for having written a “pessimistic” report. In response to
this, I attempted, as politely as possible, to point out that these data were a record
of the past and that it was not possible to be pessimistic about the past. Predict-
ably enough, this only increased my unit head’s hostility. In this case, it is clear
enough that rejection of data was a way of protecting emotionally-invested as-
sumptions about reality and that the ability to do statistical analysis, even very
simple and primitive analysis, depended on the ability to suspend that emotional
investment, in other words to enter into the negative moment to which I have
referred.
In my unit, robust and growing enrollment was taken to be a measure of the
worth of our programs and of those of us delivering them. In other words, it was
an indicator that we had something of value to offer and were in that sense the
locus of the good. At my School, students’ desire to enroll in our programs was
taken as irrefutable evidence that our School was, in fact, the source of the good
things, which presumably students were seeking when they enrolled. Robust
enrollment was the primary quantitative measure of our wished-for reality, and
much effort was expended to assure that perceptions of actual numbers could be
interpreted to conform to that wished-for reality. Preserving the idea that our
enrollment was robust was a way of preserving our identification with the good.
Appeal to reason and evidence expressed a willingness to cast that identification
into doubt.
To take this point a step further, we might consider the possibility that what
is distinctive about the use of psychoanalytic concepts is not only, or even pri-
marily, their descriptive power with respect to specific phenomena, but their
connection to the development and use of the capacity to arrive at the negative
moment. Here, it needs to be emphasized that the capacity to arrive at the neg-
ative moment is not a matter of deciding to do so, though such a decision needs
to be made. Indeed, to assume that we can simply decide to relate to objects ex-
isting outside the sphere of what in psychoanalytic language would be referred
to as omnipotent control runs counter to what is essential in the psychoanalytic
idea. Similarly, the idea that we can develop the capacity to enter into the nega-
tive moment simply by deciding to do so leaves out of account what is essential
12 Applied psychoanalysis

about this capacity, which is its connection to internalization and to interest,

emphasized above.
The negative moment is the moment in which separation from the one good
object occurs. This separation is necessary if there is to be any creativity in
thought processes, indeed, if thinking is to emancipate itself from the constraints
associated with identification with the good object. Then, the use of language to
establish identification can give way to the use of language to convey either the
results of a thinking process or that thinking process itself. The negative moment
is the moment in which we suspend our emotional investment in or attachment
to a particular belief or hypothesis about the world. It can be said, then, that to
move into this moment we must move our emotional investment away from the
original good object and toward the thinking process that replaces that object in
orienting us in the world.
But the negative moment has another, related, significance, which has to do
with the matter of awareness. By not thinking systematically about enrollment
trends, my faculty not only kept alive the conviction about our relationship with
the good, it also blocked any awareness that we might be identified not with the
good but with the bad. You cannot negate what you think you know unless you
can allow yourself to be aware of hidden (or disavowed) knowledge about your-
self, in this case that you are not the good.
Vital to the use of psychoanalytic method is the idea that we have two kinds
of knowledge, or two ways of knowing. One way of knowing involves holding
what we know in the mind, in other words, thinking about it. The other way
of knowing operates in exactly the opposite way and depends on our not hold-
ing what we know in the mind in a way that involves thinking about it. In the
language typically used in psychoanalysis, this is a distinction between what is
or is not available to the conscious mind and especially what can be thought and
what remains “in” the unconscious. Here I use the language of being aware or
unaware of what we know to emphasize that we are dealing with an ongoing
activity, which involves either thinking about something or preventing ourselves
from thinking about it.1
We keep knowledge about ourselves outside of awareness by knowing it in a
special way. We know it in the form of the unthought meaning embedded in our
relations with others.2 When what we know remains embedded in doing and re-
lating it is enacted rather than thought. So, we can say that enactment is the way
of knowing used as an alternative to thinking. This distinction between thinking
and enacting plays an especially important role in social systems, institutions, and
relations, so I will place considerable emphasis on it in this book.

***

The psychoanalytic idea about knowing just briefly summarized leads to a psycho-
analytic idea about the possibility of altering how we know and therefore
what we do. Specifically, it implies that what is needed to break the cycle of
 Applied psychoanalysis 13

enactment and reenactment of embedded knowledge held in place by not think-

ing is to think about what we do and why we do it. Thinking makes it possible to
interpret enactment in a way that reveals the meaning present, yet also hidden, in
the enactment. Using Christopher Bollas’s language, interpretation is the activity
by which we come to think the unthought known (Bollas 1987).
Interpretation involves the exercise of a skill or capacity, which is the capacity
to bring disavowed knowledge into awareness. This capacity involves becoming
receptive to experiencing the emotional meaning embedded in enactment while
maintaining sufficient autonomy from it so that interpreting, or thinking about,
it is possible. Put another way, the capacity to bring disavowed knowledge into
awareness involves tolerating our connection to emotions we might otherwise
reject as alien to us. For interpretation that develops out of an empathic con-
nection, we cannot simply reject the emotional engagement offered to us for
example by those who hate, those who commit violent acts, or those who would
control what we say or think in order to prevent our understanding them.
In public life, one of the most important questions is whether we are able
to think about difficult and painful issues, and if not, what prevents us from
thinking and in so doing bringing their underlying or embedded meaning into
awareness. Much of public life is about dealing with taboos about thinking and
the implied need to control the thought process. The psychoanalytic method
can be especially powerful in our effort to overcome taboos about thinking and
speaking, including taboos about empathy for designated enemies and about un-
derstanding the sometimes damaging consequences of identification with desig-
nated allies.
I think it will prove useful to consider the empathic connection as something
that is made possible by the capacity to enter into the negative moment. Empathy
is only possible when we are open to discovery in and through a form of com-
munication in which knowing the other is the outcome and not the premise. If
we consider psychoanalysis to be, among other things, a method for arriving at
the negative moment, we might understand better what I have in mind by inter-
nalization of a psychoanalytic idea and therefore employment of a psychoanalytic
method.
The negative moment is the prelude to and precondition for the kind of
change for which psychoanalytic methods are relevant, which is change in the
idea the individual holds about him- or herself. Through change of this kind,
the individual develops a new idea about the self: that it is not already known as
the locus of projections validating a preexisting fantasy and that it is or can be a
reality sui generis. This is the starting point for a new reality of self-expression in
doing and relating.
Consider, in this connection, a specific idea about the self, the idea that it is not
a thing of value, that the impulses driving it are essentially destructive, and that
the world must be protected from those destructive impulses. Consider further
that this idea has been formed early in life in response to a relationship in which
withdrawal of the good object (most notably the mother or maternal object)
14 Applied psychoanalysis

was a dominant theme. When faced with loss of the good object, the individual
formed a hypothesis involving causation, specifically the hypothesis that it was
his or her bad conduct that caused object loss. This hypothesis was formed for a
reason. By taking on responsibility for object loss, the individual accomplished
two important ends: (1) assuring that the destructiveness in the relationship is his
or her own and not that of the good object, who thereby remains unblemished
by any darker impulses and (2) keeping alive the hope that the situation can be
corrected and that it can be corrected by his or her own actions, however long
those may take to have the desired effect. An idea is formed, then, in response to
a relationship but in a way determined by the premise of agency.
This is clearly a complex idea involving (1) the capability to determine the
presence or absence of the object, (2) an emotional state characterized by a pre-
dominance of guilt, and (3) a belief in the goodness of the object that is protected
from contrary evidence by an appropriate interpretation of any experiences that
would seem to run contrary to it. This idea insists that the world is rational in the
sense that the object behaves not in arbitrary ways but in ways we can both pre-
dict and affect. This entire construction, this complex multi-leveled idea about
self and the world, emerges to fend off the fear that the good object has been lost
forever and that it is a flaw in the object that is responsible.
The result of shaping the inner world and the thought processes that are typ-
ical there according to this idea is a significant degree of unhappiness. The inner
world is dominated by what, in Freud’s structural model, would be referred to as
a harsh superego. It should be emphasized that, in shaping this unhappiness, it is
not the experience of guilt per se that is the essential point. Guilt is an important
part of the human experience of relating with others and with the self. It is an
expression of agency and therefore subjectivity. The problem here is not guilt and
the unhappiness associated with it, but rather (1) the way guilt has become the
essential, if not the only, factor in self-relating and (2) the magnitude of the (real
or imagined) harm for which guilt is the response. When the perception of harm
gets out of proportion, we are dealing not with normal forms of guilt but with
the guilt linked to grandiose fantasies of the power of the self to do harm, which
are then linked to equally grandiose fantasies of the power of the self to do good.
If the change we wish to bring about in the inner world involves reducing
the harshness toward the self that is its defining feature, then we must somehow
disrupt the logic that organizes internal experience, which is the logic of agency,
responsibility, loss, and hope. But this logic forms a closed circle; it cannot be
disrupted by evidence to the contrary because it interprets the evidence in a
way that makes it conform to the integrating idea. Neither can it be disrupted
by protestations that it is false, most notably insistence that the individual is not
responsible for object loss, because that would mean that the unrelenting attack
on the self can never bring about the return of the object and therefore that the
object will never return.
If change is to occur, there must remain in the psyche, however eclipsed by
the logic of the closed circle, a deeply buried residue of the conviction that the
 Applied psychoanalysis 15

self is not essentially the locus of a destructive power from which the world must
be protected at all costs. If there does remain such a residue, then there can be
a struggle over hegemony in the inner world, but only if the residue can find a
powerful ally. In the absence of such an ally, the weakness of the self, which is
the result of the unrelenting attack, will never allow it to regain dominance and
thereby redefine the logic of the inner world around a new idea.
Following Ronald Fairbairn (1958) we can refer to the bringing into the
inner world of this ally and its attachment to the residue of the self, remain-
ing there as the internalization of (or identification with) a new object. Allied
with the new object there is a much-enhanced possibility of overthrowing the
self-destroying idea that has for most of the individual’s life dominated in his or
her inner world. Heinrich Racker summarizes the whole matter very well in the
following statement:

The analytic transformation process … is a specific form of Eros, it is the

Eros called understanding, and it is, too, a specific form of understanding.
It is above all the understanding of what is rejected, of what is feared and
hated in the human being, and this thanks to the greater fighting strength,
a greater aggression, against everything which conceals the truth, against
illusion and denial—in other words against man’s fear and hate towards
himself, and their pathological consequences. (1968: 32)

In fostering the change with which I am concerned in the example, the purpose
of language is to convey the following idea: your aggression will not destroy
me, nor will it make me withdraw my support for the revival of your capacity
to make contact with the self, contact that was lost when you formed the self-
destroying idea that you were responsible for loss of the good object. Paradoxi-
cally, this idea cannot be conveyed through the magical power of language
however emotive that language might be. This is because acceptance of the idea
conveyed in the language is not a result of the magic of the words used to say it or
the emotive quality of those words. Rather, acceptance becomes possible when
the individual gives up the idea that his or her destructive power rules the world
and subjectivity takes on a more modest, more human, scale.
But, it is the grandiosity of the constituting idea formed in response to object
loss that underpins the notion that words have the power to change the world.
So, the idea that words have power, even magical power, is an aspect of the prob-
lem and not the solution. On a psychological level, the notion that words have
power means that the individual’s words can lead to the return of the good object
so all will be right with the world. But they can only do so because they also have
the power to do harm; they were, after all, experienced to be the cause of object
loss. Thus, the burden remains on the individual because the power remains his
or hers. To give up the burden means to give up the power that goes with it and
to reconceive, that is form a new idea about, the self, an idea of the self existing
on a human scale whose powers also exist on a human scale.
16 Applied psychoanalysis

For this, what the individual needs is not a new word, a new set of words, or
even a new concept. Rather, the individual needs a new idea about subjectivity,
one that allows him or her to live a finite life involving the exercise of finite pow-
ers. The individual finds this new idea in the internalization of an experience of
a new relationship organized around it; it is this experience that makes the new
idea possible and therefore real. This is the new experience we speak about in
the language of empathy, that “specific form of understanding” to which Racker
draws our attention. It is the understanding that allows us to “know” what is
feared, hated, and rejected inside ourselves. Knowing what has been rejected inside
us reshapes our relations with others, relations that are no longer about knowing
that what has been rejected inside ourselves exists in them. Saying the magic
words does not foster change; rather change requires finding a new way to know
self and other.
To embrace this new idea, the individual must give up an essential part of his
or history, the part involving the idea of self and object considered above. In-
deed, this idea is an idea about the past. And the power of the idea that must be
given up is the power of history itself to determine who we are, what we think,
and how we relate to others. Psychic change only has meaning, then, where our
history is not also our destiny.
One of the most important obstacles to giving up an old idea about subjec-
tivity and replacing it with a new one is what Fairbairn refers to as the “closed
system” (1958). This term refers to a relationship in which a reality that is os-
tensibly outside the individual is made to conform to an internal reality so that
the confrontation with external reality is powerless to disrupt the terms of the
internal reality. The idea of a closed system can usefully be applied to social
systems and to the problem of social change if we consider social change to be a
kind of negotiation between the inner world and the world outside. In the next
chapter, I develop some ideas from psychoanalysis that, I think, can be useful in
our attempt to understand this negotiation.

Notes
1 On the use of a more active language in psychoanalysis, see Schafer (1976).
2 The idea introduced in this paragraph is developed more fully in chapter 2.

References
Bion, W. (1961) Experiences in Groups. London: Routledge.
Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Caper, R. (1999) A Mind of One’s Own: A Kleinian View of Self and Object. London:
Routledge.
Fairbairn, R. (1958) On the nature and aims of psychoanalytic treatment. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis XXXI: 374–85.
 Applied psychoanalysis 17

Kohut, H. (1982) Introspection, empathy, and the semi-circle of mental health. Interna-
tional Journal of Psychoanalysis 63: 395–407.
Racker, H. (1968) Transference and Countertransference. Madison: International Uni-
versities Press.
Schafer, R. (1976) A New Language for Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Segal, H. (1957) Notes on symbol formation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 38:
391–97.
2
OBJECT RELATIONS

How do we know how to relate to others? What sort of knowledge do we use

to guide us in relating, and how do we acquire the knowledge we use for this
purpose? In responding to these questions, what are referred to in psychoanalysis
as “internal objects” can play an important role (Klein 1932, 1935; Freud 1957).
Internal objects play this role by acting as templates for relating. We use these
templates to guide us in our effort to know self and other and in seeking or avoid-
ing relationships based on what we think we know about them.
An internal object is an object we form and hold in the mind. This object in
the mind is the object as we come to know it, or the known object. It is also what
we know about the object. We create objects in the mind in different ways that
result in different kinds of knowledge. We might, for example, create an object
in the mind through the careful study of objects we encounter in the world.
Alternatively, we might create an object in the mind out of wishes and fears we
have about objects with which we have important relationships. We might go
about creating an object in the mind intentionally, fully aware that this is what
we are attempting to do. Or, we might create an object in the mind through
processes operating outside awareness, most notably processes involving identi-
fication with objects in the world. There is nothing simple about either of these
methods or about the objects in the mind they create. Both of them can be said,
however, to result in something we can reasonably refer to as knowledge of ob-
jects, although the different methods create different kinds of knowledge.
These ways of knowing can be said to shape internal objects. In psychoanaly-
sis, however, the term internal object has been limited to a specific kind of object,
one that has been formed in a particular way. The specific kind of internal object
with which psychoanalysis has been concerned is distinguished by the fact that
it is formed through mental processes available in the earliest stages of emotional
 Object relations 19

development and reflects in its construction the way of knowing suitable to

primitive emotional life. In this primitive form of knowing, the kind of taking
in of objects we speak about in the language of identification plays an especially
important role. The term identification refers to the shaping of a part of the self on
the model of the object, becoming, along some important dimension, like the
object or what we imagine it to be. Unlike the study of objects as a way of know-
ing them, identification follows a pattern laid out by the emotional salience of
objects. In other words, it is guided by emotional significance rather than objec-
tively discovered characteristics. What identification creates is essentially a way
of depicting and experiencing emotional salience itself as an object in the mind.
This primitive object in the mind takes the form of an emotionally-invested
narrative of the self. The term typically used for this narrative is fantasy. A fantasy
may be no more than a monologue or conversation, but it may also be an elabo-
rated sequence of events. Internal objects, as that term is used in psychoanalysis,
can, as a first approximation, be considered characters in fantasy. Put another
way, we are aware of internal objects in the form they take as characters in our
fantasies. So, we know these primitive internal objects in the same way we know
the characters in our fantasy, which is primarily through the emotions invested
in them as expressed in what they do.
Consider as an example the description of her inner world provided for us by
the artist Sadaf Cameron:

My ‘rich’ inner life is a constellation made up of The Anarchist Cookbook,

leaked CIA torture manuals, alchemical lab notes, and trashy romance
novels. It is a world premeditated to blow shit up—consisting of real and im-
agined adversaries and lovers—haunted by the mistakes I’ve made and will
eventually make, and the inevitable shame or catharsis they bear, riddled
with paranoia and self-torment, instinctually superstitious, and disturbed by
nostalgia and desire. (2015)

All of these contents of Cameron’s inner world can be thought to include ma-
terial for fantasy and fantasy objects representing her powerful emotional states,
for example, her desire to “blow shit up.” Here we see a glimpse into an inner
world containing figures ranging from torturers in CIA manuals to characters in
romance novels along with the range of emotions attached to them.
To the extent that we can be said to script what the characters in our fantasies
do, fantasy falls under our control in a way that real external objects do not. Real
objects have a will of their own; they exist in their own right (Winnicott 1971:
88–89). They can decide to provide or withhold gratification. But, what the
characters in our fantasy do and refrain from doing is determined by us and not
by them. Because of this, psychoanalysis has come to refer to the world of fantasy
as a realm subject to our omnipotent control. Because it is subject to omnipotent
control, fantasy reveals much about our desires, our fears, and the dilemmas in
20 Object relations

which desire and fear place us. It tells us something important about what relat-
ing means to us.
Yet, even though fantasy may be subject to our control, and even though we
write the script for fantasy, there is a sense in which fantasies are shaped by forces
outside our control because they are outside awareness. A fantasy of gratification
from an unavailable object may be one we feel driven to repeat over and over
again in a form that changes very little and expresses little of our subjective
freedom. We are driven to repeat the fantasy not by choice in any simple sense of
the term, but by the emotional salience of the objects in it. So long as the internal
object has this emotional salience, it exerts a force over us.1 The compulsion to
repeat fantasy reveals the all-too familiar absence of control over what goes on in
our inner worlds. We can say, then, that fantasy represents the complexity of our
control over our inner world, the fact that we both exert control there and feel
that what goes on there controls what we do.
The formation of fantasy is our effort to overcome the externality and given-
ness of things by conceiving them within the sphere of our control. In our fan-
tasy, objects lost to us return, failed relationships with objects succeed, shame is
overcome by moving it from self to other. Fantasy is part of our effort to control
relations with important figures in our lives by moving them from a world they
seem to control to one we control. Cameron refers to the presence in her inner
world of characters both “real and imagined.” Yet the “real” figures are also
imagined, because only by imagining them do they come to exist internally.
This follows from the forces that make the internalization process something
other than a mere replication, in image and narrative, of actual experience with
important figures (objects) in our lives. Rather than replicating, internalization
is a process of “remodeling and integration” (Trevarthen 1979: 332). As I suggest
above, internalization is also an effort to manage those relations by bringing
them under control. An important part of the way we do this is through inter-
pretation of our experience.
The most basic, or primitive, element in interpretation, and the one that
clearly expresses the way we appropriate experience rather than simply repli-
cating it internally, is the attribution of subjective causation to the sequence in
which events occur.2 Indeed, at the primitive level of the mind, nothing is an
accident; nothing simply happens. On the contrary, all that happens does so be-
cause of the power invested in objects to make something happen. This primitive
form of subjective causation evolves into what we refer to as will. Attribution of
will to objects opens up the possibility that we might control what they do by
influencing their will, something that would not be possible were their actions
entirely capricious or were they machine-like beings or instinct-driven organisms
rigidly programmed to do what they do.
We can say, then, that the fantasy narrative, which appears as a concrete
encounter, is about something more general, which is subjective causation.
Understood in this way, an internal object is a concrete depiction in image and
action of the reality in the world of willful conduct. Only because fantasy has
 Object relations 21

this more general significance can it be used not just to recall past experience
but also to shape experience in present and future. So far as fantasy involves this
more general dimension, it can be said to embody a primitive theory about the
world. Indeed, fantasy is a primitive expression of the same urge that later in life
expresses itself in theory making, which is such a vital part of everyday life and so
vitally important in shaping conduct and the way we relate to others.
This would all seem straightforward enough were the interpretation of expe-
rience and guide to relating embedded in fantasy well known to us, but this is not
always the case. Especially where we are dealing with primitive emotional life,
the meaning of fantasy is not overt but embedded in the actions of the characters
in it. Put in a language introduced in chapter 1, so far as we can speak about it
as being known, it is known in that special way Bollas refers to when he speaks
of the unthought known. The existence of an unthought known makes it pos-
sible, indeed likely, that the known exists for us in two different and potentially
conflicting forms: the form that is thought and the form that is not. This implies
that the interpretations of fantasy resulting from the more advanced processes of
knowing associated with the thought known may reveal the meaning of fantasy,
but they may also serve the opposite purpose, which is to hide that meaning in a
false understanding. Put another way, there are two interpretations of meaning,
one associated with the thought known, the other embedded in doing and relat-
ing rather than thought. The latter can develop to assure that we are protected
from knowing the real significance of our internal object world. But, since the
internal object world is the template we use for knowing the meaning of relat-
ing with others and therefore to shape relationships, the conflict between the
two levels of meaning implies that we often have a flawed guide for doing and
relating.

***

To help fix the ideas just briefly summarized, let me offer two examples.

Paul
Paul was a work associate of mine. He is a bright, lively, and amiable individual,
whose mode of communication offers a useful example of the role internal ob-
jects can play in shaping relations with others.
Relating to Paul consists primarily of listening to Paul tell stories or free as-
sociating. If you make a comment, Paul responds by pausing, withdrawing into
himself for a moment, then telling a story or offering the seemingly random
results of his ruminations. While Paul’s stories can be entertaining, they also
create a problem for the listener. This is the problem of figuring out what the
story is about and why Paul is telling it in the context of the conversation. Paul’s
communication embeds meaning in narrative, thereby simultaneously convey-
ing and hiding it.
22 Object relations

Musing on my experience with Paul led me to a fantasy about Paul and his
mother. In this fantasy, Paul is a child who seeks his mother’s help. Perhaps this
was help in managing difficult and troubling emotions; perhaps it was help in
negotiating life in the interpersonal world, especially in securing a reliable sense
of self in relations with others. For Paul, as for all children, these were important
problems, and he hoped he might find in the connection with his mother a path
to their solution. But, he did not. Instead, his mother responded either by telling
him a story in which she, not Paul, was the main character, or by simply spilling
the contents of her mind before him in a free associational sort of way. Yet, the
stories were always told with a kind of affection that led Paul to return to her
even when he had more or less given up on getting any help.
What he now sought in place of maternal care was a vicarious experience of
his mother’s internal narcissistic process, something he had come to confuse with
maternal care. Put another way, Paul came to experience attending to his mother
in the form of listening appreciatively to her stories about herself as what it means
to be cared for by her. He had confused being cared for with attending to the
would-be caretaker’s narcissistic chatter. Yet, this interpretation of experience
remained outside of his awareness; it was never explicitly articulated or known.
Instead, Paul communicated the meaning of his relationship with his mother by
enacting it with others.
As I thought about my experiences with Paul, I discovered more and more
evidence in support of the interpretation embedded in my fantasy. This evidence
existed most notably in Paul’s stated or implied maternal aspirations, but also in
a preoccupation with being fed that suggesting his need to fill a void in a way
that would create for him a semblance of the feeling associated with the maternal
connection. Evidence of Paul’s preoccupation with being fed was provided by
Paul’s tendency to offer effusive praise about others and their work. The evident
fact that this praise was at best out of proportion with reality and at worst a
wholly fanciful denial of reality suggested a projection onto others of Paul’s need
for a missing emotional sustenance.
On the hypothesis, then, that my fantasy in some way captured the reality of
Paul’s early experience with his mother, I was led to the following conclusion.
Having confused being cared for with participating in his mother’s narcissistic
process, Paul came, over time, to relate to others as his mother had related to
him. It could be said that he had internalized his mother and her way of making
a connection by applying in life the lesson he had learned in relating to her, or
attempting to do so. Yet, none of this could make up for the deficit in their rela-
tionship; it could never fill the void created by her absence. For, it is clear enough
that her presence was also a kind of absence in that, whether physically present
or not, she was never really available to him. He felt with her as I felt with him:
in the presence of a person who was lost in his own inner world. Being with
Paul had become, like being with his mother, being in the presence of the absent
mother (Green 1986). In this complex and paradoxical way, Paul held onto his
lost mother by taking her inside, or becoming like her.
 Object relations 23

Above, I suggest that fantasy provides a template for relating. In my exam-

ple of Paul, I used his way of relating as evidence of a fantasy, seeing his way
of relating as something driven by his internalized object relationship with his
mother. This method gains support when modes of relating have a repetitive and
impulse-driven quality, as was the case for Paul. Feeling entangled with Paul in
puzzling ways, I attempted to identify the meaning relating has for him by inter-
preting the internal experience relating with Paul provoked in me.
In the language of internal objects, we could say that an important aspect of
Paul’s experience of himself had been shaped according to the pattern laid down
in his relationship with his mother. This way of relating was coded as an internal
narrative of self and object, which was used by Paul to help him not only in ne-
gotiating relations with others, but also in his effort to know how to be in those
relationships and therefore make it possible for him to feel at home in relating.
When circumstances provoked the need for a method to relate to others, Paul
called on this internal narrative, or object relation (Bollas 1982: 350).

Robin
Robin is an academic with a history of awkward interpersonal relationships. Her
awkwardness traces back to important childhood experiences. Robin lost her
parents when she was young and then found herself in the care of relatives. This
experience disrupted her feeling of safety in the world and, indeed, her convic-
tion that she had a “home.” An important theme for Robin later in life was the
search for the good parent, which we can think of as a search for a safe place to
be, in other words for her home. For a period she would decide that her father
had been a good parent, while her mother became the target for her considerable
frustration and anger. Later, she would switch and judge her mother the good
parent, and her father became the target for her aggression. Throughout all of
this, it was vitally important for her to have a good parent, as she felt otherwise
she would be without hope that she could find safety in her world.
It could be said that Robin had set for herself the task of constructing a good
internal object out of complex and problematic relationships with her parents.
But, more than this, it could be said that Robin was attempting to use her cog-
nitive skills to replace already existing internal objects that offered her very little
comfort. Thus, we can see her struggle to “find” the good parent as evidence of
the presence of problematic internal objects, objects that were, in the end, not
good enough to sustain her wished-for feeling of safety in being.
As an adult, this struggle took a particular form, which was Robin’s moral-
political fantasy of herself as an engaged intellectual struggling against injustice.
The emotional center of her fantasy was her identification with excluded groups,
which could be considered, for Robin, groups of people who had no safe place
to be, or “home,” in the world. The emotional salience of the internal objects
in her fantasy was the feeling associated with being a victim of injustice that was
specifically linked to the denigration of socially and culturally ascribed group
24 Object relations

characteristics. The overt or conscious narrative was one involving the valence
of known traits, especially gender, and the struggle to change that valence from
negative to positive.
That internal objects can have a valence follows from their involvement in
narratives of gratification, deprivation, and loss. Internal objects can represent
the factors that block or prevent gratification, in which case they are “bad.” Or
they can represent factors in the personality that make the individual worthy
of gratification, in which case they are “good.” In psychoanalysis we speak of
the struggle over being good and being bad as a struggle over identification
with good and bad internal objects, which is to say good and bad figures in our
fantasies.3 In Sadaf Cameron’s words, the inner world consists of “adversaries
and lovers.” We can also speak of this as a struggle over the judgment we make
of ourselves, whether we judge the self to be good or bad. The idea that we
identify with good and bad internal objects then means that we have within
ourselves the potential to be good and bad, which is to say we have both a good
and a bad self.
But, for Robin, there was also a narrative operating under the radar, a nar-
rative in which she felt that she was born impaired in some vital way linked to
gender, and that, as a result, she lacked a quality needed to gain the respect of self
and other that would allow her to exist comfortably in the society of persons. It
was a narrative of being left out that paralleled an experience in which her par-
ents “left her behind” when she lost them. This hidden narrative was one that
attributed her loss to something that was unalterably wrong with her: inscribed
qualities of character that could not be changed.
While she may have held the belief that shifting the valence from negative to
positive would solve her problem, the fact that doing so required shifting the va-
lence for others in the opposite direction indicated that her strategy could never
work. So long as she tied her hopes to replace a negative self-assessment with a
positive one to moving the negative one onto others, and so long as this transfer
had to be continually repeated, her strategy implied the continuing presence of
an internal object having a negative valence. She always needed an engagement
with those external containers for her bad self as the way she reassured herself
that she was good and they were bad. But the fact that the need for reassurance
persisted made it clear that the strategy had not succeeded in ridding her of her
unconscious knowledge that the badness remained inside. Her way of knowing
her identification with her “bad” internal object was in the form it took in her
external container: those onto whom she had attempted to move it. The intensity
and persistence of her refusal to “know” it as part of herself indicated how deeply
embedded a part of herself it really was.
Through altering the valuation of the problematic aspects of herself, she
hoped she could transform the degraded self into the grandiose self of her fan-
tasy: a leading figure in the struggle against injustice. In other words, the hid-
den narrative was one in which the only hope was for a new self to act as a
magnet drawing attention away from what she “knew” was true about herself
 Object relations 25

(her unthought known). And that was the problem: the new self was made up of
the same material as the one that led to her abandonment, that material was just
valued differently.
Robin saw the world through the prism of group identity: gender, race, na-
tionality, sexual orientation, religion. Group identities existed in pairs occupying
opposing poles on her moral-political scale. An interesting aspect of this was that
Robin always knew self and other not as unique individuals, but only as loci of
predetermined group identities. Thus, she always looked outside herself, to these
ascribed and culturally defined characteristics, in seeking self-knowledge. This
strategy can be understood as a way of managing her need to not know herself
by replacing her personally developed identity with an externally defined set of
abstract qualities.
An important consequence of Robin’s method for engaging others was that,
along an important dimension, she never met anyone she did not already know.
She knew others in the way she attempted to know herself: as the intersection of
group identities. This method is built into the use of internal objects as templates
for knowing external objects when those templates are shaped by group identity
and express the weakness of the self as a factor in shaping the fantasies that make
up inner experience. There is a significant loss of identity in knowing yourself
the way Robin did: as black or white, male or female, Anglo or Hispanic. And,
by knowing others in this way, Robin imposed her loss on them.
Taking pride in attributes of an ascribed identity means taking pride in a false
self in Winnicott’s sense of the term (1962). This is a self put in place to exclude
the possibility of making contact with what is real and true about us. In other
words, insistence on taking pride in attributes such as race and gender means
treating the self as a bad object and doing everything that can be done to prevent
identification with it. And this is the case whatever the specific attributes might
be, whether you are white or black, male or female. The alternative to relating on
the basis of a template of pride and shame in ascribed characteristics is to invest
value in what is real and true about one’s self and thereby assure access to it as the
basis of doing and relating. Then, rather than using a template of group identity,
doing and relating will express the individual’s original vitality as that has taken
form in an individual identity and way of being.

***

Both Paul and Robin were drawn to narratives of a world marked by destructive
forces. They held a widely shared view that we live in a world of chaos, destruc-
tion, and disorienting change. Each made frequent references to either popular
fantasies of a destroyed world, notably cinematic and literary accounts of the
post-apocalyptic dystopia, or real-world accounts of war, genocide, and racial
or ethnic violence. Without rejecting the element of truth in these narratives,
it is also important to see the preoccupation with public fantasies of a destroyed
world and factual accounts of those who are forced to live in the reality of such a
26 Object relations

world (refugees from war zones, victims of atrocities) as suggestive of important

qualities of the inner world.
This is not to say that the public fantasies were simply an expression or man-
ifestation of internal object relations. On the contrary, their cultural prevalence
and the fact that they were widely shared indicates very clearly that they can-
not be explained by reducing them to manifestations of individual psychology.
Furthermore, public fantasies are not separable from real events: the CIA torture
manual in Sadaf Cameron’s inner world presumably refers to actual events. Yet,
the fact that actual events may be material for fantasy life does not preclude their
appropriation in a special world of meaning and for a special purpose when they
become part of the individual’s inner life.
A more productive approach than the one that treats public fantasy as a man-
ifestation of the individual’s inner life would see private fantasy life as bearing
a complex and multi-layered relation to actual events and public fantasy. Real
events and public fantasy do not simply replicate themselves in the psyche of the
individual, thereby making individual psychology an epiphenomenon of politi-
cal and cultural trends existing prior to and independently. Rather, those trends
could no more exist without their presence in the inner world than that presence
in the inner world could arise outside the cultural trends. And to become part
of the inner world implies that the events are not brute “facts” imposing them-
selves on the subjective world, but narratives saturated with an imposed meaning
through the activity of interpretation.
We can gain some insight into this mutual dependence of individual psy-
chology and macro-social trend if we consider the matter of abandonment more
closely. Both Paul and Robin had significant, though very different, experiences
of abandonment. Robin’s abandonment, while more tangible, was not more
damaging than the emotional abandonment Paul experienced in the presence
of an absent mother. So far as abandonment in its different forms is a common
theme in social and cultural processes, its psychological consequences will be
prevalent. And when they are prevalent, so will intergenerational transmission
associated with abandonment be prevalent as each generation enacts an inter-
nalized drama of abandonment and loss on the next. Paul’s relationship with his
mother offers a good example of this intergenerational transmission and the way
enactment of an internalized relationship tends to perpetuate a mode of relating
across time.
The earlier events associated with abandonment occur, the fewer the internal
resources the child has put in place to cope with them and therefore the more
vulnerable the child is to an apocalyptic interpretation of his situation and to an
intensification of feelings of aggression against the object that has left him alone
and afraid. The resulting provocation of intense anxieties linked to overwhelm-
ing destructive feelings supports the experience of the world as a dangerous place
that later developed for Paul and Robin.
What formed inside both individuals were internal object relations (or fan-
tasies) featuring not the moderation of anxiety in the connection with a caring
 Object relations 27

object, but the intensification of anxiety in a relationship with an object unable

to provide the needed care. Understanding the vulnerability of the young child
allows us to understand how what appears to the adult as a manageable event is
experienced by the child as a catastrophe that provokes unmanageable emotions
and can develop into an internal object relation organized around the intensifi-
cation rather than moderation of anxiety. The significant destructive emotions
embedded in these internal object relations can become a permanent aspect of
the inner world, while experiencing the destructive impulses in objects outside
(externalizing) can foster the conviction that the world is a dangerous place. At
the same time, the greater the dominance of internal object relations featuring
intensification of anxiety, the more likely the adult will relate to his or her chil-
dren as his parents related to him: by intensifying rather than moderating their
anxiety. By relating to his children in this way, the parent enacts an internal
object relation, or narrative of self and other, that transmits the meaning of relat-
ing from one generation to the next.
Most notable in the fantasies of chaos and destruction is the theme of the loss
of a stable or reliable object relation. This loss is then expressed in adult language
as attributes of the world outside, which is described and experienced as danger-
ous, chaotic, and, because it is in constant flux, unreliable. For Paul and Robin,
the consequence of the interpretation of the external world on the basis of an
internal narrative or object relation is a radical and one-sided interpretation of
the world in which they found themselves as a dangerous place to be.
This is not to say that their interpretation of the state of the world is
altogether misguided. On the contrary, their interpretation carries significant
weight. We do not live in a peaceable reality well suited to a sense of emo-
tional wellbeing. There are good reasons to consider the world we live in one
without adequate security and stability due to the presence there of power-
ful destructive forces. Highlighting the link to internal object relations need
not nullify a judgment of reality along the lines favored by Paul and Robin.
Still, it does allow us to appreciate some important, and problematic, conse-
quences of their lack of awareness of the part played by internal object rela-
tions in shaping their interpretation of reality. These consequences include
most notably (1) a tendency to misread the magnitude of disorder and chaos
in the world due to the experience of reality as the external manifestation of
an early childhood experience interpreted at the time as a catastrophe and
(2) a tendency to shape interpretation of reality according to the principle of
subjective causation that dominates primitive object relating and primitive
internalized object relations.
This second consequence has special importance for understanding the rela-
tionship between the inner world and social processes and institutions. In prim-
itive mental life, there is always someone responsible for the bad experiences and
bad feelings; more specifically, there is always someone who has the “power” to
be, in Cameron’s formulation, either our “adversary” or our “lover.” And, in this
judgment, we are not incorrect. But, to transfer this assessment onto the adult
28 Object relations

world narrows and skews our knowledge of how that world works. Recourse to
primitive forms of causation drives interpretations of reality that make it the re-
sult of willful conduct on the part of those who have the power to impose their
ends on others. It leaves little room for the idea that things happen to us that are
the results of broader social, political, and economic processes operating outside
the will of those caught up in them.

***

Because meaning is experienced through internalized object relations, and be-

cause internal object relations provide a template for relating to others in the
world outside, it is natural to see in relations with others opportunities to adjust
meaning in a desired direction, most notably one that would relieve the suffering
associated with meanings that are imposed in ways intended to degrade individ-
uals and groups. This suggests an important link between the inner world and
the world of relating to others: politics, culture, and social institutions. Indeed,
we can understand an important purpose of groups and social movements as
controlling the meaning invested in relating. Their purpose, in other words, is
to engage in a battle over interpretation. Yet, while we may assume that this is a
battle between opposing cultural appropriations of experience, the unseen, but
decisive, battle takes place on a different plane. On this other plane, the struggle
is between the articulated meaning and the meaning embedded in the enactment
of fantasy, between the meaning we think we know and the meaning we know
without speaking or thinking about it.
The struggle over interpretation in the world of politics, culture, and so-
cial institutions parallels the struggle in the inner world between the embedded
meaning and the explicitly articulated meaning, between the unthought known
and what is thought to be known. The social world is constructed and experi-
enced as a world of what is thought to be known and a place for the struggle
over what is thought to be known, a struggle whose importance derives from the
conviction that control over what is thought to be known means control over
suffering. Yet, treating the social world as if it were all about what is thought
about experience denies the other reality of social processes, which is that they
are often enactments of embedded meaning held outside of awareness. But, to
acknowledge that what goes on in the world of social relating is enactment of
embedded meaning is to undermine our hope that we can resolve the problem
of meaning entirely at the level of what is thought to be known, that changing
what people think they know changes what they know without thinking about
it and therefore changes how they relate to others.
In all of this, preventing the unthought known from being thought has special
importance. There is a special kind of anxiety associated with the prospect that
the unthought known might be thought. Because it operates at primitive levels
of mental functioning, the unthought known follows a rule according to which
thinking about it makes it real, and the purpose of not thinking about it is to
 Object relations 29

assure that it is not real. There is a reason, in its way a good reason, this rule is
assumed to apply, which has to do with what it is we must not know. What we
must not know is that the self is irredeemably flawed. Knowing is the way we
confirm this conviction about the self, which makes the prospect that we might
come to know a source of anxiety. Knowing the flawed self also challenges the
reality of the wished-for self, the self we hope we can substitute for the one we
fear we have.
Yet, preventing the unthought known from being thought about does not
make it disappear. On the contrary, when we prevent ourselves from knowing
it, we also keep secure its presence in the psyche and the power it has over us.
This power is expressed in enactment, most notably the enactment by which we
struggle to assure self and other that the bad self is not ours, but belongs to some-
one else. As I suggest above, what reveals the flaw in this strategy is that we must
keep repeating it over and over again. Where enactment is driven by the need to
move unacceptable aspects of the self outside, the work of preventing awareness
that the flawed self is ours can never be finished.
In psychoanalysis, the method by which we drain the unthought known of its
power is to think about it. We accomplish this goal by creating a link between
the more primitive and more advanced ways of knowing (enactment and think-
ing). Use of the terms primitive and advanced clearly indicate how the psycho-
analytic method rests heavily on a notion of emotional development. This idea
of development makes it possible to speak of movement along a developmental
line. This movement is not only the forward progress indicated by the notion
of development, but also the movement backward we refer to in the language
of regression. Embedded knowing experienced through enactment represents
a more primitive level of mental functioning, one available to us at the earliest
stages of emotional life. For the more adult mind to make contact with this more
primitive level, it must facilitate the movement away from its characteristic mode
of thought, or regress, to more primitive processes.
Regression can be an important part of the method by which we make contact
with embedded knowing, but only if regression takes place in a setting where
it is safe not simply to move from more mature to less mature mental processes,
but to do so in a way that leads to a more mature knowing of the more primitive
processes. In brief, regression only reveals the hidden meaning of relating if we
maintain our more mature capacity while making contact with the more prim-
itive. Otherwise, regression simply means moving from thinking to enactment,
from contact with our disavowed self to actions aimed at moving that self onto
others. When regression is used to know what we dread we will know about
ourselves, then it leads to a new knowledge of self and other, a knowledge that
includes a diminished fear of what we will discover through this new way of
knowing. This new knowledge is what we refer to as integration of the self because
it allows us to hold together the different aspects of self-experience, those that are
good and make us worthy of gratification and those that are bad and block the
gratifying connection.
30 Object relations

Anxiety promotes regression away from thinking in the direction of enact-

ment. The more anxiety can be reduced, the more regression can lead instead
to the kind of self-knowledge that drains the unthought known of its power by
limiting the fear we experience at the prospect that we will know it and will,
through knowing, confirm that the fatally flawed self is all the self we have. This
is important because it indicates that reducing anxiety is essential in any process
of change that would reduce the power of primitive mental processes in our life
together. Because it is not simply regression that facilitates change, but regression
in a setting that alleviates anxiety, change depends on the availability of a setting
marked by what Roy Schafer refers to as an “atmosphere of safety” (1983).
For our purposes, what is essential about the atmosphere of safety is that it
fosters integration, which is to say it fosters “the understanding of what is re-
jected, of what is feared and hated in the human being” to which Racker draws
our attention. This is the safety of the inner world that results from internalizing
an empathic relationship with another as an empathic self-relation. Put another
way, it is the safety afforded in an internal object world that includes a figure
capable of knowing rather than rejecting what is feared and hated in ourselves. It
is expressed, for example, in an internal fantasy of conversation with an empathic
object.
Once a conviction about the badness of the self is instantiated in the inner
world as an unthought but deeply felt narrative shaping our relations with others,
that conviction cannot be easily dislodged. It cannot be easily dislodged because
we know it in that special way that protects it from being thought. This way of
knowing constitutes a closed system. In this closed system, we relate to others as
internal objects or characters in our fantasy. In doing so, we follow a template set
through primitive processes of internalization. As a result of this, relating to oth-
ers in the here and now is always a repetition of early relations as those take form
internally. Any apparently new objects are experienced, through projection, as
the reappearance of the already known object. As in Robin’s world, there is never
room for anything new.
By contrast, in an open system, objects are not already known by projection,
and relating is not limited to a fixed template. New objects are possible. Any en-
gagement we might have with others involves their being present in our minds,
but this presence does not in all cases make them a part of our fantasy life. Our
ability to imagine and conceive objects having an existence in their own right
can liberate us from the use of fantasy as a template for relating and enable us to
look elsewhere for a way of knowing. Real change is change that moves us from
a closed to an open system.
Social institutions and processes instantiate ways of knowing as ways of relat-
ing, thereby assuring that they are not contingent results of personal biography
and experience, but larger realities of living that transcend what is particular,
personal, and contingent. Families, schools, work organizations, and politi-
cal processes all embody norms of relating that are also norms of thinking and
knowing, or, in some cases, of knowing without thinking. Of special importance
 Object relations 31

in families are ways of relating that incorporate knowledge of self and others
appropriated by children as their internal object worlds. Schools teach ways of
knowing and relating both overtly and implicit in pedagogy. Political processes
and organizational life call upon these ways of knowing as the necessary basis for
participation. I explore some of these institutions and processes in greater depth
in chapters 4, 8, 9, and 10.

Notes
1 Traditionally, in psychoanalysis, this emotional salience is understood in terms of in-
stinct; see Freud (1911), Isaacs (1943), Segal (1964). Here, I consider fantasy in its role
of managing object relations, especially as object relations bear on the standing of the
self in the inner world.
2 On subjectivity and intentionality in infant development, see Trevarthen (1979).
3 On good and bad internal objects, see Klein (1932) and Fairbairn (1943).

References
Bollas, C. (1982) On the relation to the self as an object. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
63: 347–59.
Cameron, S. (2015) Studio visits. The Magazine XXIV, III: 21.
Fairbairn, W. (1943) The repression and the return of the bad objects. British Journal of
Medical Psychology XIX. Reprinted in: Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952.
Freud, S. (1911) Formulation on the two principles of mental functioning. Standard
Edition 12: 218–26.
——— (1957) Mourning and melancholia. Reprinted in J. Rickman (editor) A General
Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Anchor Books.
Green, A. (1986) The dead mother. In On Private Madness. Madison: International Uni-
versities Press.
Isaacs, S. (1943) The nature and function of phantasy. In M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs,
and J. Riviere, Developments in Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1932) The Psychoanalysis of Children. London: Hogarth Press.
——— (1935) A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive state. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 16: 145–74.
Schafer, R. (1983) The Analytic Attitude. New York: Basic Books.
Segal, H. (1964) Phantasy and other mental processes. International Journal of Psycho-analysis.
Trevarthen, C. (1979) Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of
primary intersubjectivity. In M. Bullowa, Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal
Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Winnicott, D. (1962) Ego integration in child development. In The Maturational Processes
and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Madison:
International Universities Press, 1965.
——— (1971) Playing and Reality. East Sussex: Bruner-Routledge.
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PART II
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3
RELATING AND NOT RELATING

In this chapter, I explore an idea of Winnicott’s that is, I think, of central

importance for thinking about social processes and institutions. This is the idea
of the isolation of the true self.1 Winnicott summarizes the idea of isolation when
he notes that there is a “tendency in personality growth” that “can be discerned
from the very beginning,” which is the tendency to develop “a capacity to make
relationships with objects in spite of the fact that in one sense, and an important
sense, the individual is an isolated phenomenon and defends this isolation at all
costs” (1962: 68).2 This is not the idea typically associated with Winnicott, who
we most often think of as a key figure in the development of what are sometimes
referred to as relational theories. In particular, the idea of isolation would seem
to conflict with Winnicott’s famous statement that there is no such thing as a
baby; there is only the mother-infant unit.3 It would also seem to conflict with
the importance Winnicott places on “mirroring” as an essential element in ego
integration (1962a: 61). These ideas have been assumed to point us toward a no-
tion of the personality as a social construct.
But, if we think more closely about Winnicott’s writing on the mother-infant
unit, or “holding environment,” we find that what he has to say on the subject
involves the idea that, because there is no element of separation and difference
in it, the mother-infant unit is not a relationship at all. Specifically, during what
Winnicott refers to as the holding phase, there is no object relation, but instead
the development of the “capacity for object relationships” (1960: 45). For this ca-
pacity to develop, the infant must create an internalized object world that allows
it to exist in a larger context of others, in other words to provide the nascent per-
son with a basis for relating. And, the essential element in the capacity for object
relations is what Winnicott terms the isolation of the true self.
36 Relating and not relating

The ideas of the mother-infant unit and the holding environment are im-
portant, then, not because of the way they establish the human individual as
inevitably embedded in a world of relatedness, but because they are the necessary
basis for the creation of an inner world that is separate from the world of object
relations and used to protect the core of the personality from them. I think that
any careful reading of Winnicott makes it clear that his main concern is with the
isolation of the core of the personality and the capacity to cope with the problem
he refers to as impingement.
By impingement, Winnicott has in mind the demand for the infant to adapt to
the needs of the mother who, rather than responding to the infant, expects that
the infant will respond to her. Winnicott contrasts impingement with “active
adaptation to the child’s needs,” which “enables him to be in undisturbed isola-
tion.” In this state, the infant “makes a spontaneous movement and the environ-
ment is discovered without loss of sense of self.” By contrast, “faulty adaptation
to the child” results in “impingement of the environment so the individual must
become a reactor to this impingement” (1952: 222). Winnicott defines the main
function of the maternal holding environment as “the reduction to a minimum
of impingements to which the infant must react with resultant annihilation of
personal being” (1960: 47).
What does it mean for the child to “adapt” to the parent? To answer this
question, we need to focus our attention on the matter not of what the child does,
but of who the child is. In other words, what is important in impingement is that
who the child is meets the parent’s needs and expectations. In thinking about
who the child is, of primary importance is the way the parent knows the child.
More specifically, we can relate impingement to the way of knowing the child
that involves having the child play a role in the parent’s internal object world
or fantasy life. When the child is cast in such a role, the child is known prior to
any process of self-development and self-determination. Indeed, the child is well
known before it has even been born.
From the child’s standpoint, there is something magical in this knowing,
which the child experiences as the parent’s possession of a special power: the
power to see the child’s future. But, of course, this is not magic at all, but an
ability to see the future born of the power to coerce the child into adapting to
the parent’s vision of the child in the future, to make the child become what he
or she already is in the parent’s fantasy. This way of knowing the child plays an
essential role in the process of intergenerational transmission of ways of living
and being since the knowledge of the child’s future is really a way of knowing
the past as that has come to be embedded in fantasy. We can, then, understand
impingement as the process by which the future is determined by the past. And
it is important that the future be determined by the past not simply because it
fulfills the parent’s narcissistic need, but because it assures that traditional roles
and norms persist across generations.
The result of impingement is that the child will always remain dependent on
external markers in the effort to discover his or her identity. In other words, the
 Relating and not relating 37

child will seek to find him- or herself outside, in a designated social role, or set
of social roles. We know who we are if we know our gender, race, ethnicity, and
so on; or if we follow the work role designated for us by our family. This is the
way Robin came to know herself and comes to know others: as a list of designa-
tions. When this looking outside (adaptation) is the method we employ, then our
personal experience of living contracts, even disappears, because we can have no
“unique presence of being” (Bollas 1989: 9); our center of being, or self, is forced
to retreat not only from any existence in the world outside, but from the inner
world as well.
The idea of impingement can, then, help us understand something important
about the psychological consequences of imposed group identity. When we adapt
to pre-existing ways of being rather than create our own, we must make an
emotional investment in socially determined and recognized roles rather than in
a way of life shaped by the presence of the self as an active factor. In Winnicott’s
language, under these circumstances, living is all about adaptation and compli-
ance rather than creativity. Though, for Winnicott, this is not a way of living at
all because it is not a way of being psychically alive. What is essential in social
organizations that demand compliance and the rule of the past over the present
is the eclipse of what is personal in living, a personal way of being, and a rich
inner world.
The perpetuation of norms of being as the individual’s identity underlies the
formation of a false self organized around the demands of adaptation.4 A false self
of this kind is essential in all forms of social organization that depend heavily on
domination of the past over the present and future, which is to say require affir-
mation of the normative standing of the past in the form of compliance with the
demand that who we are be determined by who our parents are, and who their
parents were. This development of social arrangements on the basis of adaptation
begins, as Winnicott insists, in the child’s earliest experience, which is the expe-
rience of a too-early disruption, or loss, of the holding environment.
As I note above, the main quality of the holding environment is that, in it,
the world adapts to the child. Failure of the environment to adapt means that the
child exists for another and not for him- or herself. What Winnicott is getting
at here, then, is the struggle over being for self and the problem of resisting the
pressure to be for, or adapt to, another. Following Winnicott, Arnold Modell
speaks of the fragility of our sense of self in connection to the experience that
our continuity of being is “held hostage to the response of another person” (1993:
12). For Winnicott, being for self, or existing, is an end in itself; and, it is also the
end of living with others. If we are to follow Winnicott, then, we must consider
this state of being our starting point. If we do not exist, then nothing really
matters. And this is the case because other things only matter to us because we
invest them with emotional significance; we make them matter (Levine 2013:
vii-xi). But we can only make things matter if we have the capacity to make an
emotional investment in objects including the self as an object. The language of
the “true self,” “original vitality,” “existing,” and “feeling real” is simply a way
38 Relating and not relating

of referring to our capacity to make things matter. Impingement undermines our

ability to make ourselves the source of the emotional significance of our activities
and relationships.
True self-experience is possible when we have the capacity to negate the ex-
ternal world by treating it as if it has no power over us and sets no limits on us,
and, as a result of this negation, to experience the feeling that we exist. What
we create by negating the world is space in which we can exist. Originally, this
space is the maternal holding environment; later, it is what Winnicott refers to
as the intermediate space between fantasy and the reality principle. Interestingly
enough, Winnicott also refers to this as “potential” space, thereby suggesting a
connection between the true self and the existence of the organism as a “poten-
tial,” which is something yet to be formed or realized. The true self should be
understood not as something determined, for example by society, but as some-
thing that is not determined, at least not yet and not by a process of adaptation to
outside factors. Impingement refers to the effort on the part of the world outside
to violate the space in which the true self exists and to shape the personality in-
dependently of it, to force the individual to live as someone already known in a
space already formed and predetermined.
When damaging object relations have been internalized, it is necessary to
protect, or hide, the true self from the kind of internal presence that involves it in
shaping awareness. Then, we have what Winnicott refers to as an “extreme” ver-
sion of the false self put in place to deaden emotional experience and eliminate
all vestiges of creativity so that the individual can survive, in however reduced
a state (Winnicott 1960). Under these circumstances, awareness of the true self
is replaced by an emotional investment in the false self that takes the form of the
conviction that it is real when it is not. It is necessary to do this when the true
self has been identified with bad internal objects, or, in other words, has come
to be judged a bad object (the bad self ) and therefore experienced as a threat to
gratification. Because the only real gratification is the gratification experienced
in the expressions of vitality associated with emotional existence, this situation
places the individual into a contradiction. The strategy to assure gratification by
hiding the true self actually assures that no real gratification is possible.
Being in society is only consistent with a secure connection with the self
when society is configured in a way that makes emotional withdrawal from it
possible. To the extent that withdrawal is important, which is to say contact with
the self is important, being in society cannot require a configuration of the inner
world organized around the hiding of the true self. We can, then, distinguish
social arrangements on the basis of the degree to which the hiding of the true self
in the inner world is fostered by them.
The hiding of the true self is not a natural or inevitable condition. It is, rather,
a configuration of the inner world that takes shape in response to the need for the
individual to find him- or herself in a world of relating of a particular kind. And
the need to find ourselves in a world of relating that requires hiding the self stems
from the internal imperative we feel to live in a world secure from any true-self
 Relating and not relating 39

experience. This is not a causal system, but a system of mutual determination of

inner world and the world outside organized around the complex idea that the
only way the core of the personality can be kept safe from destruction is if it is
not allowed to be present.

Withdrawal
As an example of the ideas introduced above, I would like to explore a film con-
cerned with a phenomenon in Japan referred to as hikikomori, or withdrawal.5
This is a phenomenon of adolescence in which the individual withdraws both
from the family and from the world outside into his or her room for an extended
period of time, as much as several years. The individual lives during this period
in a state of near total isolation from human contact.
The film, Left Handed, opens to a scene of a group of adolescent students
writing at their desks in a “cram school,” which is a special school designed to
help students prepare to pass entrance exams for high schools and universities.6
It is evening and dark outside. The film is shot in black and white. As each stu-
dent moves to the teacher’s desk and hands in his or her paper, the teacher speaks
only the word “passed” or “failed.” The teacher is not a teacher who teaches, but
an impersonal authority passing judgment. The exams are then crumpled and
tossed in the wastebasket. The scene is bleak; the students show little emotion;
one is asleep at his desk. In the next scene, the central character of the film,
Hiroshi, and his younger brother are walking to school, not together but in
single file with Hiroshi in the lead. They do not communicate. As they walk,
Hiroshi counts the steps: 1, 2, 3…20, 21, 22…400, 401, 402…1100, 1101,
1102. At home after school, his mother serves dinner. After Hiroshi has retired
for the night, his father returns from work. Hiroshi’s father does not speak with
his mother. Outside the home, the camera finds symbols of imprisonment, for
example in the repeated pattern of the metal framing of a staircase. A group of
men at a driving range hit golf balls over and over again. Hiroshi’s brother plays
a game by himself in which he repeatedly throws a ball into a net.
For Hiroshi, the world outside the home is like a prison. But, he finds no ref-
uge at home. Eventually he retreats into his room, the only place where he can
escape the prison outside and be at home without being with his family. To es-
cape prison, he imprisons himself. He remains isolated in his room for 18 months.
Hiroshi’s mother is no help, and his father feels only shame. Hiroshi leaves a mes-
sage outside his door telling both that he wishes he could just disappear.
For Hiroshi, home is not a good place to be. His father is essentially a stranger
concerned with Hiroshi only insofar as he brings honor or shame. His mother
is a well-meaning woman who keeps asking him questions he cannot answer:
What’s wrong? Why are you doing this? His mother expresses concern but offers
little to help him find out what is wrong. Later in the film, Hiroshi’s mother goes
shopping to buy him a gift: a bicycle, a warm jacket, a watch, all things for which
a boy shut in his room could have no use. Instead of offering him what he needs,
40 Relating and not relating

she offers him things that express her ignorance of, or refusal to acknowledge,
what he needs.
When Hiroshi’s mother suggests to his father that they seek outside help,
he flatly refuses citing the shame he feels about Hiroshi’s behavior. Intolerance
of Hiroshi’s state leads his father to attempt forcibly to remove Hiroshi from
his room. When his father fails to get Hiroshi out of his room, he gives up on
Hiroshi. Later, Hiroshi’s mother and father separate. When asked which parent he
would prefer to live with, Hiroshi indicates that he would prefer to live with his
father. Yet, he does not go to live with his father as his brother does, but remains
in his room. The wish to live with his father suggests that Hiroshi wants a life
outside the home and a related desire to move away from his mother; the fact that
he nonetheless remains at home suggests that he is unable to have such a life or
move away from his mother.
Once Hiroshi’s father has moved out, his mother is free to seek help for Hiroshi,
which she does. She meets with a counselor or therapist, who comes to the house
to speak with Hiroshi through his closed door. During the first brief visit, the
therapist simply introduces himself and leaves. In subsequent visits, he talks to
Hiroshi through the closed door about why he wants to help him come out of his
room: he wants Hiroshi to see the light and feel the warmth of the sun; he wants
him to experience being alive. Eventually, Hiroshi leaves with his therapist, who
takes him to an institution for young people with similar problems, assuring
Hiroshi that he will be safe there, no one will force him to do what he cannot,
or does not want to, do.
Rather than asking Hiroshi what’s wrong, or being a stranger for whom
Hiroshi’s only significance is that he causes shame, the therapist talks to him
about the experience of being alive (feeling sunlight) and his right to live (emo-
tionally). And he offers Hiroshi a safe place to be alive (or as alive as he is able and
willing to be). For Hiroshi, the therapist is something new. It is not surprising,
then, that the therapist might make a difference. He is not part of the family and
therefore not part of the problem, makes no judgment (unlike the father), but
(unlike the mother) conveys a feeling that he might understand Hiroshi’s predic-
ament. What is notable in this is that, unlike for his parents, what is important
about his withdrawn state to Hiroshi’s therapist is not the absence of relating but
the absence of living. It was the therapist’s understanding of this distinction that
made it possible for them to make a connection.
In thinking about Hiroshi’s withdrawing himself from the world, it will prove
useful to consider Hiroshi’s shutting himself in his room an attempt to commu-
nicate a situation in the inner world. This is the situation Winnicott refers to as
the hiding of the true self. If we view the movie as a dramatization of the hiding
of the true self, we can see all the ritualized repetitive behavior in the film as
examples of mental processes that serve to hide the true self in the inner world:
counting steps, doing multiple-choice exams, working on a golf range, playing
ball with yourself, and so on. All of these acts prevent awareness of, and therefore
the experience of, a troubled internal situation.
 Relating and not relating 41

Late in the film, a young woman who has come out of her withdrawn state
describes herself during her period of isolation as spending her time playing
games and daydreaming. She tells us that what she spent her time doing was try-
ing to find a way to stop herself from thinking. If we assume that “not thinking”
indicates the presence of something she is trying not to think, we can consider
the whole matter of adolescent retreat depicted in the film an effort to avoid
thinking something, and that this something is an unavoidable result of engaging
with other people wherever that engagement might take place. Yet, while the
film offers a vivid and moving account of the attempt to avoid awareness, there
is little discussion, at least explicitly, of what it is the young people feel they must
not be aware.
Nonetheless, there is in the film a communication of what it is that must not
be thought conveyed not in words, but in image and mood. In image and mood,
the film contains as its central reality a profound absence: the absence of human
vitality. What cannot be thought, and therefore cannot be said, is the loss of con-
tact with the individual’s vital center. But, though it cannot be thought, it can
be communicated by mood, color tone, and one specific action, which is taking
oneself out of the picture. This act can be considered a symbolic representation
of severing contact with the self internally. Once Hiroshi has closed himself off
in his room, he is no longer present in the film, though his absence is. In this
enactment of absence, the film conveys what must not be thought. If this is the
case, then hiding himself in his room is an enactment of another hiding that takes
place inside himself.
Understood in this way, the film depicts Hiroshi’s disconnection from his
inner source of vitality in being or “true self ” with the result that his life has
been indefinitely put on hold. We may be tempted to conclude that this loss
of connection with the true self is made necessary by the world in which he
lives, where there is no place to be alive, and that is no doubt true, at least up
to a point. But if, as I have suggested, we also consider the external world as it
is depicted in the film a metaphor for inner space, then the struggle that the act
of withdrawal in the film depicts is not only the struggle of a boy withdrawing
into his room, but the struggle of a boy seeking to hide from an inner world that
is also the dark and deadening world of the film. This means that the absence
of the boy from the world of the film represents not only his absence from the
world outside but also his absence from his own inner space, and the desire that
everyone disappear is a desire that he might disappear, which is a desire that he
not exist in a state that results from severing contact with the self. Put in the
context of the film, the answer to the question his mother poses to him (what
is wrong?) and the answer to the question we have posed to the young woman
(what do you not want to think?) would be: I dare not feel alive or let myself
know that I have life within me.
All of this suggests that the issues in the film are linked to the matter of the
false self. The term false self refers to a way of being in relations with others shaped
by the need to adapt to their needs and expectations and most importantly to
42 Relating and not relating

what they need you to be for them. The implication in this usage is that what
the individual needs to be for others stands opposed to what he needs to be for
himself; so, the false self is a negation of the true self. Because it represents ex-
istence for others, it stands in sharp contrast with the true self, which refers to
our existence for its own sake, in other words our aspiration to feel alive and real.
The false self entails loss of all connection with our vital presence. It replaces the
personality with one alien to our deepest aspirations and sense of who we are.
So far as the foregoing interpretation has merit, we can think about Hiroshi’s
problem as originating in his use of projection to deal with a false self. Projec-
tion created for him an external world populated by those who are emotionally
dead. Where the world is not, in reality, altogether dominated by the false self,
but only seems so due to projection, there is a solution to this problem. This
solution lies in reducing the need to conceive the world as the external form
of a soul-destroying false self and therefore opening up the possibility that the
individual might find there a place where he can live his life. Where, however,
projection is confirmed by reality, there can be no solution because the inner
world and the world outside constitute a closed system in which reality conforms
to projections and projections constitute reality.
Where projection is confirmed by reality, there can be no clear dividing line
between the two, nor any meaningful causal account of spirit death that begins
at one level or the other. It is certainly plausible to assume that much of the world
in which Hiroshi found himself was a soul-deadening place: that school was all
about suppression of creativity and the kind of conformity in dress, demeanor,
and thinking that assures the absence of human vitality; that home was an unsafe
place in which to express vitality in living. None of this should be considered
essentially a manifestation of Hiroshi’s inner world. And, yet it is important to
understand that, running parallel to the soul-deadening reality of an external
world was the use of that world as a container for projection of the internal forces
that necessitated the hiding of the true self.
The solution to Hiroshi’s problem offered, though not really developed, in
the film is the one represented in the person of the therapist. One way of think-
ing about this solution involves the idea of potential space and the struggles
that eventuate in life when that space is not available or has been in some way
deformed.7 By potential space, I have in mind a space made safe by the availabil-
ity of the parent (or parental figure) but not controlled by the parent’s needs and
expectations. For the child, potential space is a place in the world where it is safe
to be, which is to say be in contact with the true self. When the experience of po-
tential space has been an important part of growing up, the child can internalize
that experience as a place in the inner world where it is safe to be. Reference to
an internalized potential space is another way of speaking about the capacity for
making contact with the self. If the experience of potential space while growing
up is somehow inadequate, especially because of the predominance of impinge-
ment, then the needed inner space cannot develop, and the child finds himself in
the situation in which we find Hiroshi.
 Relating and not relating 43

The impingement to which I have just referred can take different forms, but
the one suggested in the movie is the form of impingement associated with
parental pride. Emphasis on taking pride makes being worthy of pride the child’s
primary objective. But to be worthy of pride is to be for the parent and serve the
parent’s need to take pride in the child. Thus, concern with taking pride in the
child puts the child in service of the parent and fosters development of a false self.
In these circumstances, pride is the celebration of the false self that makes
possession of a true self a shameful thing and thereby obstructs any connection
with it in doing and relating. So, instilling pride in identification with the false
self is the same thing as instilling shame in possession of the true self. When the
parent’s relationship with the child is too heavily shaped by matters of pride and
shame, then love is inevitably confused with impingement. Indeed, the central
emotional reality of this world is what Alice Miller refers to as the “tragic link
between admiration and love” (1986: 330).
It should not be surprising that the equation of love with admiration fosters a
considerable measure of aggression directed against those who expect their chil-
dren to be worthy of their pride in them. Founding the parent-child relationship
on pride deprives the child of any real love and care for who the child is and can
be. The resulting confusion of admiration for love confuses hate for love and in
so doing makes the parent the target of powerful destructive impulses. To the
extent that this is the case, withdrawal from the world serves simultaneously to
protect the child from the danger put there through projection of a hate-filled
self, and protects his or her parents from the child’s powerful destructive im-
pulses born of the parents’ inability to tolerate the child’s emotional life.
We can see evidence of this in the way the film deals with the matter of
containment of emotion. As I have indicated, above, repetitive rituals play an
important part in the film, and this suggests that the struggle to contain emotion
is important. Beyond the repetitive rituals, the film depicts this struggle in two
brief scenes, one involving Hiroshi’s father and the other involving Hiroshi’s
room.
While preparing to go to work in the morning, Hiroshi’s father discovers
that his wife has not cleaned his shoes. He complains to her about this, and they
have a brief exchange. Having clean shoes is so important to Hiroshi’s father
that, rather than go to work with dirty shoes, he stops on the way to work to
buy himself new shoes. We can interpret this as a way of speaking about the false
self represented in the act of dressing for work in the morning. To put on the
false self, Hiroshi’s father’s clothes must be perfectly clean or they will reveal the
hidden chaos and trash that is also Hiroshi’s father’s psychic reality.
In contrast to the father’s preoccupation with clean shoes, the one glimpse
we get of Hiroshi’s room in the film reveals it to be filled with trash, especially
empty water bottles piled floor to ceiling. This suggests how, when his father
attempts to remove Hiroshi from his room, it can be understood as an enactment
of Hiroshi’s resistance to his own removal from the chaos of his inner world,
where empty bottles and other trash threaten to overwhelm him. By closing
44 Relating and not relating

himself in his room, Hiroshi attempts to hide his disordered self, but not in a
way that enables him to be in the world. This suggests that he does not have his
father’s capacity to prepare himself for the world outside, which is the capacity
to hide the disorder by taking on the persona of an orderly person. Hiroshi can-
not contain his disordered self within by dressing it in clean and neat clothes as
his father does. Because he cannot do that, he cannot be in the world. His mess
always leaks out into the space around him, which he must contain by enclosing
that space.
For the individual, containment begins in the holding environment, where
the absence of a boundary between mother and infant means that the infant’s
emotional state passes over to the mother (is projected onto her), who manages it
and returns it to the infant in a form the infant can tolerate. The ability to contain
emotion outside the holding environment depends on the child’s internalization
of that environment, or more specifically, the internalization of the experience of
being with a mother who assures safety by managing anxiety. If Hiroshi’s mother
found this effort to contain his anxiety intolerable, and communicated that fact
to him, the result would be his experience of his emotions as destructive of the
secure connection with his mother. When this occurs, Hiroshi’s original prob-
lem of containing emotions returns to him, but in a heightened form.
Under these circumstances, Hiroshi never develops the ability to manage
his emotions through self-soothing (which is what we mean by internalizing
a soothing relationship with his mother). Self-soothing refers to the process
of moderating emotional response so it is possible to experience that response
(contain it) rather than develop strategies designed to avoid having emotional
experience. Since Hiroshi cannot manage his emotions in a way that makes hav-
ing them tolerable, he must somehow rid himself of them. But since projection
onto his mother only exacerbates the problem, that solution is unavailable. So, he
must either project them elsewhere or find strategies internally to shut them away
so he does not experience them. Hiroshi’s action of closing himself in his room
can be considered an enactment of these responses to the failure of the holding
environment adequately to manage his emotions. It is an enactment of inner
turmoil as external disorder (trash) and containing emotion as shutting himself
up in his room.

***

If we contrast the father’s strategy with the son’s, an important difference in-
volves adaptation to social settings, specifically work and school. The father’s
development of a false self made being in the world of work possible, while the
son’s inability to put in place a false self adequate to the task made it impossible
for him to attend school.8 Indeed, it made it impossible for him to be in social
settings of any kind. He could not be in social settings because he did not have
adequate psychological resources to adapt to them. The development in him of a
false self was not fully consummated.
 Relating and not relating 45

But, if this is the case, then projection of a false self does not fully account
for the experience of the world, both internal and external, as a dark and soul-
deadening place. If it does not, then what additional factor must we consider?
Given the limited information provided in the film, any attempt to answer this
question must be highly speculative. One possible answer, however, would be
that Hiroshi had not yet completely lost his struggle against taking on a false self,
but at the same time was unable to win that struggle, that whatever else shutting
himself up in his room expressed, it also expressed his unwillingness to give in,
in the metaphor of the film to clean up his mess and put on clean shoes. He would
not adapt in the way necessary to be in social settings; but, at the same time, he
could not overcome an imperative to do so. Understood in this way, the film can
be understood to depict an important aspect of adolescence, which is that it is a
“state of not accepting false solutions” and defending the “right not to find a false
solution” (Winnicott 1989: 71–72).
In social settings, adaptation is necessary because in those settings we must
live with others who seek to exist in their own right. This entails certain expec-
tations about how we are in relation to them, as it also entails comparable expec-
tations about how they are in relation to us. The ability to make this adaptation
is important if the individual is to make a transition from living in the family to
having a life outside, especially in the world of work and civic engagement. It
is not, however, possible to make this transition if all adaptation is experienced
as domination of the personality by the false self and the associated loss of con-
tact with what is true and real in living. With this in mind, we could formulate
Hiroshi’s problem as one that arises when all adaptation to living with others
equates to suffering a life-destroying form of impingement. This happens when
all you know is impingement, and no template has been established in the devel-
opment process for relating free of impingement.
The inability to conceive relating free of impingement expresses, however,
not only the absence of the template to which I have just referred, but also the
presence of a powerful urge to shape relating around the need for impingement,
in Winnicott’s language, to “collect impingements” (1965: 150). By collecting
impingements, I have in mind an experience of the inner world dominated by
memories and fantasies of relating with others in which the dominant end is to
impose adaptation to their needs, their fantasies, and their projections. Doing so
acts as a warning system about the dangers of relating. The more internal expe-
rience is dominated by this warning system and the anxieties about relating built
into it, the more the individual is driven to avoid situations in which relating is
certain or likely to occur.
Being in society requires an ability to protect oneself from the consequences
of impingement while relating in contexts where the pressures associated with
impingement are likely to be present. To do so, the individual adopts a de-
meanor or, to borrow Winnicott’s term, “social manner” that assures the true
self will not be put at risk in relating. While the terms civility and social manner
may seem to refer to ways of relating easily mastered, for the reasons I have just
46 Relating and not relating

summarized, they are not.9 On the contrary, they can be considered hard-fought
accomplishments that can only take root where love is distinguished from admi-
ration and relating is not infused with the aggression linked to the unconscious
assumption that exploitation of self or other must always be its end. The struggle
to be in society is a struggle for a way of relating and a social setting that allows
for adaptation to a world of others that does not empower the false self.

Notes
1 On the notion of the “true self,” see Winnicott (1960).
2 It may be that the term “isolation” is not the best, especially if we are interested in ap-
plication outside the clinical setting. There, a term such as “privacy” may have more
suitable and accessible connotations. See Modell (1993), for a discussion of the private
self and its complex relationship to relating, and Caper (1999: 51) for a discussion of
isolation in the clinical setting.
3 Following Winnicott, I use the term mother to refer to whichever parent takes on the
role of mothering.
4 Winnicott (1965: 150) uses the term false self not only in the way I use it here, but
also to refer to adaptation in social settings of the kind discussed in this section. This
is the “False Self in normal development,” and involves the development of a “social
manner … which is adaptable.” Since the notion of adaptation is very different in the
two uses of the term false self, and since the consequences of adaptation are also very
different, I think it better to limit the term to one of the two uses, especially as it is
not clear that the false self in normal development really merits the connotations of
that term even if it does involve a kind of adaptation.
5 On hikikomori, see Bowker (2016).
6 Size and Growth Films, directed by Laurence Thrush, executive producer Takao
Saiki; released in 2009.
7 Here, I have adapted the term from Winnicott (1971), chapter 8.
8 It should be noted that the development of a false self is only suitable to certain kinds
of work settings, specifically those that do not involve creativity (see Levine 2010).
Work that is ritualized and rule bound affirms and gives comfort to the false self. Any
work that requires creativity causes anxiety and provokes aggression.
9 For a fuller discussion, see Levine (2011).

References
Bollas, C. (1989) Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and the Human Idiom. London: Free
Association Books.
Bowker, M.H. (2016) Hikikomori as disfigured desire: Indulgence, mystification, and
victimization in the phenomenon of extreme social isolation in Japan. Journal of
Psycho-Social Studies 9(1).
Caper, R. (1999) A Mind of One’s Own: A Kleinian View of Self and Object. London:
Routledge.
Levine, D. (2010) Object Relations, Work and the Self. East Sussex: Routledge.
——— (2011) The Capacity for Civic Engagement: Public and Private Worlds of the Self.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
——— (2013) The Capacity for Ethical Conduct: On Psychic Existence and the Way We Relate
to Others. East Sussex: Routledge.
 Relating and not relating 47

Miller, A. (1986) Depression and grandiosity as related forms of narcissistic disturbances.

In A. Morrison (ed.) Essential Papers on Narcissism. New York: New York University
Press.
Modell, A. (1993) The Private Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Winnicott, D. (1952) Psychoses and child care. In Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis.
London: Karnac Books: 1958.
——— (1960) Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes
and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Madison:
International Universities Press, 1965.
——— (1962) Providing for the child in health and in crisis. In The Maturational Processes
and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Madison:
International Universities Press, 1965.
——— (1962a) Ego integration in child development. In The Maturational Processes and
the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Madison:
International Universities Press, 1965.
——— (1971) Playing and Reality. Sussex: Bruner-Routledge.
——— (1989) Psycho-analytic Explorations. Edited by C. Winnicott, R. Shepard, and M.
Davis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
4
AMBIVALENCE ABOUT THE SELF

Guilt and shame

An important idea about the relationship between the inner world and social
life is the idea that the self poses a threat to social cohesion. To some degree, the
conviction that the self poses a threat stems from the assumption that action that
expresses the presence of the self must take the form of a greedy and destructive
self-interest.1 Those especially concerned with destructive forms of self-interest
often seek to foster ideals associated with self-sacrifice, ideals involving service to
others as an alternative to serving the interests of the self. Here, service to others
is used as a defense against perceived destructive impulses associated with the
doing that expresses being. At its root, emphasis on service as a defense against
destructive impulses expresses the conviction that the self is bad. The badness to
which I refer can take two forms. In one, it refers to bad acts that have, in fact,
had destructive consequences. In the other, it refers to a badness implied in the
very presence of the self as a factor in doing and relating. This attachment of a
negative valence to being and doing when it is connected to the presence of the
self is what I have in mind by ambivalence about the self.
The conviction that the self is bad takes the form of powerful feelings of guilt
and shame. Both play essential roles in the complex relationship between the
inner world and the world of relating to others. The adverse judgment of the self
associated with feelings of guilt and shame can serve the purpose of disconnect-
ing the individual from the self and its rejection as a basis for determining what
we do and how we relate to others. As a result of this disconnection, we become
dependent on external factors to determine doing and relating, most notably
moral strictures and group expectations.
Guilt is our emotional response to damage (imagined or real) done to oth-
ers. But, guilt, while experienced as an attack on the self, and therefore on our
 Ambivalence about the self 49

center of agency, also expresses the presence of agency in the form of taking
responsibility. We can only experience guilt if we can take responsibility for the
consequences of our actions, and if it matters to us that we have harmed others.
The concern for others that is the essential element in guilt expresses the positive
value placed on the self in other. But it also expresses, if in a somewhat complex
way, the value the individual places on his or her own agency. Concern for the
self in other expresses the paramount value we place on the experience of human
vitality and on subjective experience as the active element in living. Yet, there is
also a kind of guilt that expresses the presence of a fundamental doubt about the
value of maintaining a connection with the self. This distinction between kinds
of guilt will become clearer if we consider the factors causing guilt, specifically
whether they involve real harm done to others or destructive fantasies and
impulses whether acted on or not.
There is an important difference between guilt felt as a consequence of real
damage done to others and the kind of guilt felt whether or not the individual’s
agency is responsible for damage and suffering. In the first case, guilt is not an
assault on agency per se and therefore does not express basic ambivalence about
it. But, in the second case, there has developed a too-close association between
harm to others and agency. When this development has taken place, guilt ex-
presses the conviction that harm done is always the result of the intent to do
harm and the allied conviction that it is our own intent to do harm that is always
responsible for harm done. A good example of the latter is the idea of “bystander
guilt,” which insists on our responsibility for acts we did not commit, but only
fail to prevent from occurring.
When this conviction about the scope of our guilt takes hold, our urge to
take responsibility has gotten out of hand. It has gotten out of hand because our
guilt has expanded in step with our conviction about the excessive magnitude
of our capacity to do harm. In the case of bystander guilt, all of this is expressed
in a magnified sense of our capacity to do good by preventing harm if we only
have the will to act. Magnification of our idea about our power to do harm and
magnification of our power to do good are really two sides of one psychic reality.
This psychic reality has early roots in the conviction that subjective causation
rules the world.2 We have lost perspective on our capacity to damage important
objects in our world, and we have also lost perspective on the degree of damage
our destructive impulses are capable of inflicting on objects.
The resulting too-close association between damage that objects suffer and our
intent to do damage is evident in the attachment of guilt not just to real acts
and their real consequences, but also to imagined acts and destructive impulses
whether acted on or not. Failure of this distinction to develop fully indicates the
presence of weak boundaries between internal and external worlds, between self
and other. As a result, the distinction between fantasy and reality does not fully de-
velop, a failure that is more common in adult life than we normally assume it to be.
For some, the presence of destructive fantasies and impulses provides proof
enough of badness and in this way feeds a primitive conviction about the role of
50 Ambivalence about the self

intent in causing damage. When this happens, the psychic pain associated with
enduring convictions about guilt can lead to powerful impulses to transfer guilt
onto others. The result is that we establish a relationship with others whose pur-
pose is to use them as containers for the guilt we cannot bear because it has been
magnified to the point that we cannot manage it internally. Important evidence
for this way of thinking about how we experience damaged objects can be found
in the insistence that, where there is a damaged object, there must be those re-
sponsible for harm done to it. By moving in this direction, we make guilt a per-
manent character trait of those we hold responsible for bad deeds. And, we make
innocence the state of never being guilty of causing harm, because any respon-
sibility for harm is always projected onto the designated containers for our guilt.
In the case of guilt attached to specific acts and actual harm done, there is
room for reparation. Acts of reparation not only repair the damaged object, but
also repair the inner world by relieving, or at least moderating, feelings of guilt.
Moderation of guilt makes access to the self as the mainspring of doing and re-
lating a possibility. Reparation can be considered an expression of the presence
of the self in doing and relating. But, when guilt moves in the direction of a
permanent state fueled by fantasies and impulses rather than a finite experience
linked to real encounters and real experiences, we move away from a situation in
which reparation can play an important role; we move in the direction of shame.
Because it is a self-state that expresses the presence of a basic and irreparable flaw,
shame is not subject to repair in this way.
Alice Miller defines shame as the individual’s affective response to the pres-
ence of a defect in the self (1986). To feel shame is to know that your self exists but
that it does not measure up to the ideal of what a self can and ought to be. The no-
tion of a defect depicts this experience as a constituting fact, an original endow-
ment. We are ashamed of what we are. The passive quality of the language used
here expresses the passivity of self-experience typical of shame. In the end, we are
passive because of our shame, and we are ashamed of our passivity. Yet, however
accurate this is as a way to capture the psychic meaning of shame, it leaves out
something important about shame: that it responds to the internalization of an
experience in which the self is present and therefore plays an active part.
Andrew Morrison captures this aspect of the experience of shame when he
describes it as the response to the “subjective experience of the defeated self ”
(1986: 364). This language makes shame the outcome of a struggle to be pres-
ent, to measure up and be the subject of our life experience. The dependence of
shame on presence or the struggle for presence indicates how shame “requires
a certain degree of self-cohesion” (Morrison 1986: 352, 364). In other words,
shame can only become a powerful factor when the self has to some significant
degree established its presence internally and been put at risk in relations with
others. When the defeat of the self is internalized, then shame is our internal
experience of defeat, and therefore the factor within the personality that blocks
the emergence of the self and fosters the powerful impulse to hide it from sight
so that its defeat will not be repeated and thereby confirmed.
 Ambivalence about the self 51

In psychoanalysis, the defeat of the self is viewed on an individual basis as a

result of parental failure to assist in establishing “the child’s cohesive, grandiose,
exhibitionist self ” (Kohut 1977: 185). Considered on this level, the experience
of defeat is the experience of presenting the self to a parent who responds with
rejection, which may be the passive failure to acknowledge or an active deni-
gration, both involving the misrecognition associated with impingement. The
inability of the child to withstand this experience is assured by the asymmetrical
nature of his or her relationship with the parent. For the child, the parent is the
adjudicator of what is right and good including whether the child’s essential
being or self is right and good. When the child receives an adverse judgment,
whether in the overt form of rebuke or in the passive form of the failure to
provide a positive response, the child concludes that his or her most prized pos-
session has no value.
This experience contributes to the formation of a harsh internal judgment de-
signed to preempt the external judgment. Pressure then develops to externalize
the harsh internal judgment through imposition of harsh judgments onto others.
In this way, shame expresses itself in hatred and violence intended to accomplish
two ends. The first is to transfer shame onto others, and the second is to dispel
the passivity that both expresses and affirms shame. The transmission of shame to
others always involves acts of violence, whether those are physical or not. Here,
agency is present only in the defeat of agency in others; passivity is overcome in
its imposition on others.
The transmission of the experience of shame within and across generations
constitutes a system of social interaction of a particular kind, one that makes
shame, together with the hatred and violence associated with it, an objective
reality rather than simply an interpersonal transaction. Within this reality, shame
is caused neither by the interaction of parent and child nor by the transmission
of that interaction to others. It simply exists as the constituting experience of the
larger social reality within which the individual actors live their lives. There is,
of course, a powerful impulse of the kind we have already considered to find a
cause for shame as a way of simplifying the problem of coping with it via projec-
tion. The effort to do so is best understood, however, not as part of a strategy to
reduce the power of shame in social systems but as a way of assuring the perpet-
uation of shame in them.
When social systems are organized to perpetuate shame, the defeat of the self
has a greater social and cultural significance as an event that shapes the individual
in a way consistent with cultural expectations and requirements having to do
with limiting the presence of the self in activity and relations with others. Put
simply, the predominance of shame in social systems expresses their profound
ambivalence about the self. This profound ambivalence is transmitted across gen-
erations in the form of the parental rejection of the child’s self, which can be
thought of as the parent enacting with the child an experience of his or her own.
The urge to impose an experience of defeat by defeating the child’s effort to
present his or her self to the parent is driven most notably by envy of the child for
52 Ambivalence about the self

possessing what the parent has lost and by the urge to moderate the pain of that
loss by assuring the world contains no one who does not share it.
Because shame is powerfully involved with self-repression, eliminating the
embedding of shame in social institutions has significance for freeing the self
from an important obstacle to its presence. Where feelings of shame predomi-
nate, no genuine expression of the self is possible. This is because shame is ulti-
mately about hiding the self from the world both internal and external, hiding it
not only from those who bear the shame of a degraded self but also from those
whose active involvement in degrading others is no more than a strategy for ex-
ternalizing their own shame.

***

In many pre-modern systems, shame is ritualized and objectively allocated across

status groups. The idea that some are born with a degraded self is accepted as a
fact and embedded in institutions and modes of relating. Modern social move-
ments have been devoted to overthrowing these systems for the allocation of
shame and establishing that no one can be assumed to have been born with a
defective self. The success of social movements in achieving this end is also their
success in establishing the social position of the self as the result of its own effort
and action. But, more than this, social movements insist that all are possessed of a
self and that the self is not defined by position in a hierarchy of lesser and greater.
To the extent that this end is achieved, there is no reason built into social insti-
tutions that the self must be hidden.
The instantiation of shame in social systems expresses the way social systems
depend on repression of the self. Indeed, it expresses an identification of the
social with what is not the self, but a reality in which self-repression is the signa-
ture act of self-assertion. To overcome shame, then, there must be a fundamental
change in the status of the self within social systems. To understand the dynamics
of, and the conflict endemic in, social systems, we need to start with the struggle
of the self to be present and therefore with whether the self must be defeated in
this struggle or can survive and make its presence felt.
Because shame is our experience of ourselves as fundamentally and irretriev-
ably flawed, it is not surprising that it often attaches itself to qualities we expe-
rience ourselves as having from birth and prior to any acts of self-definition and
self-discovery, qualities such as gender, race, and ethnicity. This quality of shame
is evident in the way the imposition of shame on us by others targets qualities of
being about which we have no choice. These are qualities we are born with rather
than achievements and chosen attachments linked to our active engagement in
our lives. Shame involves both an excessively powerful attachment to these at-
tributes of who we are and a negative emotional investment in them. It makes
what is essential in us determined from outside. Its connection to ascribed char-
acteristics attached to groups to which we are assigned membership independent
of our will reinforces the natural-seeming quality of the reasons for our shame.
 Ambivalence about the self 53

It follows that the use, for example, of racial, ethnic, or gender slurs in attack-
ing others is no accident of choice, but something built into the nature of the
feelings of shame that prompt targeting of ascribed group identity. If we under-
stand this, we also understand that the assault on civility associated with ethnic,
racial, or gender slurs is no simple choice to be dealt with by suitable sensitivity
training, but the expression of deeper trends associated with the instantiation of
shame as a defining quality of self-experience.
While we experience our shame in relation to inborn, and in that sense nat-
ural, characteristics we may be able to experience the valence attached to those
characteristics differently, or at least we may attempt to draw this distinction.
In other words, we can attempt to turn our shame into pride. The distinction
between shame as something inborn, and shame as the external attachment of a
negative valence to inborn characteristics is not, however, a simple one to draw,
and the effort to do so can express a double bind rather than a real opportunity for
relieving shame. This is because there remains a basis for shame whenever who
we are is determined from outside, when it is something imposed on us by nature
or culture independently of our will and of any element of self-determination in
the trajectory of our lives. This means that the loss of agency, and especially its
alienation to others, remains the active factor, however we might imagine we
can relieve ourselves of shame by forcing others to reassign the valence of our
defining characteristics from negative to positive. To the extent that we seek to
overcome shame by demanding that we be seen differently by others, the solution
to our problem recreates the terms in which the problem is originally defined,
most notably the passivity that is so essential to feelings of shame. Employing this
strategy assures that external determination of doing and being imposes itself on,
and substitutes itself for, self-experience.3
It is possible for social institutions to be organized around guilt, shame, or both.
If they are, they can only function where mechanisms are in place to assure that
the inner worlds of those living in them are marked by ambivalence about the self.
Shame and the more systemic forms of guilt are the way individuals experience
psychologically the distrust of, and even hate directed toward, the self that are con-
stitutive of social systems that can only survive if the individual’s connection to the
self is disabled. This disabling is accomplished by exacerbating the individual’s psy-
chological dependence on forms of social relating organized around making iden-
tity depend on recognition and linking recognition to the valuation of self-worth.
Social relating in these settings often constitutes a complex system of transactions
involving the externalization of shame and the social instantiation of shameful at-
tributes as sources of pride. Central in all of this is the matter of dependence as that
is tied to the imposition of identity linked to ascribed characteristics.

Premature termination of childhood

Although the individual may experience the meaning associated with having
a self, and especially the valence attached to it, as an inevitable, indeed natural
54 Ambivalence about the self

or inborn, characteristic, this is not, I think, the case. Rather than an inborn
characteristic, ambivalence about the self develops as an implication of the qual-
ity of early childhood experience and especially of the internalization of that
experience. More specifically, I would like to consider ambivalence about the
self something that develops as a result of what I will refer to as the too-early
termination of childhood.
In speaking of the too-early termination of childhood, I will consider the goal
of childhood along two interrelated dimensions: (1) establishing self-boundaries
that enable the individual to live a life with others and relate to them as objects
existing outside his or her sphere of omnipotent control and (2) the provision
for the child of an atmosphere of safety, where safety refers to the affirmative
reception of expressions of the child’s original vitality, or, in other words, his
or her spontaneous expressions of being. These two factors converge around the
idea that the purpose of childhood, viewed along the dimension of emotional
development, is to secure for the individual an internal object world consistent
with a minimum of ambivalence about the self, in other words to foster in the
individual that “benign environment” of the inner world to which Winnicott
draws our attention (1958: 32).
The termination of childhood can be prompted by the demands of work, es-
pecially where the kind of work that must be done requires repression of vitality
and creativity. Thus, in a socio-economic system where the family unit cannot
survive unless children are put to work more or less full time early in their lives,
the too-early termination of childhood is an implication of economic imperative.
Yet, this can also be the case where the survival of the family does not depend
on child labor, but the parents cannot sustain the family unless both work more
than is consistent with providing the child with an atmosphere of safety at home.
Failure in this latter case takes the form not of putting the child to work too soon,
but of emotional abandonment prior to the development of the internal resources
needed for the child to be “on his own.” Thus, for example, premature recourse
to surrogate caregivers can produce for the child an experience of abandonment
that contributes to a too-early termination of childhood.
One result of the operation of factors that make survival of the family de-
pend on abbreviation of the childhood experience is that the needs of the family
take priority over those of the self in the inner world, in other words to the child
valuing the family as an end in itself that transcends his or her own emotional
development. This priority of the family constitutes a special and important
form of impingement required by prevailing social and economic institutions
and the level of economic development they represent. Later in life, this psy-
chological priority of the family becomes a principle governing the individual’s
participation in family-like groups. We can say that, where too-early termina-
tion of childhood is a norm, the demands of economic and social institutions
dominate psychic life so that the individual’s inner world is not really his or
her own.
 Ambivalence about the self 55

Impingement encourages the loss of the creative potential and the subordi-
nation of self to the needs of others. It fosters adaptive behavior rather than a
conviction that we can act in the world in non-adaptive ways, which are ways
expressive of our original vitality and creative potential. There is a sense in which
shaping our inner worlds around the need to adapt can be considered an impair-
ment of inner or self-experience and, in this sense, a loss of the inner world. As
a consequence, the inner world is never securely separated from the world of
relating to others. The lack of a secure separation of what is internal from what is
external means that our subjectivity has no safe place to be. There is even a sense
in which having an inner world, because it is understood to conflict with the de-
mands of the world outside, cannot be allowed. All of this is expressed as a flight
from the inner world into excessive dependence on relating used as a vehicle for
externalizing through projection important aspects of subjective experience.4
But, premature termination of childhood can also develop as a socio-cultural
norm where demands of the economy and of work do not dominate. This is the
case when the other factor, envy, plays a powerful role in familial relationships.
So far as parents have themselves suffered from termination of childhood be-
fore they were prepared to cope with it, experience of their child’s spontaneous
expressions of vitality may be too painful to bear. As a result, they respond not
with positive expressions of pleasure in the child’s emotional vitality, but with
envious attacks aimed at taking from their children what was taken from them.
This way of relating to children establishes a powerful mechanism for the inter-
generational transmission of emotional states associated with premature loss of
childhood experience.
It is worth noting how this expression of envy in deprivation can take the
form of an excessive attentiveness to what are presumed to be the child’s needs.
This happens when the parent constructs the child’s needs through projection.
Thus, for example, the child’s needs are confused with the parent’s narcissistic
need for achievement and admiration, which results in imposing on the child the
need to be admirable for the parent rather than to be for self.5 Here, again, we
have impingement in the form of the confusion of being cared for with attending
to the parent’s narcissistic need (as discussed in chapter 2).
When vitality provokes envious attacks, the home does not afford an atmos-
phere of safety, quite the opposite. The association of expressions of the true self
with envious attacks and the resulting internalization of the attack on the self
promotes severing contact with, or hiding, the self as the only means to secure its
safety. Even when the socio-economic system does not demand abbreviation of
the childhood experience, the psychic effects can remain in the form of intergen-
erational transmission of ambivalence fueled by envy. Then, even if child work
is not a matter of economic imperative, the idea that children can get along well
enough in an environment made unsafe by the demands of work, the presence of
a significant measure of envy and the resulting distrust of self-experience remain
important in shaping social processes and institutions.
56 Ambivalence about the self

The abortion debate

To make my point more concrete, let me consider briefly as an example the de-
bate over abortion. One way to think about this debate consistent with the idea
of a struggle over the standing of the self is to consider how those who treat abor-
tion as murder do so because they identify with the fetus as the locus through
projection of their soul or spirit (original vitality). Their horror at the prospect
of abortion, then, expresses their horror at the prospect of the death of their own
spirit projected onto the unborn child. This stance expresses a special preoccupa-
tion with the matter of soul or spirit death resulting from ambivalence about psy-
chic existence that develops out of an experience early in life of the deprivation
of the true self of a suitable environment in which to thrive, a deprivation from
which the individual has been unable to recover. The fetus, then, stands in as a
surrogate for the individual’s own vitality, and the act of abortion as a surrogate
for the acts of emotional deprivation that altered his or her inner world in a way
that made that world an unsafe place to be.
The fact that opposition to abortion forms into a social movement linked to a
set of distinct, but in some ways related, issues indicates that the psychic conflicts
expressed in the conviction that abortion is murder are not simply manifestations
of contingencies of individual emotional development. Rather, it suggests the
presence of broader social trends shaping individual emotional development in
ways expressed in common interpretations of social issues, in this case the inter-
pretation of abortion as murder. The important link between the social processes
and the formation of individual psychic structure have to do with embedded
interpretations of relating of the kind considered in chapter 2.
Opposition to abortion can be understood as an effort to go back in time
and retrieve what has been lost. Thought about in this way, the conviction that
abortion is murder makes sense on the psychic level, as does the intensity of the
emotional investment in the survival of the fetus. That it makes sense on the
psychic level does not make the policy driven by the configuration of the inner
world fostered by an early and violent loss of contact with the self the best policy.
But, it can help us understand what is at stake, or thought to be at stake, and
therefore why the debate over policy takes the form that it does. Doing so allows
us to understand how the intense emotional states exhibited by those engaged
in the abortion struggle are rooted in loss of contact with the self and the deeply
held conviction fostered by that loss that the individual does not matter.
Within this context, it also makes sense that whether the fetus taken to term
has any real prospect of having a life suitable to making contact with its original
vitality does not much matter. It does not matter because all that matters in life is
undoing an original assault on the self; there is nothing more. In other words, it
does not matter because the individual has little experience of being psychically
alive and no way to conceive a purpose in life other than preventing his or her
constituting loss, which, of course, occurred in the past and therefore cannot be
prevented.
 Ambivalence about the self 57

For those preoccupied with abortion, having a life means sacrificing yourself
to a mission. It is all about the suffering and self-deprivation implied in making
this sacrifice. There is, of course, a contradiction in this because the preoccupa-
tion with life expressed in opposition to abortion becomes a way of not having a
life. In sum, there are two connected reasons to oppose abortion. One is to save
the life of the spirit as represented in the unborn child; the second is to reenact
psychic death in the form of the sacrifice of life to a mission to protect the unborn
child. The sacrifice of life to a mission exemplified in this stance, far from being
unique to those in the anti-abortion movement, is common to many in very dif-
ferent political movements dedicated to protecting the vulnerable from harm.6
Following this line of thought, we might consider the intense hostility di-
rected toward women who seek abortion, or merely support the availability of
abortion, as hostility directed toward a fantasy of the self freed from the burden
of sacrifice to the mission to which I have just referred. This fantasy is then pro-
jected onto women who favor the availability of abortion and are twice judged
for their sins: once for collusion in murder of the human spirit and once for the
hubris of seeking to live their lives. As the stewards of the unborn child, women
are also the stewards of life itself, which makes them uniquely culpable when
they abandon their responsibility and abort the fetus, in other words, when they
place their own lives ahead of their stewardship.
The struggle over psychic life and death enacted in the abortion debate is
simultaneously an intra-psychic and public conflict. The public world offers a
special reality in which to carry on this struggle, one in which the hope to re-
trieve the individual’s lost vitality need not be given up and, at the same time,
one in which that loss of hope to retrieve vitality can be endlessly reenacted. The
public arena is a place onto which the struggle can be shifted out of the inner
world so that any awareness of the internal struggle can be avoided. It should
be emphasized that the relationship between the intra-psychic and the public is
best understood not in the language of causation, but rather as a parallel process
through which a conflict common to the two levels is played out.

***
The foregoing discussion suggests how we might understand the abortion debate
as an expression of what I refer to in this chapter as ambivalence about the self.
More specifically, we can understand the abortion debate as, in part at least, a
struggle over the shaping of social institutions so they will reflect the ambiva-
lence about the self felt by those aggressively insisting on the ideal of the “right
to life” of the unborn fetus.
Yet, on another level, the struggle over the right to life formulated as a strug-
gle against abortion only emerges to prominence so far as specific norms and
ideals of childhood have been instantiated in social practice and because of that
have played a prominent role in the shaping of the inner world for those intensely
invested in the idea of a right to life. More specifically, demand for the right to
58 Ambivalence about the self

life of the fetus resonates politically because of the prevalence in society of the
too-early termination of childhood, an emotional fact of life for which there is
no better language than that of the “aborted” life of the unborn child. When
defenders of the rights of the unborn child confront advocates of the right to
abortion who frame their position in the language of “choice,” it is not surpris-
ing that the defenders of the unborn child understand their struggle as a struggle
against those who would put the mother’s needs ahead of those of the child even
when doing so will result in the child’s death.
By formulating the problem as one of choice, advocates of a right to abortion
place themselves squarely on the emotional terrain of their opponents. Or, put
in the language of internal object relations, they place themselves into a well-
defined role in their opponent’s fantasies, which are shaped out of desire for
care and the loss of psychic existence due to the impingement implied when the
mother places her needs ahead of those of her child. Political debate blurs the line
between the inner world and the world outside as the participants use politics as a
means to achieve fantasized solutions to real problems and to take vengeance on
those they treat as responsible for their own loss of life.
On the side of advocates of the right to abortion, the decision to use the
language of choice suggests how the abortion debate expresses a deep-seated
conviction that they have, in some fundamental way, been diminished by the
absence of self-determination in living. Were abortion unavailable, they would
be forced to take on responsibilities for which they are unprepared or which are
in some important way inconsistent with who they are. Their lives will belong
to someone else as represented in the fetus taken to term. This construction turns
out to be consistent with that of their opponents, the only difference being that
their opponents have reconciled themselves to the loss of self-determination in
living and resent the refusal of the advocates of choice to do so as well. Still, using
the abortion debate as an arena for expressing a more general and profound sense
of the loss of self-determination also assures that the debate will be dominated by
forms of aggression that make any real communication impossible.
The abortion debate, however important the real issues may be for the health
and welfare of women and children, can also be considered a political dramatiza-
tion of a complex shared fantasy that expresses certain essential ideals, especially
about childhood, embedded in social institutions, culture, and modes of relating.
Understood in this way, its emotional resonance lies in a fantasy representation
of unconscious motivations embedded in social institutions and processes that
transcend the specifics of the issue of access to the premature termination of
pregnancy. Put another way, it is the fantasy appropriation of real experiences of
premature termination of (psychic) life and the implied loss of a safe place in the
world outside before a safe place in the inner world can fully develop.
One way to summarize what is central to social institutions in the world of the
debate over abortion is that those institutions are organized around an opposi-
tion between life and choice. For women, to be forced to have children is to lose
the self-determination expressed in the opportunity to choose. But, at the same
 Ambivalence about the self 59

time, the opportunity to choose to end a life before it begins is to place choice
above life. The problem arises because social institutions embody this opposition
between the life of the child and the life of the mother. Within those institutions,
there is no way to reconcile opposing ends and needs, which, while expressed
as an opposition between child and mother, exist psychologically as an internal
struggle between our original vitality or presence of being represented in the
potential of the fetus and the self-determination represented in the mother that
stands in opposition to it.

Subjectivity
Central to being in society is the struggle for self-experience or subjectivity. By
subjectivity, I have in mind nothing less than the experience of the world, both
internal and external, as a place in which we can exist because we are able to
make contact with our original vitality and presence of being. Used in this way,
the term subjectivity refers both to a turning inward or dwelling in the mind and
to an orientation to the world outside involving what Winnicott refers to as the
“doing that arises out of being” (1986: 39). We make our subjectivity real in the
world when it endures against the pressure to treat it as the enemy of the good
and the primary obstacle to being a part of a world of relating to others.7
The idea of the self as an enduring reality is closely linked to another idea
about self-experience, which is the idea of psychic integration. We experience
the presence of the self as an enduring reality when it integrates different activ-
ities and relationships across time, thereby assuring a continuity of being and
experience. The link between the integration of experience around the presence
of a core self also links integration to the capacity to live with others and tolerate
their presence in the world (Caper 1999: 112). This integration of experience can
be considered the vital element in a world where presence of being, or contact
with the self, is an important norm.
Claims regarding self-integration of the kind just advanced have been cast
into doubt by much recent thinking on the matters of self and identity. Thus,
Stephen Frosh refers us to the “‘normality’ of fragmentary experience” and sug-
gests that the “the ‘analytic attitude’ is always suspicious of entities that appear
integrated, because it senses that this integration is likely to be covering over
states of contradiction and conflict” (2010: 115). Much here depends on what we
have in mind by integration. My use of the term centers on making contact with
the self the mainspring of doing and relating. The ability to make contact with
the self assures that the personality will not take a rigid form and organize itself
around the use of aggression to deny, repress, and externalize unacceptable as-
pects of self-experience (bad internal objects). The need to use aggression for this
purpose fosters the organization of self-other experience into Fairbairn’s closed
system within which there is no room for novelty, creativity, and learning. So
far as integration fosters flexibility and openness, integration is the condition that
protects the individual against the impulse to eliminate oppositions by purging
60 Ambivalence about the self

the unacceptable poles, for example purging the psyche of the hate felt there by
projecting it onto a chosen container outside.
Here, I consider the struggle for society a struggle for self-integration. This
means treating society not primarily as a setting for the transfer of internal drama
onto an external stage, but instead as an external world of others who are not
subsumed into the sphere of our subjective control. In a sense, struggles over
life and death of the spirit are not so much struggles within society as they are
struggles for society if what we have in mind by that term is a world in which
subjective experience has a place, and meaningful protections against impinge-
ment exist. The approach to the study of society I take here follows, then, from
insistence on a closer link between our experience of living in society and our
ability to secure the experience of ourselves as centers of subjective experience
free from impingement.

Notes
1 On greed and self-interest, see Levine (2013).
2 See above, chapter 2.
3 A useful case in point would be the second example (Robin) in chapter 2.
4 This excessive dependence on relating is exemplified by the magical power of words
discussed in chapter 6.
5 Equation of admiration with love should not be confused with providing support and
encouragement for expressions of the child’s vitality and presence of being.
6 We can consider this an instance of manic reparation (Segal 1981).
7 The importance of the idea of an enduring self has been emphasized by Arnold Modell
(1993: 11).

References
Caper, R. (1999) A Mind of One’s Own: A Kleinian View of Self and Object. London:
Routledge.
Frosh, S. (2010) Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic: Interventions in Psychosocial Studies.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kohut, H. (1977) The Restoration of the Self. Madison: International Universities Press.
Levine, D. (2013) Pathology of the Capitalist Spirit: An Essay on Greed, Loss, and Hope.
New York: Palgrave.
Miller, A. (1986) Depression and grandiosity as related forms of narcissistic disturbances.
In A. Morrison (ed.) Essential Papers on Narcissism. New York: New York University
Press.
Modell, A. (1993) The Private Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Morrison, A. (1986) Shame, ideal self and narcissism. In A. Morrison (ed.) Essential Papers
on Narcissism. New York: New York University Press.
Segal, H. (1981) Manic reparation. In The Work of Hanna Segal: A Kleinian Approach to
Clinical Practice. New York: Jason Aranson.
Winnicott, D. (1958) The capacity to be alone. In The Maturational Processes and the Facili-
tating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Madison: International
Universities Press, 1965.
5
MORAL ORDER AND MORAL DEFENSE

In this chapter, I explore the idea of a social system organized to manage

anxieties it has itself created. That a social system may be organized this way
is suggested in Isabel Menzies’s study of social defenses. There, she explores the
way institutions activate primitive anxieties and then are used to manage those
anxieties. As she puts it, “the success and viability of a social institution are inti-
mately connected with the techniques it uses to contain anxiety” (1960: 309). In
Menzies’s way of formulating the problem, while anxieties are activated by the
institutional setting, their origins are innate in that they arise out of “phantasy
situations that exist in every individual in the deepest and most primitive levels
of the mind” (284).1
These fantasy situations involve struggle over what is good and bad in the
individual’s psychic life (the good and bad objects). While the situations in the
deepest levels of the mind to which Menzies refers may be universal, the balance
of strength between the good and bad and the form the struggle takes between
them differ across individuals and groups. Thus, the fantasy of destroying an
enemy in combat differs from the fantasy of nursing the sick. Yet, both may
involve the struggle in the mind over the worthiness of the self and the impulse
to do harm.
Anxiety linked to the prospect that identification with the darker forces will
be made known to self and others can be alleviated if those darker forces can be
moved (projected) outside so that they can be experienced not in ourselves, but
in other people. This does not, however, eliminate anxiety so much as it changes
the form it takes. Rather than anxiety associated with the prospect that thoughts
and actions will provoke feelings of guilt and shame, anxiety results from the
perception of threats originating outside. As it turns out, it can serve the individ-
ual’s emotional needs better to struggle with the threat posed by external objects
62 Moral order and moral defense

than by the internal danger posed by the prospect of being identified with a bad
self and therefore being judged to be bad (unworthy of love).
To the extent that institutions not only activate primitive anxieties, but also
transform anxiety by altering what we perceive to be its source so it can be more
easily managed, individuals do not simply manage anxiety activated in insti-
tutions, but also seek out the anxiety experienced there in the hope that it can
replace the anxiety that originates internally. The more important it is that we
know the bad object outside, the more we seek the anxiety associated with being
in a world of bad objects.
The more prominent the anxiety in social institutions, the more likely what
goes on there will be dominated by coping with it. This can evolve to the point
where institutions become little more than systems organized to defend against
the anxiety activated in them. When institutions are organized in this way, the
individuals in them experience identification with the bad self as the price they
must pay for belonging and, paradoxically, gaining the relief from psychic suf-
fering the institution can provide. When we consider not a particular institution
of this kind, but a social system writ large, then such a system can be said to
require that its members accept knowing themselves to be bad, while offering
in return a way of life holding the promise of redemption either through forms
of service or through struggle against external bad objects. In other words, the
social system demands that its members sacrifice their lives so that those lives can
take on meaning and purpose. It needs to be emphasized that the life sacrificed
is the individual’s psychic life or original vitality; although, in some cases, most
notably the armed forces, it is also life itself that must be given up if identification
with the bad self is to be overcome.
This sacrifice is made necessary by the implicit judgment that the self is a bad
object and therefore poses a threat to the good object and to the individual’s re-
lationship with it. This idea first develops in the individual when the relationship
with his or her parent is subject to a reversal of roles that makes the needs of the
parent rather than those of the child the active factor. This reversal begins early
on when that relationship is dominated by impingement. If the child interprets
impingement as a response to its need to exist and have attention paid to its ex-
istence, the child may draw the conclusion that his or her presence of being (self )
is a threat to the relationship with the source of the good things. To resolve the
problem, being for other must replace being for self, with the result that the self
has no place to be either internally or in the world outside.
In an attempt to cope with this situation, the child takes on responsibility for
the badness of the parent. In other words, the child becomes bad so the parent
can be made good. To do so, the child creates a fantasy world of object relations
in which responsibility for failure is reversed. Ronald Fairbairn captures the un-
derlying motivation for this reversal when he observes that “it is better to be a
sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil” (1943:
66–67).
 Moral order and moral defense 63

While it may be said that institutions are shaped the way they are in response
to the situations arising out of the individual’s earliest formative relationships,
the reverse is also true. That is, early formative relationships develop in a specific
direction because they incorporate an idea about the self that is well suited to life
in institutions. In other words, the formative relationships are shaped in a way
that assures adaptation of the individual’s emotional life to the institutions in
which he or she must live. The specific idea with which we are concerned here
is the idea that connection with the self must be blocked so that the individual
fits well into a world of self-sacrifice necessitated by his or her identification with
a bad self. The reversal by which the parent demands attention from the child
is a microcosm of the larger world in which the social order and its institutions
demand self-sacrifice from their members.
It may be that, as Fairbairn suggests, this reversal is to some degree inevitable
regardless of the institutional setting. What is not inevitable is that the individual’s
personality will be organized around it and meaning in life shaped by it. For that
to happen, formative relationships must impose loss as a matter of principle. In
other words, the experience of loss of the nurturing relationship must develop out
of a larger, socially instantiated, equation of deprivation with care. This equation
only develops where parental failure passes a certain threshold, one that makes
holding onto the internalized image of, and connection with, the good self dif-
ficult to do.
To hold onto our connection with a good self under these difficult circum-
stances the individual deploys a psychological strategy that involves finding
others onto whom the bad self (taken on to secure the goodness of the parent)
can be displaced. While this strategy secures the fantasy of the good object and
the good self, both are now conditional on finding containers for externalizing
what is bad in the relationship with the good object. Of special importance in
thinking about social processes and institutions is the resulting dependence of the
individual on a continuing connection with the external containers for the bad
self that holds the whole construction together.
The bad self and the idealized good parent exist not in reality, which is to say
outside the sphere of subjective control, but as fantasy objects in the inner world.
As internal objects, they play their roles in an internal drama that also plays a vital
role in shaping how the individual relates to others. The relation of fantasy object
to real object follows the pattern I have been emphasizing, which is the effort
to make relating with real objects follow the role set in fantasy life. This means
that relating is all about the effort to exert control over others in ways that assure
that their behavior suits their role: provoking bad behavior in those designated to
contain the bad self projected onto them and managing the wished-to-be good
object in ways aimed at assuring it realizes its role in fantasy. A good example of
this is the use of violence (both emotional and physical) to provoke a response of
the kind that confirms that those provoked into violent acts play the role of the
bad self in relating. Acts of terrorism that provoke violent responses can work
64 Moral order and moral defense

in this way and be a significant element in the unconscious motivation of those

responsible for them.
Borrowing a term from Fairbairn, I will refer to the complex situation in the
inner world expressed in these interrelated fantasies as the “moral defense.” The
moral defense is a response to, and a way of coping with, a moral injury, which
is to say a disruption of the individual’s connection to the good (Bowker and
Levine 2016). It is in the nature of moral injury that it is self-inflicted, something
that is clearly implied in the development of the moral defense. It is the child who
finds himself responsible and convicts himself of a crime against the good object.
Although doing so may be prompted by the terms set for relating with the parent,
it is the child’s interpretation of that relationship and his taking responsibility for
it that are the key factors. To the extent that the child takes responsibility for a
damaged relationship with the parent, the injury can be considered self-inflicted.
Within the context of the moral defense, the thought that the good object
is responsible for deprivation cannot be tolerated but, and perhaps of equal im-
portance, neither can the thought that no one is responsible. The need to assign
personal responsibility is an aspect of primitive emotional life. In primitive
emotional life, there are only concrete, particular objects, and experiences of
gratification are all about their intent. Emotional maturation involves the devel-
opment of the capacity for abstract thinking that separates matters of causation
from their more primitive equation with acts of will. The result is the capacity
to conceive a world in which important things happen for which no one is
personally responsible. The moral defense works against this development. The
stronger the defense, and the more it dominates in emotional life, the less the
capacity to hold the thought that bad things happen for which no one is person-
ally responsible.

***

When, following the moral defense, social arrangements are organized around
reversal of responsibility for parental failure, all issues that arise are understood to
be judicable, which is to say, everything is a matter of determining who is good
and who is bad, who is perpetrator and who is victim. We can understand this
if we bear in mind that, however powerful the unconscious commitment to the
moral defense, there always remains a profound feeling that its result is deeply
unfair, which it is. The individual has, after all, found him- or herself unworthy
of care because others have failed to provide it. It will not be surprising, then,
to discover a good measure of anger over injustice mixed in with the powerful
urge to do penance for harmful acts, imagined or real. The individual wrapped
up in the complex system spawned by the reversal of roles is also wrapped up in
a deeply embedded drama of injustice. All forms of injury are placed before an
internal court of justice mandated to determine who is good and who is bad.
This internal court of justice is reproduced in the world outside, where it takes
shape as a system of justice.
 Moral order and moral defense 65

The system of justice offers the individual a way to cope with the moral de-
fense and manage its emotional consequences. This method of coping with inter-
nal conflict engages the emotional centrality of matters of guilt and innocence,
of harm done and of those who do harm. The matter of harm done is important
in that it carries with it the possibility that the child will internalize not only a
bad self and an idealized good self, but also the damaged good object. The failure
of the good object to provide care may indicate that it has been lost to us, but it
may also indicate that it has been damaged. The impaired good object provokes
aggression directed toward it, which then must be dealt with by repression or
displacement if the good object is not to be lost. Displacement may include the
strategy of defining impairment as the good. This assures that the good remains
available, though at the cost of identifying the absence of care as love and de-
manding that the individual manage a significant measure of aggression by either
turning it inward (directing it against the self ) or enacting it in the world outside.
Identification with the impaired good object follows the equation of impair-
ment with the good and produces an impetus for the individual to establish that
he or she is, indeed, impaired while insisting that others ought to accept that they
are as well, which is to say that they join the group of the impaired. All of this
creates powerful momentum in the direction of the intergenerational transmis-
sion of the emotional costs of parental failure and makes what I refer to below as
the moral order a self-perpetuating, that is closed, system.
The connection between damage and virtue is well expressed in two closely
related ideas: the idea that suffering breeds character and the idea of the inno-
cence of victims. Each of these ideas plays a powerful role in social systems or-
ganized around the moral defense where we typically find institutions facilitating
the participation of their members in a drama of the innocent victim and the
adjudication of guilt.
The socially instantiated conviction that victims are innocent translates into
a powerful impetus for individuals to see themselves as victims and have them-
selves judged to be victims by others so their innocence will be assured. In other
words, the appeal to victimization offers a path to relief from identification with
the bad self. This appeal, it is hoped, will relieve those making it of the uncon-
scious conviction that they are anything but innocent, which is the inevitable
product of the moral defense. Appeal to justice, then, is a means used by indi-
viduals and groups to find themselves innocent of the damage done to the good
object for which they have unconsciously taken responsibility. It then becomes
the task of the system of justice to relieve the individual of responsibility for the
self-inflicted wound of moral injury, which also relieves the individual of his
own certain knowledge that he is culpable and therefore unworthy of connection
with the good.
The system of justice can also help individuals cope with an unconscious
identification with the damaged good object by redefining damage as strength
and thereby dismissing any knowledge of the impairment resulting from dam-
aging early relationships. We can find a strategy of this kind operating where
66 Moral order and moral defense

individuals and groups engage in the celebration of oppression and its conse-
quences (Levine 2011: 140; Bowker 2016). While the celebration of oppression
has as its conscious purpose to relieve victims of oppression of the shame associ-
ated with it, it does so by dismissing the damage done by oppression in the inner
world and insisting that no damage has been done there, and therefore all dam-
age done can be repaired by action aimed at securing justice in the world outside.

***

To exemplify and further develop the ideas just introduced, I would like to con-
sider an example involving the 2016 election campaign in the US.
During the early stages of the 2016 Presidential election campaign, Hillary
Clinton met with leaders of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, a movement
dedicated to making changes that would reduce or eliminate police violence in
black neighborhoods. In her meeting, Clinton emphasized the importance of
changes in the criminal justice system as the best path to reform likely to reduce
violence. In doing so, she drew a distinction between seeking policy solutions for
real problems and seeking to “change hearts”:

Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you
change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re
not going to change every heart. You’re not.
(Gearan 2015)

One of the leaders of “Black Lives Matter” answered Clinton by insisting that he
was unsatisfied with her response to their concerns:

What we were looking for … was a personal reflection on her responsibil-

ity for being part of the cause of this problem that we have today in mass
incarceration. … And so her response, really targeting on policy, wasn’t
sufficient for us.

In this view, policy that might resolve the problems embedded in the treatment
of members of the black community by police was not enough. What was needed
was for Clinton to accept responsibility. Only if she did so could members of the
black community feel assured that no responsibility for the problems would fall
on them. What was needed, as they understood the problem, was not the kind of
thinking that might lead to effective policy but to have someone in a position of
authority say the right words, which are the words that would remove the burden
of their community’s identification with what is bad in the world.
It would, I think, be easy enough to dismiss the demand for Clinton to take
personal responsibility because it moves us away from policy matters and the
kinds of solutions to social problems policy is capable of offering. Yet, doing
so would also dismiss the importance of the concerns of members of the Black
 Moral order and moral defense 67

Lives Matter movement and of the communication they offer about them. What
they are telling us that remains important is that there is a form of suffering that
cannot be alleviated through changing social policy and should not be dismissed
because the form it takes is to move bad feelings onto others, in this case Hillary
Clinton.
In responding to this demand of the Black Lives Matter movement, it would
be a mistake to limit ourselves either to accepting that an apology from the
one-time First Lady will, in fact, relieve their suffering or simply rejecting
their demand as irrelevant. A third alternative involves neither accepting nor
rejecting the demand to take responsibility, but instead thinking about it in
a way that leads to understanding the limits of policy in alleviating suffering
while not rejecting the significance of the fantasy dialogue in which words
spoken by a presidential candidate can accomplish what policy cannot. This
third alternative is the one in which we encourage participants in the angry
exchange to arrive at an understanding of the issue through thinking rather
than through the fantasized resolution of the problem by transferring bad feel-
ings onto others.
Because thinking poses a threat to fantasy, we must protect fantasy from it. In
the words of Hana Segal, “thinking puts a limit on the omnipotence of phantasy
and is attacked because of our longing for that omnipotence” (1981: 220, 224).
We protect fantasy by not thinking, but not thinking blocks the process of creat-
ing ideas and policies applicable to social problems. Rather than a complex policy
issue, we are encouraged to engage the simple issue of blame. Blame is all about
innocence and guilt and therefore about where the badness lies. Because of this,
blame operates at a primitive level of emotional functioning, a level on which
objects outside are used to contain bad feelings, and there is an endless replica-
tion of ways of relating aimed at preventing us from knowing what we consider
unthinkable, which is our identification with the bad self.
Insistence on blame indicates the great power of the anxiety associated with
knowing the bad self, as well as the danger associated with any effort to do so.
Because of this, communication organized around guilt and innocence and the
importance of blaming others always indicates that the individual does not find
him- or herself in a setting that fosters the feeling that it is safe to acknowledge
that we feel bad about ourselves. The problem cannot be resolved by having oth-
ers accept blame, because doing so only reinforces our conviction that accepting
any responsibility is intolerable, which is the mainspring of our need to distance
ourselves from something vital about ourselves and the main cause of our emo-
tional suffering. When the battle over blame takes over in public life, public life is
all about raising the stakes regarding the judgment of the value of the self, which
then makes the public world an unsafe place to be. The absence of an atmosphere
of safety assures that the results of public deliberation will be ill conceived and,
to a significant degree, disconnected from reality.

***
68 Moral order and moral defense

Central to the agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement is the violence en-
demic in the black community, especially police violence. Concern on the part
of the movement, then, is about the violence embedded in the system of justice
itself. The movement insists that we recognize that some systems of justice have
violence embedded in them. What the movement does not recognize is that
this violence is endemic in systems of justice expressive of the moral defense,
where violence will always be endemic.
Here, I use the term violence to refer to a violation of the self-boundary.
Violence understood in this way is not limited to the violation of the physical
boundary of the self, a limitation that tends to obscure the emotional ends of
violence and treat it instead as the expression of the organism’s natural determi-
nation, for example its instinctual drives. Violence understood in this broader
sense is endemic in the moral order because of the importance there of the trans-
fer of guilt to others, an end that can be achieved only by the forcible violation
of the self-other boundary. Where the moral defense dominates, not only is
violence typically done in the name of justice, but the prevailing form of justice
typically has violence embedded in it.2
When the moral defense purges the good object of any responsibility for dep-
rivation, it also assures that the good object will not be found to be the source
of acts of violence. Since, however, impingement is a form of violence, indeed
its original and archetypical form, and since the origin of the moral defense is in
the experience of impingement in the relationship with a good object, the moral
defense requires that impingement be understood not as an act of violence but as
an act of love. Just as deprivation is confused with care, so also is violence con-
fused with love. To secure this equation and hide the reality of violence, the term
violence must be limited to acts attributable to those who have been assigned to
represent the bad object in the world outside. Whether an act is violent or not is
made to depend not on its intrinsic meaning but on who committed it. A social
system organized around the moral defense needs to identify suitable contain-
ers for violence so that the violence in it will not be judged endemic.3 In other
words, it must identify within it a set of individuals who realize its restricted no-
tion of violence so the universality of violence implied in the system’s underlying
dynamic processes will not be known.
We can see this clearly with regard to violence in the black community, which
the police view as something endemic to that community, and the community
views as acts perpetrated against members of that community by the police or
provoked by them. For the police, young black men are the locus of violence,
while for the Black Lives Matter movement, the police take on that role.

Moral order
A social system rooted in the moral defense is characterized by its emphasis on
matters of justice understood in a moral language. Because of this, I will refer to
it as a “moral order.”4 Central to the idea of a moral order is the sacrifice of the
 Moral order and moral defense 69

individual’s unique presence of being or true self in order to secure a relation-

ship with the good. The moral order is held together by a shared investment in
achieving identification with the good object and therefore a shared investment
in the way the object is conceived. This means that connections between mem-
bers are derivative of their wished-for identification with the idealized good
object. Because of the centrality of the moral defense, the identification with the
good object exists more in the form of hope than in the form of a real expecta-
tion. This means that the bond that holds the order together, the bond of identi-
fication, is one that operates at the most primitive level of emotional experience
(Freud 1959: 37).
Because the moral order is an expression of identification, it is essentially a
group phenomenon. All the member needs to be accepted into the moral order
is what he needs to be a part of a group, which is the ability to “sink his identity
in the herd” (Bion 1961: 89). This ability, even necessity, arises out of the indi-
vidual’s discomfort with the task of forming an identity of his or her own, one
that expresses an emotional investment in what is unique and real in the person-
ality. Put another way, to be a member of a moral order the individual must be
made to feel discomfort with any connection with his or her self, a discomfort
that, therefore, the moral order must assure is experienced by those who would
belong to it. The inability to make a connection with the self is the other side of
the presence of a powerful negative investment in the self, which follows from a
powerful conviction that the self is a bad object. This, then, connects the moral
order to the moral defense.
Moral order is something like what Freud has in mind when he speaks of the
tension between the individual and the “collective” in his essay on Civilization
and Its Discontents. There, he writes that “[h]uman life in common is only made
possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate indi-
vidual and which remains united against all separate individuals” (1961: 42). Freud
links this to a dilemma of freedom: “The urge for freedom … is directed against
particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether. …
A good part of the struggles of mankind centre round the single task of finding an
expedient accommodation—one that is that will bring happiness—between this
claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group …” (43).
For Freud, the term freedom means a state of unfettered pursuit of the pro-
gram of the pleasure principle (23). Thus civilization stands opposed to individ-
ual freedom because of the identification of the latter with the unlimited pursuit
of instinctual satisfaction. It is “impossible,” therefore, “to overlook the extent
to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it pre-
supposes the non-satisfaction … of powerful instincts” (44). For Freud, freedom
means pursuit of satisfaction limited only by external factors. But, because it
equates freedom with a state of being driven by factors intrinsic to the organism’s
natural condition, this is an odd notion of freedom. Indeed, it is hardly freedom
at all, but something more like its opposite so far as it imagines an organism
dominated by instinct.
70 Moral order and moral defense

The idea of the moral defense offers a way of conceiving the problem with
which Freud is concerned, a problem that avoids the difficulties caused by the
equation of freedom with instinct-driven behavior. In place of the conflict be-
tween community and instinct, the moral defense focuses attention on a conflict
internal to psychic life that is then enacted outside not as a conflict with commu-
nity but as the primary factor that impels the individual to sacrifice connection
with the self and seek out the bonds of group life. Conceived in this way, freedom
is not freedom from limits to instinctual satisfaction, but the ability to make the
self the mainspring of doing and relating. And, the loss of freedom is the goal of
the moral defense that operates by severing any connection the individual might
have with him- or herself.
It needs to be emphasized that, while viewed from a standpoint outside the
moral order, deprivation of care appears as parental failure, viewed within the
terms of the moral defense and the social order organized around it, deprivation
does not signify parental failure, but the opposite of it. Rather than parental
failure, forms of neglect and abuse are understood, correctly, as emotional prepa-
ration for life in the community. This last observation suggests how the moral
order operates as a closed system by establishing parallel processes at the inter-
and intra-psychic levels. Where a closed system of this kind has been established,
the attempt to find causation at one level or the other fails because it does not
take into account what is essential to the system as a whole. The forms of relating
experienced by the individual in his or her formative years assure adaptation to
the emotional demands of living in a moral order. If we wish to understand the
moral order, it is not by seeking causation but by identifying how ambivalence
about the self shapes both intra-psychic experience and life in the community.
It may be the case that, just as the individual cannot altogether escape his
or her unconscious identification with a bad self, society must accommodate
the elements of moral order that are inevitably present in it. It is not, however,
inevitable that the terms of the moral order become the primary foundation of
social institutions and social interaction. The possibility that institutions will be
built on a different foundation requires that we disrupt the equation of having
and being a self with being identified with what is bad. For this to happen, the
underlying equation of deprivation with care must be weakened and, along with
it, the responsibility of the child for parental failure. This, in turn, will foster a
break in the conviction that our end is to regain our innocence and that, to do
so, we must have others found guilty of our crimes, whether real or imagined.

Notes
1 The term “phantasy” is used to refer to unconscious fantasies.
2 On the relation between justice and violence, see Gilligan (1994).
3 On suitable containers for externalization, see Volkan (1988).
4 Traditionally, the term moral order has been used to refer to a system organized
around a hierarchy of social positions each invested with moral standing (Tawney
1962). Here, I apply the term in a modern context where (formal) equality of standing
among persons is the norm.
 Moral order and moral defense 71

References
Bion, W. (1961) Experiences in Groups. London: Routledge.
Bowker, M.H. (2016) Ideologies of Experience: Trauma, Failure, Deprivation, and the Abandon-
ment of the Self. New York: Routledge.
Bowker, M. and Levine, D. (2016) Beyond the battlefield: ‘Moral injury’ and moral de-
fense in the psychic life of the soldier, the military, and the nation. Organizational and
Social Dynamics 16: 2.
Fairbairn, W. (1943) The repression and the return of the bad objects. British Journal of
Medical Psychology XIX. Reprinted in: Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952.
Freud, S. (1959) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. New York: Norton.
——— (1961) Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton.
Gearan, A. (2015) Clinton tells Black Lives Matter activists to focus on ways to change pol-
icy, not ‘change hearts,’ The Washington Post, August 18, http://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/18/clinton-tells-black-lives-matter-activists-
to-focus-on-ways-to-change-policy-not-change-hearts/; retrieved 8/18/2015.
Gilligan, J. (1994) Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Vintage.
Levine, D. (2011) The Capacity for Civic Engagement: Public and Private Worlds of the Self.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Menzies, I. (1960) A case study in the functioning of social systems as defenses against
anxiety: A report on a study of the nursing service in a general hospital. Human
Relations 13, 95–121. Reprinted in A. Coleman and W. Bexton (eds.) Group Relations
Reader 1. Jupiter: A.K. Rice Institute.
Segal, H. (1981) Psychoanalysis and freedom of thought. In The Work of Hanna Segal.
New York: Michael Aronson.
Tawney, R.H. (1962) Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Gloucester: Peter Smith.
Volkan, V. (1988) The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Analysis to International
Relations. Northvale: Jason Aranson.
6
THE POWER OF WORDS

In this chapter, I consider some implications of an idea from Wilfred Bion for
the way we understand the relationship between society and the inner world.
Bion’s idea is that when frustration cannot be tolerated the result is a flight from
thinking in the direction of a process referred to as “projective identification.”
In Bion’s language, the result of the inability to tolerate frustration is “that all
thoughts are treated as if they were indistinguishable from bad internal objects”
and, as a consequence, the appropriate mental “machinery … is felt to be, not
an apparatus for thinking the thoughts, but an apparatus for ridding the psyche
of accumulations of bad internal objects.” Here, the “development of an ap-
paratus for thinking is disturbed and instead there takes place a hypertrophic
development of the apparatus of projective identification.” By contrast, it is the
capacity for tolerating frustration that “enables the psyche to develop thought as
a means by which the frustration that is tolerated is itself made more tolerable”
(1967: 112).
What Bion suggests is that when frustration cannot be tolerated, the psyche
has recourse to “projective identification” as a way of coping. In projection, we
attribute our own emotions to others and, in this sense, move them outside. But
this strategy runs into difficulty when the others onto whom we would move our
emotions behave in ways inconsistent with their role by refusing to express our
emotions as their own. To solve this problem, we seek not only to experience
others as having our emotions, but to provoke them in ways that assure they will
experience those emotions and especially the self-states associated with them
(Caper 1999: 21, 34). Because they experience our emotions as their own, they
will also act in ways consistent with our projection of emotions and self-states
onto them. When we relate to others in this way, we are engaged not only in
projection, but also in projective identification.
 The power of words 73

Thus, provoking others to experience and act aggressively, even violently,

toward us confirms that our own aggressive and destructive impulses are out-
side and that we are therefore not responsible for them. Provoking others to act
in the role of aggressor in our internal fantasy places them in the role of bad
objects, and in this sense is a method for “ridding the psyche of … bad internal
objects.” Projective identification establishes an especially powerful connection
between our fantasy world and the world of relating to others and, for this rea-
son, can be important in understanding the relation between society and the
inner world.
We can think of projective identification as a method of thought control.
Control over thoughts is important because bad objects exist internally in the
form of thoughts and fantasy figures involving experiences that denigrate self and
other. Here, it is the power of the thoughts and fantasies representing dominance
of the bad self that we must struggle against. Nowhere is the power of thoughts
more apparent to us than in this struggle over emotionally-invested fantasy.
Thought control can be considered a way of managing anxiety associated
with our identification with the bad self. The greater our anxiety about our
identification with what is bad in our world, the greater our need for control to
protect us from thinking unacceptable thoughts. This is important if we are to
understand the preoccupation of individuals and groups with the idea of social
systems as systems of power. Thinking about social systems as systems of power
follows naturally from the prevalence of the use of control as a way of manag-
ing anxiety. So, what we need to understand if we are to understand the role of
power is not any primal urge to exert power over others, but the matter of man-
aging anxiety through control, including most importantly thought control. So,
it becomes important that others be made to think about us in a particular way
because only if we can control the way we are thought about can we control the
bad objects with which we are unconsciously identified. The purpose of thought
control is to prevent thinking from happening to assure the predominance of
fantasy over mental processes and over doing and relating to others (Segal 1981:
220, 224).
The link between the underlying strategy of evacuating bad objects (projec-
tive identification) and thought processes that prevent thinking is to be found
in the special use of words typical when thinking is superseded by the effort to
evacuate bad objects. This special use of words treats the word as a “thing in
itself ” Bion (1967: 112).1 The “thing in itself ” is the mental content protected
from thinking because of the danger holding it in the mind, especially thinking
about it, is felt to pose. When the word is treated as a thing in itself, saying the
word does not depend for its effect on its place in a larger context of meaning
and therefore on the idea the word conveys, or helps to convey. Rather, the act
of saying the word immediately, and on its own terms, constitutes the reality of
self and other. The ability of words to constitute reality means that words have a
creative power, which I will refer to as the magic power of words.
74 The power of words

The underlying idea of the magic power of words is that words create the
reality to which they refer. The inability to distinguish between the word and
the thing to which it refers, then, indicates the inability to use the mind to form
concepts and ideas through a thinking process, or it indicates the conviction that
the use of words to think is inconsistent with the end of evacuating bad internal
objects.2
As an example, consider the following account of the way words are treated
in Navajo culture:

In Navajo culture, elders impress upon their children that the spoken
Navajo word is potent. Words uttered in a harmful way bring harm to the
speaker or his family, they say. A child growing up on the reservation in the
1930s would have understood this. Nizaad baa’ áhályá, he would be told.
Be cautious of how you speak. Saad, words, carry unseen power.
(Azcentral.com 2013)

In this statement, belief in the magic power of words is made explicit. Because of
their power, words must be used with great care. Indeed, certain words can cause
harm and must not be used. Thus, you must not talk about “cancer” as part of a
program for cancer prevention, because saying the word “cancer” causes the dis-
ease. While it can be said that this power of words is “unseen,” it can also be said
that the power of words to create reality stems from the fact that it is “unseen.”
Thinking about this power brings it into view; therefore, the fact that it is unseen
is really a taboo against seeing rooted in the danger in which those who would
see the power put themselves.
This belief is by no means limited to Navajo culture, but appears, even if only
implicitly, in what are otherwise very different settings. Thus, we will find the
same belief in the power of words to do harm in the taboo applied to the use of
derogatory terms for members of ethnic and racial groups. Another example,
seemingly far outside the world of the Navajo use of words, can be found in the
special use of language found in some academic writing, where words are used
not to think about a complex subject matter, but to establish a line of separation
between those who use the words and those who do not.
It might be said that the stronger the belief in the power of words, the more
real is that power. Indeed, to the extent that words are treated as things in them-
selves rather than having a meaning established by their use to convey a process
of thinking, words do have power. This is the power associated with projective
identification, which is the power to transfer self-states to others. Thus, use of de-
rogatory language has power when the words used create in their target the con-
viction that he or she possesses a shameful self. Then, the power of words stems
from their ability to provoke an identification of the self with the bad object. The
target of projection experiences this not, however, as the provocation of iden-
tification with bad objects, but as an act that creates those bad objects, in other
words makes us bad, and in this experiences the words as having magic power.
 The power of words 75

What is missing in the attribution of power to words, or what is hidden in it,

is the ceding of control over internal states to others, or the qualities of the inner
world that create in us vulnerability to external control. The power of words
is proportional to the threat felt by the prospect that the word and the shame
associated with it will be placed into us, which then makes thinking about our
thoughts a dangerous thing because it only serves to make us aware of the reality
created in us by the presence of the words there. To obviate this threat, we must
rid ourselves of the words by finding others into whom we can place them.

***

The archetype of the use of words to create reality is the use of the words “good”
and “bad” in primitive emotional life. The child knows he has been bad because
his parent calls what he has done “bad” or, worse, calls him “bad.” For the child,
it is the application of the word that makes the act bad not anything about the
act itself; that comes later. The young child also “knows” that saying the word
“mother” causes mother to appear, and therefore the word has the power to
create the good. And this all makes sense later in life for those who have not,
or have not fully, moved beyond the more primitive experience of the world in
which words have power to create the reality to which they refer.
Outside the family, the impact on others of speaking words to them (or other-
wise communicating those words) can be experienced in a different way. There,
the impact of the word depends on whether the communication of the word has
consequences in “reality.” The distinction implied in this statement is that the
individual moves into in a world outside the family because he or she does not
experience words as having the power to create the reality to which they refer.
Thus, my using a derogatory word to refer to a member of a racial, ethnic, or
religious group does not in itself affect his or her standing in the external or real
world. On the other hand, when a jury declares that a defendant is “guilty,” this
has the power to make him guilty in the “real” world and has consequences for
his life consistent with his having now become a “guilty” person. Similarly, laws
preventing job discrimination prevent individuals and organizations from using
members of designated groups as repositories for a bad self. Rather than part of
the exercise of the power of words, legal constraints move society in the direction
of an objective assessment of qualifications. We can even say that the term “real”
used to refer to this world outside the family is appropriate because our standing
in it is not determined by the power of words.
The guilty verdict, so far as it results from a deliberative process, differs from
the ethnic slur. But, so far as guilt is attributed to members of designated groups
regardless of their actions and regardless of the existence of laws defined inde-
pendently of group characteristics, then application of the term “guilty” operates
in the same way as an ethnic slur. For those who believe in the magic power of
words, control over the words used by others is synonymous with control over
the location of the bad self. Control over the use of words must therefore be
76 The power of words

exercised as a primary strategy for exerting control over who is identified with
the bad self. One important purpose sometimes invested in social institutions is
to act as a mechanism for exerting control by using the power invested in them
to determine what words can and cannot be said.
Where this purpose dominates, the system of justice becomes a part of the
effort to transfer the bad self onto others. Indeed, we could say that a “real” system
of justice is one that protects against the use of designated individuals or groups
as containers for the bad self; and if we do so, systems of justice designed to assist
in the transfer of the bad self onto others are not systems of justice at all. Our
ability to distinguish between an ethnic slur and an injustice, then, is essentially
synonymous with our ability to conceive a system of justice as something other
than a vehicle for the interpersonal or intergroup transfer of the bad self. And
this ability depends, in turn, on our capacity to conceive interpersonal relating as
having any purpose other than the one associated with projective identification.
Returning to Bion’s distinction, we can say that our ability to conceive justice on
a basis other than projective identification depends on our ability to contain our
bad self, which is synonymous with our capacity to think about the badness of
the self not as a thing in itself but as an aspect of personal development.
The magical use of words blurs the distinction I have just drawn because it ex-
cludes any reality not created by the words used to describe it. There simply is no
distinction between describing and creating because there is nothing to describe
prior to its creation by the power of words. And, once created, it cannot be de-
scribed, discussed, or explained; it simply is what it is. We will remain identified
with the word unless and until we are able to use its power by moving it into the
world outside and forcing others to contain it.
By saying the word, the other has put it into us. Its presence there constitutes
who we are, and the only way to rid ourselves of our identification with the word
is to rid ourselves of the word. No other strategy is available because we cannot
tolerate holding the word inside and thinking about it. We cannot tolerate doing
so because we have no access to an internal process for defining who we are that
can stand against forms of communication with others that define what we are
independently of any internal process of our own. Thus, thinking about what it
means to be bad and whether we are or are not in fact bad prevents others from
making us bad simply by saying we are. It also means we can contain the idea
that we are bad and think about it rather than transferring the badness out into
the world from whence it came.
It should be emphasized that vulnerability to the power of words applies on
both sides of the relationship: to those who are the target of the magic words and
to those who use them. Those using the words are doing so as part of a strategy
to evacuate bad objects (objects that denigrate the self ) into external containers
(to communicate their badness to others); those who respond to the words by
taking in the shame indicate through their anger and aggression that they cannot
cope with the communication except by employing the same strategy to return
the shame to its original source (or what is experienced as its original source).
 The power of words 77

That this process remains important in adult life can be seen in the name calling
that has such a prominent role in public life. Powerful words such as “racist,”
“terrorist,” “evil doer,” and “illegal alien” may operate outside a context of
meaning created through a thinking process, and, indeed, derive their power
from this fact. The result of the prevalence of the primitive use of words in public
life is that force rather than reason dominates there (Levine 2008).
So far, I have only considered the power of words to transfer the bad self onto
others. But, that power can also be used to form a connection with the good.
When the power of words is to create not bad objects but good objects, our abil-
ity to use that power is an aspect of our desired identification with the words, an
identification that it is hoped will fend off the imposed identification consequent
on the use of bad words by others to determine who we are. Identification with
the good words enhances our power to use the bad words to evacuate the bad self
onto others. It therefore indicates that, in using words, the individual becomes
something special. Indeed, the purpose of using words in such cases is to establish
something important about the person using them; that person, like the parent,
has the power to adjudicate good and bad because he or she possesses the power
of the words. The use of words in this way also creates an identification of the
user with others who use those words. At the same time, it serves to separate the
user of the words from those who do not use them and therefore have no power
to adjudicate the good and the bad.

***

The transfer of the bad self onto others is not, of course, the only use of words.
There is also the possibility that words can be used to shape and communicate
ideas as part of a thinking process.
How can we determine whether words are used to prevent or to facilitate
thinking? The answer to this question built into the nature of magic words is
that we can only know how words are used by thinking about them, and we can
distinguish between our two uses of words by whether they are used in a way
that prevents us from thinking about them. But this means that the activity that
results in knowing how words are being used, thinking, is also the activity that
drains the magic from words that gives them power over us.
Thinking about the words creates an understanding of them, which is also an
idea. What we then hold in the mind is not the word as a thing in itself, but the
idea linked to the word. Our ability to create an understanding depends on our
ability to contain the words and the emotional communication attached to them.
Magic words must be defended against any effort to articulate ideas about them;
otherwise they lose their magic power. This defense inevitably takes the form of
obfuscation, disconnection, and overt attacks on thinking, which is experienced
as an effort to drain the words of their power.3 The power of words must be
protected from thinking because if we cannot use the magic power of words, we
cannot hope to escape the unconscious conviction that we are identified with our
78 The power of words

bad self. The power of words is the power to escape from our fate. By using the
magic power of words, we can alter reality simply by saying the words. Put an-
other way, the magic power of words is their power against reality, if by that term
we have in mind something that exists outside the sphere of subjective control.
Forming a conception connects us to what is real in self and other in exactly
this sense of something that stands against subjective control, what is true about
the self rather than what is formed through projection. In other words, we fend
off the effort to control our inner worlds via projection and the use of the power
of words by creating a conception (or understanding) of self and other, a concep-
tion shaped not by the power of words to control what goes on inside our minds,
but by what is real. It is, then, our capacity to make contact with reality, espe-
cially the reality of ourselves, that protects us from external control. And, what
protects our connection to this reality is that we have formed an idea about it.
Of course, viewed from the standpoint of those who experience the world as a
place where reality is created by the use of magic words, there can be no reality in
the sense in which I have just used the term. Theirs is a closed system, and on its
terms there can be no alternatives to the subjectively constructed reality shaped
by the necessity of transferring the bad self outside. We cannot, therefore, alter
the conviction that all reality is created by the power of words by appeal to the
only method capable of doing so, thinking, because that method is unavailable.
There can be no reasoned engagement because reason is the only real threat to
the closed system. Put another way, for those operating within the terms of the
closed system, reason must be experienced as a use of magic words (in this case
“reason” treated as itself a magic word) to take control because there is no possi-
bility of any other use of words.
Where magic words are in play, fear of having words placed inside us is always
an important factor in shaping interaction. This is evident in the way words are
used as part of a strategy to prevent others from entering into and taking con-
trol of our minds, a strategy that, once put in place, involves preventing contact
with our innermost feelings about ourselves. In other words, as a response to our
experience that communicating with others is a process through which we are
penetrated by them, we block any effort on the part of others to gain access to
our innermost experiences, including the effort associated with empathy and the
special kind of understanding it entails.

***

As the Navajo insist, the power of words is an unseen power, and as I have noted,
words have power because their power is unseen. The unseen power is also an
unknown power in that, while it may be familiar, it is also alien. So far as social
systems are concerned, those systems in which words have power must be set-
tings where we are ruled by forces present inside ourselves yet alien to us. The
dominant psychic reality in this world is a reality of occupation by this alien
power known to us only by its effects.
 The power of words 79

Symptomatic of the state of being occupied is that those who are in it will hold
the conviction that their state is the only possible human condition, as, for exam-
ple, Jacques Lacan insists when he famously comments that “Man’s desire is the
desire of the Other” (1998: 235). There could be no more compelling instance
of the state of occupation to which I have just referred than that described in this
statement. For Lacan, we desire what the other desires, and we shape ourselves
according to the model of the object the other desires. But to define desire as the
desire of the other is to exclude by definition any other possibility. It is less an
observation than the expression of an emotional need born of anxiety surround-
ing the possibility that others may find in their desire the expression of their own
presence rather than the presence of the other.
The distinction just drawn between presence of self and presence of other only
emerges where the inner world is organized in a way that allows for tolerating the
presence of both good and bad versions of the self. This is because containment
obviates the need to invade the mind of the other and set up a presence there
through projective identification. By contrast, containing bad internal objects
integrates the varied elements of the personality so that none is experienced as
an alien presence but all are experienced as aspects of being a self. Then, making
contact with the self replaces both the need to control the inner worlds of others
and the need to adapt to their needs and expectations as the expression of their
presence in our minds.
Social systems organized around adaptation can be distinguished from social
systems organized around making contact with the self by the extent to which
the inner world is experienced as a place dominated by alien elements and re-
lating is dominated by the struggle over their valence. Domination by alien ele-
ments results from a state of vulnerability that, in turn, originates in the factors
that make tolerating frustration difficult or impossible. Because of this, we can
also say that access to thinking to cope with the bad self is an expression of the
presence of the self as the active factor in the inner world.
These considerations raise the question of the place occupied by thinking in
social systems or of whether thinking has a place in social systems. In referring
to the place of thinking in social systems, I have in mind the extent to which
institutions foster the opportunity for those in them to engage an internal pro-
cess that contains the bad self rather than seeking to transfer it onto others. The
end of thinking is to contain internal experience, both good and bad, so that it
is possible to experience the whole of the reality of being. This, then, makes it
possible to engage in relations with others on a basis other than using them to
contain disavowed parts of the self. When we relate to others in this way, they
become realities external to us, which is another way of saying that they become
real for us.
The extent to which social systems facilitate containment of all aspects of
self-experience will depend on the extent of their collusion with the ends of
managing anxiety via projective identification. Exercising the capacity to avoid
collusion on the societal level would parallel the experience of the psychoanalytic
80 The power of words

process, which seeks to encompass through understanding, rather than move

unacceptable aspects of self-experience onto others. This is, of course, a special
kind of understanding, which is the understanding “of what is rejected, of what
is feared and hated in the human being” to which Racker draws our attention.
Another word for this understanding is empathy. Empathy for the self forms the
basis for empathic connection with others, and also for that special way of relat-
ing to others, which is the relating to without control over we associate with being
in society.
Psychoanalysis is not about purging the psyche of all residue of destructive
impulses and replacing the reality of psychic life with what Howard Schwartz
(2016) refers to as the “pristine self.” It is not about living in a world where others
hate and we do not, where others are all about greedy desire while our desire is
untainted by greed. It is not about a world where members of some groups are
known to be bad so that belief in the innocence of others can be kept secure.
Rather, psychoanalysis is about recognizing that the protection of the innocence
and goodness of some at the expense of others serves no one. It serves no one
because, for all those involved, whatever their assigned role, it means the split-
ting off of vital aspects of self-experience and, in the end, the loss of contact with
what is alive and real in the personality. Rather than sponsoring the pristine
self, psychoanalysis is about the integration of self-experience that can only be
achieved by holding it inside. More specifically, it is about that way of holding
self-experience inside we refer to in the language of understanding. It is about
the power of understanding to make a difference, a power lost when we devote
our energies to the effort to control how we experience reality in service of de-
nial of what is real and true in it.

Notes
1 The “thing in itself ” understood in this way is linked to the Kantian idea of a world
existing outside our conceptions of it, or more generally outside our ability to con-
ceive it. Because the thing in itself must be protected from thinking, it is not the
unknowable reality of the thing, but a way to avoid knowing the reality of the thing.
2 On the equation of words with things, or the “symbolic equation,” see Segal (1957).
3 For an example, see Levine (2016), chapter 4.

References
Azcentral.com (2013) A shield made of prayer. http://www.azcentral.com/news/
native-americans/?content=codetalker; retrieved 2/12/13.
Bion, W. (1967) Second Thoughts. London: Maresfield Library.
Caper, R. (1999) A Mind of One’s Own: A Kleinian View of Self and Object. London:
Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanal-
ysis (Book XI). New York: Norton.
Levine, D. (2008) Politics without Reason: The Perfect World and the Liberal Ideal. New York:
Palgrave.
 The power of words 81

——— (2016) Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed, and Fine Art: Making Contact with
the Self. East Sussex: Routledge.
Racker, H. (1968). Transference and Countertransference. Madison: International Universi-
ties Press.
Schwartz, H. (2016) Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Segal, H. (1957) Notes on symbol formation. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 38:
391–97.
——— (1981) Psychoanalysis and freedom of thought. In The Work of Hanna Segal.
New York: Michael Aronson.
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PART III
This page intentionally left blank
7
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE
METHOD OF INTROSPECTION

In an essay written late in life, Heinz Kohut distinguishes what he refers to as

“two universes accessible to science.” One includes fields, notably the biolog-
ical and physical sciences, that are “accessible via extrospection.” The other
includes “fields that are accessible via introspection,” most notably psycho-
analysis (1982: 405). Kohut’s purpose in writing the essay is not, however,
simply to explore the introspective method as a method of investigation; it
is also a method for bringing about change. The link between introspection
and change involves introspection of that special kind we refer to by the term
empathy. While Kohut first considers empathy an “information-collecting,
data-gathering activity,” he goes on to add to this the idea that the “mere
presence of empathy” has a beneficial or therapeutic effect (1982: 397). While I
do not know that Kohut would put it this way, the therapeutic effect of empa-
thy involves, I think, the internalization of an empathic object, which creates
in the individual a more empathic stance toward him- or herself, a kind of
“self-empathy.”1
What makes the habit of introspection possible is the comfort the individual
feels dwelling in his or her inner world and the comfort felt in doing so varies
with the degree to which the individual has developed an empathic relationship
with him- or herself. This comfort felt in dwelling in the mind is the beneficial
effect of empathy. The practice of self-empathy is the activity that alleviates suf-
fering and also the activity the availability of which indicates that a main cause
of suffering has been removed.
Psychoanalysis is, then, a method of change centered on a certain kind of
introspection. In this, it stands poles apart from social movements, which, like
psychoanalysis, can also be considered methods of change aimed at alleviating
86 Social movements

suffering. It is the opposition between the psychoanalytic method and the method
associated with social movements that I explore in this chapter.

***

In the following, I consider social movements more or less well-organized

groups that seek to mobilize, and to an important degree create, a shared iden-
tity around an idea about (1) the causes for their feelings of deprivation and
(2) what must be done to remedy or at least alleviate those feelings. A small
example of this was provided by participants who brought signs reading “I
Matter” to an “Occupy” event in upstate New York. The implication of the
signs was that they were a group, or incipient group, of those who had been
damaged by others who treat them as if they are of no significance and that they
have been deprived of something important that is due them: recognition that
they matter.
We may take as an assumption that feelings of deprivation including those
associated with social movements are caused by actual experience, but this does
not mean that the prevailing idea in the group about that experience is true, at
least in any simple sense of the term. On the contrary, I think it is in the nature
of social movements that, together with their ability to highlight real and im-
portant forms of socially instituted experiences of deprivation and oppression,
they also foster problematic forms of understanding of those experiences. Thus,
while it may be true that those at the Occupy event were at some point in their
lives treated as if they did not matter, it is unlikely that those they target in their
protest, most notably Wall Street bankers, are those whose treatment has left
them feeling that way.
In relation to loss and deprivation, social movements differ according to
whether the loss they experience is linked to attributes specific to the identity of
members or whether their loss is deemed universal, whether they are the group
that has been specially targeted or the group of those who have become aware
of a universal condition. Thus, movements against government bring together
those who experience government as a threat to freedom for all, while some
segments of the environmental movement seek to protect a connection with and
dependence on the earth they assume to be universal.
The movements organized to deal with a deprivation limited to their mem-
bers tend to organize around a shared experience of shame, while those whose
defining deprivation is a universal threat tend, I think, to have at their emotional
center not so much shame as greed. For those involved in the movement against
government, government is the repository of their projected greed, and the dan-
ger it poses to citizens is the danger that greed always poses, which is that it will
deplete the source of the good things. For those involved in the environmental
movement, greed is more diffused, although there is some tendency to focus
attention on corporate greed. From the standpoint of the environmental move-
ment, all are greedy, or at least all those who have not joined the movement and
 Social movements 87

are therefore engaged in the exploitation of the environment, which is the source
of the good things.
To put the matter in an overly schematic way, we can say that there are two
kinds of social movements: those organized around shame and those organized
around greed.2 Here, I will focus my attention exclusively on those movements
organized around shame, while bearing in mind that this leaves out contempo-
rary movements that are becoming increasingly important.3
Social movements organized around shame are involved with the matter of
recognition. Recognition, however, operates on different levels. The first is ex-
ternal and abstract. This is the recognition of formal social standing; it is involved
with questions about the deprivation of political and civil rights linked to group
membership. The second is subjective and has to do with how group members
relate to themselves, especially when their lack of standing translates into shame.
In social movements there is, however, no clear-cut distinction between the two
levels. In particular, social movements embody the conviction that recognition
in the first sense dispels shame, and, if it does not, then more is needed than the
“mere” recognition of rights. This is their most powerful organizing idea. It is
analogous to what Wilfred Bion refers to as a “basic assumption.” But, social
movements also embody the conviction that their shame is, or can be made to be,
a source of pride. This expresses the link between shame and pride emphasized
by Miller. Taking pride in shame creates a powerful resistance to giving it up.
This idea that the suffering associated with shame is a valued possession can also
be considered a basic assumption or an aspect of the basic assumption of social
movements for which pride is the way we hold onto our shame.
The balance between the two dimensions of recognition can vary across social
movements so that some are primarily about civil and political rights, while, in
others, concern for rights is powerfully invested with the more subjective issues
involving shame. In the following, I will focus my attention on social movements
in which the emotional ends involving the alleviation of shame associated with
a degraded social status play an important part. It needs to be born in mind that
an important reason, though not the only reason, to extend equal rights to all is
to assure that shame is not instantiated in institutions.
Social movements can be said to exist simultaneously with what Bion would
call work groups and basic assumption groups. At the level of the work group,
the primary objective of the social movement is to assure full rights and op-
portunities for its members. This is a well-defined political goal to be achieved
by political process. At the level of the basic group, the primary objective is to
change the subjective experience of the world both for group members and for
others. There can be a belief within the group that achieving the first end will
necessarily achieve the second. But, this may not be the case, especially the
more the group represented in the movement is organized around processes of
the intergenerational transmission of feelings of deprivation, shame, and loss.
Then, more is needed from those outside the group than abstract recogni-
tion of a common social standing. This something more is recognition of the
88 Social movements

superior virtue of the experience of the oppressed group that magically trans-
forms shame into pride.
The problem that the intergenerational transmission of loss and shame poses
is that we cannot change the past. Thus, while insistence on the historical roots
of current feelings, especially of anger and even rage, may be valid, it serves to
block rather than facilitate the amelioration of the problem. Refusal to acknowl-
edge that the past cannot be changed often plays a vital role in social movements
and in their own unconscious resistance to change.
The more intense the impulse within the group to hold onto its shame, the
more the group is involved with limiting the way its members come to know
and understand themselves and their circumstances. The limitations nurtured by
social movements involve the ideas of innocence and virtue especially of those
attached to their oppression, or the idea that, as Jesse Jackson put it, “suffering
breeds character” (1989). The implied celebration of the plight of the oppressed
hides the reality of the psychic damage oppression does and of the nature of the
intense emotional states it promotes.
The demand for a special kind of recognition different from the one embod-
ied in respect for a common set of rights has the effect of continuing the psychic
tie between members and non-members beyond the moment where equal status
has been achieved and therefore also continuing the dependence of the former on
the latter. Because of its involvement with a demand for recognition that dispels
shame, the social movement embodies a contradiction. The two levels come to
stand in conflict one with the other and the continued existence of the social
movement beyond the point where its political task has been achieved brings
with it the emergence of the problem of shame and recognition as the dominant
moment, which in an important sense it always was. This can also lead to a re-
definition of justice that takes it beyond the matter of rights and identifies it more
broadly with the removal of shame.4
It is important to understand how the shame associated with group iden-
tity cannot be overcome simply by extending rights to group members. This
means that the end of coping with shame and the end of extending rights are not
achieved in the same way and by the same measures however important the latter
is to the former. One is about political and social reality; the other about psychic
reality. The difference is part of the constitution of social movements, which tend
to see their goal not only, sometimes not primarily, as achieving equality of citi-
zenship but as gaining public recognition for the special virtues of their group so
that shame can be redefined as pride. Thus the narcissistic injury associated with
the constituting experience of group members leads to a social defense organized
around a grandiose fantasy constructed to hide a degraded self.
On this, let me offer a brief example from a course I taught on hatred and
group conflict. While the course was not designed to deal with the question of
what can we do about hate, I did devote the last two sessions to a study of toler-
ance, especially of the difficulties that stand in the way of tolerating difference.
My point was first to establish tolerance as the alternative to hate and second to
 Social movements 89

make clear how deeply ingrained are the psychological obstacles to tolerance,
how we cannot eliminate hate by, for example, “teaching tolerance.” After class
one day, a Hispanic student came up to me in the parking lot to express a concern
he had about the theme of the class. What he told me was that tolerance seemed
to him a very slight goal, hardly commensurate with the problem of hate. It did
not seem nearly enough. He thought a more positive recognition, something
along the lines of the lately popular “celebration” of cultures, would surely do
more. My response to him was to reiterate the point of the class, which was
that tolerance is a very big deal. If we could achieve it, we would have drained
social and public life of perhaps the most damaging element in it. He was not
convinced.
The something more than tolerance my student sought was appreciation, even
admiration, for the virtues of his group. Where we are dealing with shame,
however, admiration takes on a special meaning. It is admiration not for the per-
son, but for attributes attached to him or her by group membership and shared
group experience. But, as Miller emphasizes, admiration of this kind, because
it is admiration for qualities externally attached to the person rather than love
for who that person really is, does not dispel shame, but affirms it (Miller 1986:
329). Where shame is too powerful a force, the individual finds him- or herself
in a double bind. To be merely tolerated by others simply confirms the presence
of a degraded self. But the alternative, admiration, only serves to attach the indi-
vidual more firmly to a degraded self thus affirming the absence of love and the
need for psychic nutrients from outside to compensate for the conviction that the
self is unworthy of love.
The strong link between shame and pride highlights the way in which shame
drives individuals and groups to a continued dependence on those held respon-
sible for their degraded selves. Seeking responses from those outside that make
it possible for members of groups to take pride in their identity continues their
dependence on others for the way they feel about themselves. This “overdepend-
ence on objects” (Kernberg 1986: 246) is an essential part of the individual’s
attachment to a degraded self and to the group of those who share that attachment.
The experience of deprivation of right is objective and real. Full recognition
of right can protect the individual against that experience. Shame is a self-state.
And the kind of shame with which social movements are often involved is a
deeply ingrained self-state. Because of this, there is little hope, and little reason
to expect, that participation in social movements will enhance insight into the
inner world and encourage individuals involved to retrieve projections and begin
to see the reality outside in a new light, especially as doing so might be harmful
to group solidarity, the promotion of which becomes an important end in itself.
In other words, we should not expect social movements and their members to
give up the ways of knowing around which those movements and the psychic
lives of their members are organized.
The same holds, though in a somewhat different way, for those who, while
not members of oppressed groups, are driven by a powerful urge to identify
90 Social movements

with them. So far as the oppression of those with whom they identify is real, the
effort to encourage those seeking an association with social movements to give
up their identification with the oppressed will encounter a double resistance, one
coming from whatever internal dynamic created the impulse to identify with
the oppressed in the first place, the second from the day-to-day confirmation of
the oppression of their chosen group as a real phenomenon of the external world.
In the context of this identification with the oppressed, there is a strong im-
pulse for the application of psychoanalytic ideas, if it occurs at all, to become just
one more tool to be used against the group’s chosen enemy. Psychoanalysis is now
put in service of a political movement, a situation I would argue is essentially in-
consistent with psychoanalysis and must inevitably lead to distortions of it.

***

Let me offer an example of the opposition between social movements and psy-
choanalytic ideas and methods also from the class I refer to above. In that class,
students were encouraged to select cases of group conflict to study and to think
about in a psychodynamic sort of way. One year, a group of students decided to
study rape camps in the Bosnian war. When one of the students made her pres-
entation to the class, she placed all the emphasis on political considerations and
the idea of rape as a political act. When her presentation ended, I suggested in as
mild a way as I could that she also look into the role that hatred of women might
play in rape so that she might bring the ideas from class to bear on the subject in
her term paper. Her response was immediate and sharp. She had just learned in
another class that the only acceptable interpretation of violence against women
was one in terms of power and politics; anything else was unacceptable. And she
conveyed this message to me in no uncertain terms.
My first reaction was to be somewhat puzzled as I had not asked her to give
up her commitment to a political interpretation but had only asked that, for
purposes of our class, she turn her attention in a different direction. As I thought
about it, however, her surprisingly intense resistance began to make sense. After
all, to think that rape might be an expression of hatred would open the door to
the question: why do men hate women (to formulate the issue in a too-simple
sort of way)? The discourse of power and politics seeks to suppress this question
to protect the splitting and projection that is understood to protect the virtue and
innocence of the oppressed while also securing the status of the chosen enemy
whose depiction as essentially evil cannot easily be reconciled with the idea that
evil acts are done for a reason aside from the evilness of those who do them.
I suspect that my student rejected any effort to talk about hatred of women
because it seemed to her that, while people may simply be bad, they do not
simply hate others. Rather, they hate others because they have suffered (real or
imagined) harm and have determined that those they hate were the cause. And
this finding a cause outside themselves is an important part of what social move-
ments are about. Thus, so far as women’s hatred of men is understood to result
 Social movements 91

from men’s proclivity for violence against women, does it not follow that men’s
hatred of women must follow from women’s proclivity for violence against men?
If so, then looking at the matter as involving hatred of women risks shifting re-
sponsibility from men onto women, therefore holding the victims responsible for
violence inflicted on them.
Of course, the syllogism that links hatred to prior acts of violence by the hated
group ignores the possibility that hatred can be displaced from those responsible
for the damage that provokes hate. But the point of political accounts is precisely
to deny this possibility and insist that things are as they appear to be. Then, to
question political accounts means to suggest that the displacement on which
they depend should be given up, which is to say that the whole impulse toward
splitting good and bad and projective identification should be resisted. To do so
is not only difficult in itself; it also means separating yourself from the group that
is built around a narrative of power and politics whose purpose is to divert atten-
tion from the more complex reality. In other words, we deny the reality to which
the language of hate points and use the discourse of politics and power as a way
to protect the oppressed, and those identified with them, from any understanding
of their experience that might get in the way of securing a construction of the
world consistent with splitting and projective identification.
There is much that could be said about this, but for my purposes the point to
emphasize is that, from the standpoint of a social movement dedicated to reduc-
ing or eliminating violence against women, understanding the complex system
of object relations involved in rape is not necessarily helpful. This is because it
might reduce the intense emotions social movements count on (what, in US
politics, is referred to as “mobilizing the base”), which are also those intense
emotions Freud (1959) links to group phenomena in his essay on the subject. The
effect of complicating the simple responses might even be to weaken the forces
mobilized to protect women from assault, which is the matter at hand.
Put another way, the purposes of social movements make their involvement
with causal accounts of human behavior formulated in the language of power
more or less inevitable. Accounts of the situation of their members in terms of
power and politics express the psychic reality of that position and the fact that it
is not simply a psychic reality but to an important extent the objective external
reality in which they live. Still, social movements are essentially involved with
denying that external reality shapes an internal reality where suffering is caused
not only by external objects but also by internal. Because of this, there is an in-
herent tension between social movements and psychoanalysis.

***

I would now like to consider how the disjunction between psychoanalytic ideas
and social movements involves not only the matter of power, but also the matter
of introspection and the activity of thinking versus acting. To do this I will con-
sider another example.
92 Social movements

Some years ago, I attended a lecture by a woman who had spent a lifetime in
the human rights movement, beginning with the liberation of Auschwitz and
continuing through involvement with aid to victims of a series of horrific events,
many of which she recounted in her lecture. In doing this, she had a clear pur-
pose that she made explicit. She wanted to provoke those in the audience to do
something, specifically to give up the passive stance of those who merely ob-
serve, and adopt an active stance of involvement. In so many words, she told the
audience to stop thinking and talking and start doing. In this, she might have
followed Karl Marx who famously commented that, “philosophers have only
interpreted the world … the point however is to change it.”
To accomplish her purpose, the speaker provided graphic accounts of
violence, accounts that had a powerful emotional impact on her audience. The
emotional response to the lecture was, I would assume, a complex one involving
such things as: identification with victims, feelings of anxiety about the avail-
ability and competence of those we expect to protect us from acts of violence
and degradation, and, perhaps of special importance, deeply hidden feelings of
identification not with victims but with victimizers and the anxiety associated
with activation of our own violent and sadistic impulses. Despite the fact that
this was, at least to some important degree, a psychoanalytically oriented confer-
ence, there existed in the group an implicit taboo against verbalizing the feeling
that the keynote address had been an assault in which the speaker sought to
promote the movement away from thinking in the direction of impulse-driven
action involving contempt for any mediation of the relation between emotional
response and action by thinking.
What came across in the experience of this lecture was first the severity of the
problem that needed attention, second the urgency of providing help, and third
the idea that taking time to think would assure that help would come too late
and that it would be the wrong kind. On this level, the communication had the
following meaning:

Know that there is evil in the world. Know that, as we speak, this evil
threatens the innocent. Know that if you pause to think or discuss this
threat, people will suffer for it, and that your pausing indicates that you
doubt that danger is imminent and real; it means that you doubt evil. If you
do not know that it is evil, then you are acting in collusion with it; you are
evil yourself. You either know or you think. If you know, you act, and if
you think you do not. If you do not act, then the innocent will be lost and
you will be responsible.

The above can be considered an outline of what we might loosely refer to as my

countertransference to the presentation. Interpretation of this countertransfer-
ence would be an interpretation of the emotional communication in the session.
Interpretation of emotional communication can be taken as an effort to moderate
its impact, especially as that is felt in the form of urgency and the kind of inner
 Social movements 93

turmoil we associate with urgency. For those whose emotional life is defined by
urgency and inner turmoil that can only be alleviated by urgently needed action,
moderating the impact of the emotional communication is neither possible nor
desirable. The stakes are too high and the anxiety too great. Interpretation of the
communication separates us from it, at least to a degree.
If we attempt to think about the issue, we no longer share the experience,
or at least we do not fully share it. Instead, we contain the emotional turmoil
the communication is meant to convey to us and reflect back a reduced sense of
urgency that includes the idea that before we act we should think about what
we are doing and why we are doing it. The human rights activist was correct in
her assessment of the relationship between thinking and acting, at least up to a
point. In thinking we do not change the external world. Rather, what changes in
thinking is not the shape of the world outside but of the world within.

***

While social movements are all about change in the world outside, psychoanal-
ysis is about change in the inner world. More than this, social movements are all
about protecting the way the inner world is and has been, defending it against
change by shifting the need for change outside. If there is a connection between
the two, I would argue that it involves the way the change in the world outside is
a precondition for the internal change we associate with psychoanalysis.
I can put this point in the language of rights. To the extent that the larger
social context is one where rights are not securely instituted and well respected,
the turning inward we associate with psychoanalysis is blocked by the continuing
correspondence of oppressive external object relations with assaultive internal
objects. Engagement with these oppressive external objects will be experienced
not as externalization of an inner drama, but as a reality-based encounter with
the actual source of suffering, which it is. Only once the reality of oppression in
the external world gives way to a world of rights and opportunities open to all
does it become possible to consider the internal struggle over the safety of the self
in the inner world.
In other words, once rights are well instituted, the presence of oppression as
an internal matter comes to the fore and psychoanalytic ideas become relevant.
Thus, an extensive and well-established system of individual rights can be con-
sidered a pre-condition for the kind of turning inward on which the application
of psychoanalytic ideas depends. In this, we have perhaps an example in sup-
port of Marx’s observation that mankind only sets itself those tasks it is able to
accomplish.5
Psychoanalytic ideas and methods become important to the extent that it be-
comes important to understand the special suffering that people inflict on them-
selves and their special attachment to it. Although this special suffering has its
origins in imposed loss, it is the internalized expression of loss that provides the
material for psychoanalytic study. This can help us understand that the imposition
94 Social movements

of loss does not support causal accounts of suffering of the kind typical in social
movements, but rather closed system accounts of the perpetuation of suffering
through its transmission across generations. To arrive at this level of analysis of
suffering, we need to give up the method instantiated in notions of power and
politics without which social movements would be unable to serve either their
political or their psychological purpose.
People do not give up attachment to their suffering or even their convictions
about its external causes simply because those external causes have been removed
and the victims of oppression are recognized fully as citizens with all the rights
and opportunities that implies. Removal of external causes is a necessary but not
a sufficient condition. My point is not that psychoanalytic concepts cannot be
applied to social problems if by apply you mean enable us to arrive at a better un-
derstanding of them. Rather, my point is that the understanding made available
by use of psychoanalytic concepts is unlikely to be a significant element in the
kinds of social change that lead away from an environment that tends to create
those problems.
To summarize briefly what I have said so far: social movements can change
the plight of the self in the external world. Their fantasy is that doing so is all that
is needed to change the plight of the self in the inner world as well. But, if this
is incorrect, then the question becomes: How do we move beyond social move-
ments once rights and opportunities have become genuinely universal?
I think the answer to this question rooted in psychoanalytic ideas appeals to
a process social movements are organized to prevent, which is the process of
mourning.6 To the extent that deprivation and loss are the raw materials that
form social movements, the way of knowing to which I referred earlier has its
roots in limitations on the mourning process that prevent it from reaching its
conclusion in acceptance of loss. Rather than completing the mourning process,
social movements tend to place limits on it that turn mourning from a process
with a beginning and end to an enduring, or chronic, state, a kind of end in itself.
Within the mindset of the group, if suffering is to be alleviated, it is not by giv-
ing up our attachment to the lost object, but by retrieving that object. Chronic
mourning is all about the idea, alluded to above, that what needs to be done is
not to let go of the past, but to change it.
But, changing the past is not possible, and the political agenda rooted in the
state of chronic mourning only makes sense where suffering is in fact imposed
and there is that correspondence between the external situation of the individual
and his or her inner world of hostile object relations. Once the external situation
has moderated, there remains only the individual’s attachment to damaging in-
ternal objects to consider. But it is only possible to consider this when it is possi-
ble for the individual to imagine life outside the group of those who survive by
externalizing their harsh internal objects onto their external containers.

***
 Social movements 95

I speak above of the limitations of knowing associated with social movements.

These limitations stem ultimately from the fact that social movements are group
phenomena and therefore incorporate certain imperatives of group life, includ-
ing those having to do with how we know what is true about self and other. In
speaking of knowing in this way, I do not intend to suggest that there is some
simple method, unavailable in groups, for distinguishing true from false, for
example by setting what exists in the mind against what exists, or is somehow
assumed to exist, outside. The problem of what we mean when we speak about
what is true or real about self and other, especially as it involves a distinction
between internal and external, has something to do with groups because groups
are settings for what is sometimes referred to as the “social construction of real-
ity.” Indeed, it could be said that the idea of the social construction of reality and
the idea that social reality is a group phenomenon are two aspects of one idea.
This means that the terms true and real have different significance for groups
than they do for a world in which individuals exist outside groups. When groups
let go, or are forced to let go, of their hegemony over their members, there then
develops a “reality,” which is the world outside the group. And since the group
is built on identification, so that reality is the same for all members while outside
the group individuals are not constrained in their thinking in this way, there
is a sense in which the opposition true and false as pertaining to social reality
emerges with the emergence of the individual out of the group.
This is important in thinking about social movements because it bears on their
tendency to imagine that they have the power to create reality, and it also helps
us understand what this means. Social movements organized around the ideal of
freedom from oppression exist in a psycho-social space defined by the idea that
the individual’s place in society is not fixed, nor is the shape of social institutions
and relating immune to change. It is this conviction more than any other that
sets up the tension between the goals of social movements and their tendency to
sponsor group identifications. Social movements tie their members to the group
and to group-oriented ways of thinking. At the same time, they are special kinds
of groups that are dedicated to freeing their members from group identification
so they can enjoy the universal rights and opportunities of citizenship. Without
social movements there would be no freedom from group identification includ-
ing the group identification that serves to constitute the social movement. And
this means that social movements can do important groundwork for freeing their
members from the group-constructed reality on which they depend.

Notes
1 Ronald Fairbairn (1958) speaks of the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis in terms
of the relationship with a new object, a line of thinking close to what I have in mind
here.
2 Movements organized around greed may have guilt rather than shame as a primary
factor.
96 Social movements

3 Of course there are anti-modern movements, typically organized around a powerful

religious ideal. It might be argued, however, that these are not so much social move-
ments as movements against the emergence of society, which is understood, correctly
I think, as a threat to the older moral order. It should be mentioned that many secular
movements contain powerful anti-modern elements.
4 See chapter 6.
5 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy.
6 See chapter 9.

References
Bion, W. (1961) Experiences in Groups. London: Routledge.
Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1958) On the nature and aims of psychoanalytic treatment. Interna-
tional Journal of Psychoanalysis 31: 374–85.
Freud, S. (1959) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. New York: Norton.
Jackson, J. (1989) Keep Hope Alive: Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Presidential Campaign. Boston: South
End Press.
Kernberg, O. (1986) Factors in the treatment of narcissistic personalities. In A. Morrison
(ed.) Essential Papers on Narcissism. New York: New York University Press.
Kohut, H. (1966) Forms and transformations of narcissism. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association 14: 243–72.
——— (1982) Introspection, empathy, and the semi-circle of mental health. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 63: 395–407.
Miller, A. (1986) Depression and grandiosity as related forms of narcissistic disturbances.
In A. Morrison (ed.) Essential Papers on Narcissism. New York: New York University
Press.
8
HATE IN GROUPS AND THE STRUGGLE
FOR INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY

In this chapter, I explore the broader significance of the psychoanalytic theory of

groups for understanding the distinctive developmental tasks that face individu-
als and social institutions in the context of a modern society. In considering the
significance of the psychoanalytic theory of the group, I emphasize the link be-
tween group phenomena and hate. The link between hate and group phenomena
arises in part out of the tension between the impulse to regress into the group and
give up the process of individuation and the impulse to pursue autonomy and live
the peculiar sort of life made available to, and to a great extent expected of, those
born into a modern society. Thus, hatred as a group phenomenon is involved in
the struggle of the modern world to provide a setting for an individual life and
the difficulties the prospects of living such a life can pose.
I use the term modern to refer not to any particular nations or sub-national
units, but to a shape of life available to a degree that varies across and within
particular nations. Modern ways of life exist side by side with non-modern or
traditional ways of life; indeed, any individual life can include aspects or mo-
ments that we can appropriately refer to as modern and others that we cannot.
A modern society is a system of relations and institutions that facilitate modern
ways of life. Modern society is, then, an ideal that may be realized to a greater
or lesser degree in different settings. In existing social systems, modern society
appears combined in complex ways with institutions and relations based on other
conflicting ideals.
The defining feature of modern ways of life is their incorporation of a norm
of the individual as source or origin of his or her action. In this book, I have spo-
ken of this capacity to act as source or origin in the language of the self. Closely
related to the notion of the self as origin is Donald Winnicott’s idea of creative
living. In Winnicott’s language, creative living is the “doing that arises out of
98 Hate in groups

being.” He contrasts the doing that arises out of being with “reactive doing” for
which “the word being has no relevance” (1986: 39). Modern ways of life consist
of the doing that arises out of being understood in this way.
I will not advance any claim that modern ways of life are inherently superior,
though it may be argued that, in the contemporary world, the norm of individ-
ual self-determination and the social institutions that embody that norm have a
special claim to our attention.1 Neither am I concerned to argue that any society
could organize itself with no concern for the power of merger fantasy and the re-
lated impulse to lose the individual self into a group. Rather, my concern is with
the implications of organizing society in a way that (1) provides substantial space
for an individual life in a society of individuals and (2) fosters the development of
the individual’s capacity to take advantage of the opportunity for creative living
that such space affords.
In this chapter, I suggest that we understand the phenomenon of the hate
group in the context of the struggle over the development of the capacity to
which I have just referred and especially over the implications of living in a world
where the development of the capacity for an individual life is at least possible,
and in many cases expected. This struggle expresses not so much the “hatred of
a process of development” emphasized by Bion in his discussion of group process
(1960: 89), but the hatred of development itself, and especially of its end.

***

In his essay on group behavior, Wilfred Bion observes that to be a member of

what he refers to as a “basic” group, the individual need only exercise his ability
to “sink his identity in the herd” (1960: 89). Offering the individual the oppor-
tunity to do so is the purpose of such groups, which means that their defining
feature is that they afford the member a vehicle for overcoming difference. The
group, or at least the basic group, is, then, a social system, or system of interac-
tion, designed to overcome difference.
As Bion suggests, this does not offer a full account of group phenomena, since
it does not apply to those groups designed to do work.2 The idea of a basic group
also applies only to those groups where a special assumption holds, which is that
before joining the group the soon-to-be member is an individual, capable of
autonomous judgment and conduct. This capability is then given up to join the
group. The requirement that the capacity for autonomy be given up, or at least
suspended, only holds, however, for groups of individuals who seek the group
as a site for regression and therefore as a refuge from autonomy. If there is to be
regression, there must first have been development. Because it presupposes the
key defining feature of modernity, which is the development of the capacity
for individual autonomy, a development that must be given up to join the basic
group, the group to which Bion refers is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. We
are concerned, then, not with groups in general, nor with the basic group taken
simply as an alternative to the working group, but with the sort of group to
 Hate in groups 99

which the idea of regression can be meaningfully applied. The group as a site of
regression is the basic group, and not the group we might find in a society that
does not expect its members to develop or exercise their capacity for autonomy,
nor offer them the opportunity to do so.
An important variant on the idea of regression for understanding group
experience in a modern society is the idea of failed development. While the
group might afford the individual the opportunity for regression, and might
even press the individual in that direction, it can also offer a refuge to those for
whom development does not seem possible. While a modern society expects
that those living in it can exercise the capacity to act as individuals, this expec-
tation is not always met, and the needed capacity is not always available. The
basic group then not only affords the member the opportunity for regression,
it also affords the member an alternative to individuation and the development
it presupposes. When this second function is primary, the basic group differs
from the traditional group not in requiring regression, but in the way it of-
fers the member an alternative to an expected development. In the traditional
group there is no expected development of the capacity for an individual life
and therefore no failure of development that must be dealt with by the group
experience.
We can draw the distinction between the group in traditional and modern
settings more clearly if we bear in mind that being a member of a traditional
social unit means being a member of a group, whereas in modern society group
membership is only part of social experience. Beyond group membership, there
is the life of the individual as a separate and autonomous center of experience.
For there to be an individual, there must also be social interaction, systems of
interaction, and institutions organized around a logic different from that of the
group. Where such systems and institutions develop, the individual has the
opportunity to move into and out of groups. For this movement to take place,
the group must give up a part of its hold on the member and therefore its claim to
be the whole of the member’s social existence. This implies that the basic group
cannot be equated with the group in traditional society, which is not to deny that
the two have important qualities in common.
The pre-modern group is essentially a family, or an extended family unit
(a tribe or clan). The objective of the extended family unit of pre-modern society
is not to overcome or avoid the differences that establish and separate individuals,
though it might need to overcome the differences of members of different fami-
lies through marriage. If a basic group is to be distinguished from a family unit,
then it is because such groups embody the process of overcoming difference.
Where families are about either perpetuating identification (traditional) or facil-
itating the development of the child toward difference (modern), the basic group
is about the attack on difference, which means that it presupposes difference and
in this sense is a construction we could not expect to encounter in a world where
the idea of a modern way of life did not play a large role. How can we understand
this need to overcome or eliminate difference? What threat does difference pose
100 Hate in groups

that turns some away from the opportunity to develop into autonomous centers
of initiative, or individuals in the modern sense of the term?

***

To be different is to have an individual identity, which is to say an identity

uniquely your own. This unique identity is an expression in living of an internal
endowment or capacity sometimes referred to as the self. It follows that any flight
from individual identity is a flight from expressing the self in living. This flight
expresses a defect in the individual’s capacity to use his or her self to forge an
identity and shape a life.3
This defect can be expressed in the language of worth or value, as is suggested
by Hans Loewald’s formulation of the self as mind “cathected in its totality”
(1980: 351). To cathect the mind in its totality means to make an emotional in-
vestment in the person as a whole. The defect in the self alluded to in the last par-
agraph means that the individual does not value his or her person, cannot invest
worth in it, and therefore cannot use it to originate an identity and way of life.
In place of a valued self is a devalued self, in place of an emotional investment in
the personality as a whole is an emotional withdrawal from it, all of which means
that in place of self-love we will find self-hate.
When we hate our self, which is to say our capacity for autonomous and
creative being, we eliminate the possibility that we will develop an individual
identity. If we cannot develop an individual identity, we cannot live outside a
setting that provides an identity for us. This means that we can never move emo-
tionally outside the family and into the world of separate individual being and
relatedness. We may seem to live a life on our own, but, however we may reject
our families (directing against them a measure of the hatred directed at ourselves)
we cannot emotionally give them up and move on.
So far as the regressive impulse driving the individual into the basic group is
fueled by hatred for the self, we can say that the basic group is a social organism
created and perpetuated to help the individual cope with self-hate and the con-
sequent incapacity to be a self and shape an identity expressive of the capacity to
be a self. This conclusion will not be surprising if we bear in mind that the whole
point of the basic group is to replace the individual self with a group self, the
individual identity with a group identity, to afford the individual an opportunity
“to sink his identity in the herd.”
A modern society is one in which there is, or at least can be, a life as an au-
tonomous individual outside the extended family unit. Modernity is the one
situation in which we must give up the sense of merger into the unit and effect a
transition into a world outside, which is a world of others. Only in that situation
does failure to make such a transition have consequences for the individual’s sense
of personal adequacy and worth. Only in a modern society must the group cope
with the failure to develop, or put another way, only in this setting does the task
of the group become coping with a failure to achieve an expected development,
 Hate in groups 101

one others have, or are imagined to have, achieved. When the group is formed
to cope with failure and with the sense of the self as a failure, it must contain and
manage a considerable measure of aggression. This task of managing aggression
establishes the basic group as the site of hate, if not as a hate group properly so-
called, at least as an incipient hate group.
The link of the hate group to failed transition to adult living is suggested in
the adolescent quality of its rhetoric. The hate group is more akin to an ado-
lescent gang in its thinking and expression than to an adult organization. The
adolescent tone of the hate group tells us much about it, especially that hate is
linked to the regressive impulse and especially to the inability to move emotion-
ally away from the world of the family and the form of relatedness fostered there.
The member of the hate group cannot escape familial relatedness, yet at the same
time cannot find comfort in his or her family and is profoundly alienated from it.
What is unique to modernity is not hate, or the organizing of the group around
hate, but the hate group in this special sense, the group that must cope with
its members’ failed development. The extended family unit of the pre-modern
society might also be organized around hate, but it is not the hate of the individual
who lives in a world where he or she does not belong, where others have achieved,
or are imagined to have achieved, a standing he or she cannot achieve.
We can consider the matter of the failed transition between embeddedness in
the family and living a life as an individual in a world of others in the language
of hope and faith. This transition takes us from a world in which we may at least
hope that we will be uniquely valued and loved to a world of others in which
we cannot expect to find that we are special in this sense. In the language of
religion, we move from a world where there is one God and we are His special
concern, to a world of many gods for whom we are not special. In this new world
of civil life, each individual has his or her own sense of what is good and his
own set of things he or she values. Because of this, the secular world of markets
and civic associations is no place for the believer who still hopes that what he
values is uniquely to be valued and that what is the good for him is the Good
(see Levine 2002).
In the hate group, the hope that the transition to an adult world will not
require giving up the sense of being of special concern to the one true God be-
comes faith nurtured by a rigid belief in the one true God and his special concern
for those who hold true to their faith in Him. Thus, as stated by the head of the
Church of the Creator, the member of the group must memorize the catechism,
must know without question what he or she is meant to believe, and how he or
she is meant to live. In this way, the hate group keeps hope alive, now in the form
of faith, and it is this quality of the member of the hate group that makes him or
her impervious to reason because reason requires that we call on our capacity for
doubt. The catechism contains the rules of living that substitute for thinking as a
way of guiding ourselves through our lives. Thinking is the guide to life appro-
priate to creative or autonomous living; adherence to rules or compliance is the
guide to life for those who cannot exercise the capacity for self-determination.
102 Hate in groups

When hope turns into conviction and thinking gives way to rigid adherence to
rules, tolerance of difference is no longer possible.

***

If the essence of the group is regression toward relatedness in the form of identifi-
cation (Freud 1959), which implies also exclusion of others (those who are differ-
ent), then we can question the distinctiveness of the hate group within the class
of groups. As Freud puts it: “It is always possible to bind together a considerable
number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the
manifestations of their aggressiveness” (1961: 61). Regression means movement
toward a mode of mental life in which positively valued self-images are protected
from negatively valued images by splitting and projection. So long as this means
that those outside the group must contain the group’s disavowed self, hate will be
a part of group experience.
But, even if all basic groups embody the attack on the autonomous self, they
are not all hate groups. This is because they are not all preoccupied with those
outside, especially with the destruction, or at least control over, those not mem-
bers of the group. For the hate group properly considered, the significant others
(the suitable targets for externalization as Vamik Volkan (1988) puts it) are those
responsible for the group’s constituting loss, which is the loss of self-love, and
therefore those who have what has been lost, and who must be fought against if
the loss is to be made good. The genuine hate group is saturated with envy and
preoccupied with justice.4
For the basic group there are two strategies for coping with loss and the hate
that replaces love. One is to cherish the loss and pity those who have not had it.
The other is to seek justice and attempt to retrieve what has been lost from those
considered responsible for it. The adoption of this second strategy creates the hate
group in the usual sense of the term.
The hate group seeks to bind hate, justice, and faith. Hate’s object is under-
stood to be responsible for the group’s constituting loss. Putting right this loss is
understood as a matter of justice. Any violence directed against hate’s object ex-
presses not the hate of the members of the hate group but the hatred and violence
of hate’s object. Thus, the attack on the World Trade Center is understood as a re-
sponse to American violence against Muslims, especially in Iraq, and therefore is
caused not by the hate and violence of the al-Qa’ida, but by the hate and violence
of Americans. In the words of an al-Qa’ida spokesman, “We have the right to kill
4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many
and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands” (Middle East Media Research
Institute 2000). Doing so would only set the balance for an equal measure of harm
done to Muslims as a result of the American bombing and siege of Iraq and the
war against the Taliban. Counting up the number of dead and injured provides a
number of dead and injured Americans that would right the balance, and in this
primitive sense, achieve justice.
 Hate in groups 103

When the element of justice is introduced, the hate group seeks to transform
its hate into something socially sanctioned. It seeks to redefine its rage as outrage.
If it can do so, it can avoid identifying itself with its own hate, which is made
instead an appropriate response to the hateful act of the other. The link to justice
would make hate acceptable, and justice is indeed a part of the social organiza-
tion or management of hate. In the words of James Gilligan, “all violence is an
attempt to achieve justice” (1994: 11; see also Kernberg 1995: 64). To manage
the hate created within society, society sanctions certain targets (those suitable in
Volkan’s sense) it deems consistent with its normative framework and therefore
with its persistence as a good society.
The idea that there are a limited number of designated hate groups protects
the community from knowledge of the extent of its involvement with hate. This
is not to say that the prevalence of managing hate as a task in groups makes unim-
portant the distinction between those groups that do and those that do not direct
their hate outward into destructive acts against others. Nonetheless, the idea of
the hate group, while identifying a real problem, also obscures an equally if not
more important problem. By designating hate groups, the community denies the
hate that exists in groups not so designated. The idea of the hate group, then,
protects the community from knowing the extent of its hate.
In sum, the basic group may or may not be a hate group. It only becomes a
hate group when it functions to turn self-hate into hatred of the self-in-other,
and when it organizes itself around the idea that the other is the obstacle to its
hope to retrieve the good object and that object’s love. The hate group is a basic
group committed to, and organized around, the effort to achieve justice under-
stood as the realization of its hope, a justice that can only be achieved by purging
its world of those suitable targets for externalization made to contain hate’s
object, which is the external form of the hated self.

***

While the term hate group seems to suggest that the hate group is all about hate
and nothing more, this need not be the case. If all the group has is hate, it can
hardly sustain itself as a group. Thus, we might argue that all Eric Harris and
Dylan Klebold had when they attacked Columbine High School was hate, and
because of this they did not fully form themselves into a hate group, and had no
basis on which to sustain their existence beyond the assault. In their own words,
their intent was not to achieve justice or secure the world for God, but to “KILL
EVERYTHING” (quoted in Stein 2000: 222, emphasis in original). To be a
hate group, there must be organization around a goal beyond destruction of the
other, which is the goal of realizing a hope. Thus, the hate group is also the hope
group. The hope is for merger with the good object to come in the future, and
satisfy all needs on demand (Potamianou 1997). The hate group is the group
whose whole preoccupation is with making the world suitable for the return of
the good object.
104 Hate in groups

Typically, hate groups want a place of their own, but not just any place. They
want a return to the place where they were favored by God (the holy land, the
sacred ground, the original site). The term often used for this place is nation. They
want a nation of their own, preferably on the original site. In this place there
would be no others, so they must take over the nation and get rid of the others.
As Nicholas Fraser observes in his study of European fascism, the members of
hate groups “have a sense of never quite belonging” (2000: 34). This sense of not
belonging becomes a sense that the member’s rightful place in the world has been
usurped by others who do not belong. In the words of David Duke, National
President of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, and one
time Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan:

Multi-Culturalism and “Diversity” are lies. The non-White birthrate, cou-

pled with massive immigration (both legal and illegal) and racial intermar-
riage, will reduce the founding people of America into a minority in our
own nation. … Our children and theirs will live in an America where alien
cultures and values will not simply be present, but will dominate. (2002)

For the members of the hate group, the nation is the repository or symbol of a
dream, the object of a special kind of hope. For them, nationalism expresses the
attachment to this dream, the commitment to keeping hope alive. The result is
that the hope to merge nation with state becomes a hope that the state will dis-
appear into the nation. Civic attachment will disappear into the more primitive
attachment based on identification: no citizens, only members. For the member
of the hate group, the idea of the nation means exclusion if not destruction of
others. Though elements of this ideal may be present in many nationalist move-
ments, only when those elements dominate and the nation loses any connection
to the ideal of a civic association open to all citizens can we say that the nation-
alist movement is a hate group.
The goal of the hate group is not state power in the usual sense. The hate
group is not a real political party operating within the terms of a modern po-
litical process. It wants not state power, but the destruction of the state, which,
because of its commitment to civic attachment, is inclusive of the others that
must be gotten rid of. Rather than a state, there will be a people, an organically
self-governing entity directed by its leader. In the words of the leader of one
white supremacist group, we “need a government of men and women … whose
attitude towards its mission is essentially religious: a government more like a holy
order than like any existing secular government today” (William Pierce, author
of The Turner Diaries, quoted in Dees 1996: 139).
We can summarize the difference between state and nation implicit in the
rhetoric of hate in the following way: Unlike a state, which is a world of many,
the nation is a world of one. Unlike the state, which is a civic association, a nation
is a community and therefore a group. The nation of the hate group is the heir to
the traditional social organism; it expresses the aspiration for a group as a whole
in a world where no such group can sustain itself. The nation is imagined to be
 Hate in groups 105

the place without others. Ridding the homeland of others would save it from
corruption and retrieve the lost state of merger into one people under one God.
The objective of purifying and retrieving the homeland can be taken to be
the shape of a primitive wish to regress to a state of merger and give up any aspi-
ration for development toward difference. In this, the objective contains no ele-
ment of the normative claims of modernity and instead seems to reach back to a
pre-modern condition that parallels a more primitive emotional situation. Thus,
in his rhetorical attack on America, Osama bin Laden emphasizes America’s dis-
tance from traditional Islamic values as he imagines them:

You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the hariah of Allah in its
Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and
desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure
nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.
(2002)

It would, of course, be reasonable to consider bin Laden a representative of an

anti-modern movement rather than an expression of forces inseparably linked
to the impulses associated with modern society. Yet, it may also be important
that his target is not simply those who worship a different God, but also those
who pursue ways of life governed more by man than by God. In considering
this possibility, we might take note of bin Laden’s single-minded preoccupation
with America’s “corruption,” “licentiousness,” and “debauchery.” He calls on
Americans to become a people of “honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts
of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.”
To the extent that bin Laden’s attack on America is not simply an attack on a
rival God, but also an attack on modernity, we need to consider how modernity
is implicated in shaping the movement directed against it, how that movement
is not simply an expression of non-modern ways of life, but a reaction to the
hegemony (imagined or real) of modernity in the world. To the degree that
a movement is organized around the struggle with modernity, it is not simply
a variant on the pre-modern struggles of opposed religions and cultures, but
takes its meaning from the struggle against something that hardly exists in the
pre-modern world: the norm of freedom and individual self-determination. If
this is correct, the religious fundamentalist movement exhibits those features
associated above with the idea of a hate group.

***

The hate group is built on a contradiction. On one side, the group is organized to
rid the sacred place of the other (the infidel). At the same time, to rid the world
of the other and occupy the sacred place means to lose the external container
for the unworthy self. The hate group is organized both to create and to destroy
the other. This contradiction is resolved by the intervention of hope. Gratifica-
tion must always be displaced into the future so we can keep hope alive in our
106 Hate in groups

struggle against the pervasive enemies of hope. This linking of hate with hope
has important consequences for the prospects that hate may be given up.
To give up our hate means to give up our hope since hate is mobilized against
the enemies of hope to keep hope alive. To give up hope means to give up hope’s
object, which is the return of the sacred place and therefore of God to his people.
This hope binds the group together and offers the member a meaning in life that
the member could not find outside the group.
The hope is that the members of the group will be returned to their rightful
place, to the primacy in their world that they once had, or imagined they had,
but have now lost:

How can [the Muslim] possibly [accept humiliation and inferiority] when
he knows that his nation was created to stand at the center of leadership,
at the center of hegemony and rule, at the center of ability and sacrifice?
How can [he] possibly [accept humiliation and inferiority] when he knows
that the [divine] rule is that the entire earth must be subject to the religion
of Allah—not to the East, not the West—to no ideology and to no path
except the path of Allah?
(al-Qa’ida spokesman quoted in Middle East Media
Research Institute 2002)

To give up hope means to give up the lost object and to accept life without it. The
process of giving up the lost object, or accepting that it is lost, is the process of
mourning (see Stein 2001). So, we can also say that the mourning process is the al-
ternative to hate. But, mourning is only possible if we can imagine ourselves existing
in the object’s absence. Because mourning is the process by which we continue on in
the object’s absence, we cannot mourn the loss of an object in the absence of which
we cease to exist. To the extent that our psychic being is merged with the object,
we cannot go on, or imagine going on, in its absence, and we cannot mourn its loss.
If we cannot imagine ourselves without the object, then, rather than mourn
the loss of the object, we replace the presence of the object with the hope for its
return. By keeping hope alive, we keep the object alive and make the mourning
process not only unnecessary but an act of disloyalty to the object. In such cases,
“never forgotten” means that the dead must be kept alive in the mind of the
living, and this means that the living must live for the dead, in the words of the
historian Tzvetan Todorov that “the dead decide for the living” (1983: 229–30,
386). The result is the mobilization of hate in service of hope and against life.
Consider in this connection the words of the preacher and white supremacist
leader Robert Mathews:

Give your soul to God and pick up your gun

Time to deal in lead.
We are the legions of the damned.
The army of the already dead.
(Coppola 1996: 35)
 Hate in groups 107

Others who would put aside the dead are the enemies of hope. They are to be
hated for being an obstacle to our hope. But, they are also to be hated because we
envy them the possibility that they might live without the burden of the dead.
Hatred of the self, of the human creative spirit, means a life without life. This
living death is the doing without being Winnicott describes as the antithesis of
creative living.
The inability to mourn expresses the fact that we are psychologically insepa-
rable from the lost (dead) object. This means that the capacity to mourn the loss
of an object is the same as the capacity to separate from it and have a separate
existence as a person in our own right. The capacity to mourn is the capacity to
sustain emotional life. This capacity is also the capacity to imagine ourselves as
individuals rather than as members of a group.5 Our capacity to do so makes it
possible for us to complete the mourning process. The completion of the mourn-
ing process, then, is an essential moment in the emergence of a society of in-
dividuals rather than members. When our psychological existence can only be
sustained within the group, we can grieve for those we have lost, but we cannot
fully mourn their loss, and we cannot give up our hate.
In sum: To overcome hate means to give up the kind of hope that nurtures
hate. To give up this hope means to mourn loss of the object. To mourn object
loss is to imagine ourselves existing without the object. To imagine ourselves
existing without the object is to imagine ourselves as individuals. To give up hate
means to mourn the loss of our exclusionary group identity, including the merger
into our family of origin, so that we can make a successful transition to a life as
an individual, lived in a world of individuals.
This is only possible if we can imagine ourselves in a place different from
the place of the family and by extension of the group: the ancestral home, the
sacred ground, the site of origin, etc. This new place is the place of individuals,
or civil society: the civic association, the world of individual rights and of chosen
affiliations.6 In the modern world, the only real antidote for hate is development:
the development in the individual of the capacity for autonomy from the group,
the development in society of the capacity to support, and secure a space for, an
individual life.

***

While individuals lead a life outside the context of the group, this does not
mean that they do so in isolation, nor does it mean that group experience has
no significance for them. Individuals join groups and seek to achieve important
emotional ends in doing so. Yet, while group experience remains important,
the shape of that experience must be appropriate to the new world of individual
lives. The hate group expresses the inability of the member to tolerate not only
a life outside the group, but also the kind of group experience appropriate to an
individual.
However significant groups may be to the emotional lives of individuals, it is
important not to conflate the idea of social being with the idea of group member.
108 Hate in groups

The individual outside the group is also a social being, embedded in social rela-
tions and living a life that includes as an essential element relations with others.
Our problem, and a vital task for any psychoanalytically informed social theory,
is to understand the distinctiveness of this new form of relatedness, the way in
which the capacity to exist within it develops, and the consequences of failure to
achieve the needed development.

Notes
1 For a fuller discussion, see Levine (2001: 31–35).
2 The same “group” can be the site for both a basic and a work group, operating simul-
taneously along both dimensions. Here, I refer to the two different aspects of groups
as two different groups.
3 This is, of course, a defect only viewed from the standpoint of modern ways of life as
I define those here.
4 The link between hate and justice does not mean that all interest in justice expresses
hate, though the demand for justice does express an often-complex emotional state
that includes hate as an important element (see Levine 1998).
5 On the relationship between group identity and mourning, see Stein (1994), chapter 5.
6 On the idea of a civil society, see Hegel (1952).

References
bin Laden, O. (2002) Full text: bin Laden’s letter to America. Observer, November 4.
Bion, W. (1960) Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock.
Coppola, V. (1996) Dragons of God: A Journey through Far-Right America. Atlanta: Long
Street Press.
Dees, M. (1996) Gathering Storm. New York: HarperCollins Publisher.
Duke, D. (2002) America at the Crossroads. www.duke.org/writings/crossroads.html.
Fraser, N. (2000) The Voice of Modern Hate: Tracing the Rise of Neo-Fascism in Europe.
New York: Overlook Press.
Freud, S. (1959) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. New York: Norton.
——— (1961) Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton.
Gilligan, J. (1994) Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Vintage.
Hale, M. (2002) Creator Membership Manual, third edition. www.stormfront.com.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1952/1821) Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kernberg, O. (1995) Hatred as a core affect of aggression. In S. Akhtar, S. Kramer, and
H.  Parens (eds.), The Birth of Hatred: Developmental, Clinical, and Technical Aspects of
Intense Aggression. Northvale: Jason Aranson.
Levine, D. (1998) Demanding justice. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society
3(1): 39–51.
——— (1999) The capacity for ethical conduct. Psychoanalytic Studies 4(1): 73–85.
——— (2001) Normative Political Economy: Subjective Freedom, the Market, and the State.
London: Routledge.
——— (2002) Tolerating difference and coping with the infidel. Journal for the Psychoanal-
ysis of Culture and Society 7(1): 43–53.
Loewald, H. (1980) Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Middle East Media Research Institute (2002) Why we fight America: Al-Qa’ida spokes-
man explains September 11 and declares intention to kill 4 million Americans with
weapons of mass destruction. Special Dispatch Series, No. 388.
Potamianou, A. (1997) Hope: A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States. London:
Routledge.
Stein, H. (1994) The Dream of Culture: Essays on Culture’s Elusiveness. New York: Psyche
Press.
——— (2000) Disposable youth: The 1999 Columbine High School massacre as
American Metaphor. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 5(2): 217–36.
——— (2001) Mourning in society: a study in the history and philosophy of science.
Mind and Human Interaction 12: 82–94.
Todorov, T. (1987) The Conquest of America. New York: Harper.
Volkan, V. (1988) The Need to Have Enemies and Allies Northvale: Jason Aranson.
Winnicott, D.W. (1965) Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In D. Winnicott,
The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. Madison: International Uni-
versities Press.
——— (1986) Home Is Where We Start From. New York: Norton.
9
AFFORDABLE CARE

When debate takes place in a public setting, there is an inherent tendency for
its emotional tone to intensify. Even those otherwise inclined to reasoned en-
gagement find themselves yelling at their opponents, though all participants, of
course, attribute their need to raise their voices to the decibel level that was set
for them by others. Much of this tendency for heightened emotion and the ab-
sence of reasoned discussion can be attributed to the connection between public
life and group phenomena. As Freud points out, “the feelings of a group are
always very simple and very exaggerated,” and it is in the nature of groups that
they promote the “intensification of affects and the inhibition of the intellect”
(1959: 10, 20). To the extent that public space is occupied by group-related phe-
nomena, we should not expect reasoned engagement and a moderation of tone
to prevail there.
The connection to the group dominates in public life because public life en-
gages issues that tap into deeply seated hopes and fears of the kind that impede
tolerance of difference. In important cases, those hopes and fears have to do with
protecting a way of life built around forms of identification with others that are
inconsistent with the bonds of reasoned engagement. In such cases, to lose the
debate over a single policy issue can be experienced as the loss of everything of
value in living, and this is not necessarily incorrect. Public space always has the
potential to become the site of a struggle over who owns the world and can re-
make it to accord with their fantasies of identity so that it will become a world in
which they and not others can find a home.
The struggle over who will find a home in the world is well expressed by
Chris McDaniel, a conservative Republican state senator who ran in the Virginia
Senatorial primary and offered the following remarks in a keynote address to
the Sons of the Confederate Veterans: “There are millions of us who feel like
 Affordable care 111

strangers in this land, an older America passing away, a new America rising to
take its place.” This sentiment was continued in a speech given after the election
where he made the following statement: “We recoil from that culture. It’s foreign
to us. It’s alien to us. … It’s time to stand and fight. It’s time to defend our way
of life again” (quoted in Bouie 2014).
The tendency to see in apparently limited policy initiatives a threat to a way
of life is nowhere more evident than in the debate in the US over the Affordable
Care Act. This act, as its name suggests, is all about the matter of care, more spe-
cifically of whether we will be cared for and by whom. Few things have greater
or deeper emotional resonance than the matter of care and few things are more
closely linked to “home” and “place” than care. In this chapter, I propose to ex-
plore some of that resonance with specific reference to the opponents of the new
health care law. In doing so, I will distinguish between the way two different sets
of opponents of the bill experience its implications. First, I will consider those for
whom the salient issue is: Who will provide care? Second, I will consider those
for whom the salient issue is the danger care is thought to pose regardless of who
purports to provide it. For the first group, the main threat posed by the bill is that
it will undermine, and in the limit destroy, the individual’s attachment to and
dependence on the family and the family-like bonds that link neighbors and local
communities. For the second group of opponents to the bill, the main concern is
that provision of care will make the individual dependent on those who would
provide it. I begin with those for whom the salient issue is not dependence per se,
but dependence on government.

***

At one point in the debate over the effort on the part of Republican mem-
bers of the US Congress to force the President to cancel implementation of the
Affordable Care Act by refusing to pass a Continuing Resolution that would fund
government operations, Trent Franks, Republican from Arizona, announced
that he would support a measure that would prevent members of Congress and
their staffers from being exempt from the Act because it would “make them live
under this hellish law” (Alberta et al. 2013). While there is no doubt an element
of political theater in this comment, there is also, I think, an accurate statement
of the fear underlying the heightened emotion that accounts for the intensity of
engagement with a program that, whether on balance beneficial or not, cannot
easily be thought to have an effect on the country of the magnitude implied in
the language chosen by the congressman.
If, however, we want to understand opposition to the law and the attitude
toward government that underlies that opposition, we would do well to take the
congressman’s comment seriously. In other words, I think it useful to assume that
the new law’s most strident opponents oppose it because they believe it would put
them into a world ruled by Satan. A world ruled by Satan is a world ruled by an
112 Affordable care

arbitrary power exercised with malignant intent. It is, quite literally, a world in
which our worst nightmare has come true.
The extreme language used to describe what is, in reality, a significant but
also in some ways modest program, suggests that what we are dealing with is
fantasy and the fear resulting from an uncertain dividing line between fantasy
and reality, between what is internal to the individual’s mental life and what
exists outside. The world ruled by Satan is best understood, in other words, as
a part of psychic reality, and the anxiety surrounding the law as an anxiety that
this psychic reality will become, or perhaps already is, the other reality of the
world outside.
Anxiety that aspects of psychic reality will become objective external re-
ality is fueled by the impulse to transfer inner reality onto the world outside.
This impulse is then projected onto those cast in the role of agents of the devil
whose intent is to make our world his. To understand the emotional tone of
the opposition to the Affordable Care Act, then, we need to understand the
internal drama that when transferred onto the public arena shapes debate there.
In other words, we must first understand the hellish inner word if we are to
understand the fear of what might become of the world outside were the law
implemented.
When we speak of a hellish law in the inner world, we speak of a malignant
presence there, the presence Freud refers to in the language of the “superego”
(1990). This malignant presence is the agency in the mind whose unrelenting at-
tack on the self assures dominance in emotional life of feelings of shame and rage.
Dominance of negative feelings about the self causes us to feel that our minds are
not our own, which is, in a sense, true since it indicates a sharp division in the
inner world between an assaulted and victimized self and the agency responsible
for that assault and victimization. The division perceived in the world outside
reflects this division in the inner world between the presence of Satan there and
the presence of an abused, humiliated, and diminished self.
The greater the dominance in the inner world of a malignant presence, the
more intense the pressure to rid that world of it via projection, which is to say
to experience external objects as if they were the presence and true form of our
malignant internal agency. Once we have identified external containers for our
own malignant agency, we can then carry on a battle against them in real space
and real time. When this happens, the world outside becomes the playground of
evil with which the congressman is all too familiar.
We can find some evidence supporting this interpretation if we consider the
response provoked in us by the action and rhetoric of the more extreme members
of Congress intent on blocking implementation of the Affordable Care Act. This
method makes use of the idea that those whose behavior we are concerned to un-
derstand relate to others by attempting to transfer their own unwanted emotional
states onto them.1 Then, so far as we find ourselves experiencing unexpected and
unwanted emotional states, we can read our own emotional response as evidence
of the emotional state of those with whom we are engaged.
 Affordable care 113

An important dimension of the emotional state provoked in us by the ac-

tions and rhetoric of the radical antagonists of government is the feeling that we
are, or soon will be, living in their world, a world in which we are an alien and
unwanted presence. Thus, the actions and rhetoric of the Radical Republicans
make us feel that we are in danger of losing our place in the world and under
threat that the world in which we live will become one that has no meaning for
us and that our wellbeing, both emotional and physical, will be at risk. But, by
having that feeling, we also share the experience of those who would transfer it
onto us (Klein 1946), which in this case is the experience that the prospect of
universal care for others puts them at risk. In their case, what they fear they risk
is the loss of a world. What they do not realize is that this loss is internal and that
it has already occurred.
Those who fear losing their world use a familiar language. They speak of their
nation, their culture, their values, and their way of life. They also speak of the
intrusion into their world of strangers and aliens (notably immigrants from other
countries, especially those whose appearance, culture, and way of life make them
unlike us). The familiarity of the words used to describe the endangered world
can make it appear that we know exactly what it is that those using the words
fear they will lose. We know where the nation is; we know specific elements of
the culture associated with it; we know what we look like. This familiarity can,
however, blind us to the real object it is feared will be lost. This is because the
world at risk is not only, or even primarily, a known space outside, the space of
familiar things and familiar faces; it is also an inner space represented or symbol-
ized by, but not synonymous with, the familiar artifacts of place and norms of
living. It is hidden in them as much as it is revealed by them.

***

Much of what I have said about the relation between internal and external with
respect to the attack on the health care law could equally be said about many
of those who defend the law. Many defenders of the law also struggle with the
need to externalize a harsh internal presence. We need, then, to consider how
the harsh internal presence takes the special form involving the demonization
of government especially as personified in the president. In doing so, it will
prove important to understand the role of the fantasy of community and the
special form that fantasy takes for those individuals and groups with whom I am
especially concerned here, which is the fantasy of small-town rural life. Polit-
ically, rural districts are the primary locus of virulent opposition to the health
care act, and it is their way of life that is felt to be at stake in the conflict over its
implementation.
I think it can be said that everyone has a fantasy of community, which is a
fantasy of reinstating something like what Donald Winnicott refers to as the
holding environment of the mother-infant dyad, and the seamless connection
with the source of the good things available there (Winnicott 1960). What I
114 Affordable care

think distinguishes the fantasy of community in rural areas is that it has a more
powerful instantiation in everyday life. In other words, it is not only imagined,
but also has a kind of reality, which is that of life in an insular and self-sufficient
group. Problems always arise when a group is able to instantiate a fantasy of iden-
tity into norms and institutions in such a way as to make that fantasy real. This is
not so much reality in the external world, however, although it is perceived that
way. It is, rather, a reality in which there is no separation between internal and
external, and in that sense it is a way of dismissing external reality. The intent of
the group to do away with external reality lays the groundwork for the kind of
virulent conflict fostered by many of those engaged in the attack on the health
care law who feel, correctly, that the insular world of their fantasy is under attack.
But, just as everyone has a powerful urge toward community, everyone also
has a powerful impulse to disrupt the connection that binds the community
together because only by doing so is it possible to establish oneself as an inde-
pendent center of action and initiative, or unique presence of being. Thus, tied to
the more concrete or tangible reality of community is a powerful rage linked to
the suppression of presence of being, which is available at best only to a limited
degree in that setting. This complex relation engenders envy for those imagined
to have escaped, which traditionally has meant escaped to the “city” and all it
represents. Envy then translates into an attack on the city as a Godless place de-
void of the kind of community that can alone provide meaning in living. The
more powerful the instantiation of the fantasy associated with the self-sufficient
community, the more powerful is the experience of conflict between the desire
to reinstate the holding environment and the desire to escape from it.
In all of this, the connection of community to the land plays an important
part. We can consider the rural small-town fantasy an instance of the fantasy
of group self-sufficiency connected to a deeply ambivalent maternal ideal rep-
resented in the land, which simultaneously represents the source of the good
things (the maternal bounty and its life-giving capacity) and the locus of an often
capricious power that may as easily deprive as provide sustenance. Yet, however
powerful the ambivalence embedded in this fantasy, it must still be defended as
the only basis on which life can take on meaning, and there can be hope for the
reinstatement of the original world of seamless gratification in the holding en-
vironment. Working on the land represents a kind of penance for thoughts and
actions directed against the symbolic representation of the mother, thoughts and
actions that are linked to the impulse to make a connection with the presence of
being and original vitality to which I have referred. In relation to this fantasy,
urban living represents not only the loss of hope, but repudiation of it.
I think it will prove useful to pose the following question about the situation
just briefly summarized: What is it like to live in the world of the rural com-
munity constituted as an expression of the terms of this fantasy? To answer this
question, we need only listen to the unconscious fantasy embedded in the angry
rhetoric of those who fear the wish embedded in the fantasy because they know
(although they are not aware of ) the loss implied were the wish to be fulfilled.
 Affordable care 115

If we treat the rhetoric surrounding the health care law as an effort to tell us,
among other things, what it is like to live in the small-town rural fantasy, we will
hear two answers to our question. The first is the answer offered by the conscious
fantasy of rural life, which is a fantasy of deep and meaningful connections and
an enduring and positively invested group identity with a strong moral-religious
dimension involving mutual support and care for those in need. But, there is also
an unconscious fantasy, and this is the fantasy we come to know through the
unconscious communication with which I have been especially concerned here.
In blunt terms, the unconscious fantasy is the fantasy of life in hell. It is a fantasy
organized around rage fueled by domination by an often-capricious maternal
power (the “land”) that gives and takes away at will.
The important part that penance for sin and dependence on a capricious
power play in the fantasy of small-town rural life suggests that the response to
the Affordable Care Act has roots in ambivalence toward care and caregiving.
Running contrary to a conscious conviction that the problem the Act poses is
that it takes caregiving out of the hands of a benevolent community and places it
in the hands of Satan is an unconscious conviction that the community is not a
benevolent source of care but a form of subjection to a capricious power. As we
will see, this ambivalence forms an important link between those who oppose
the Act because it is understood to be an attack on community and those who
oppose it because it imposes dependence.
Instantiation of its fantasy in norms and institutions requires the self-
sufficiency of the group. And, while self-sufficiency may not necessarily be real
in small-town rural life today, at one time it was. The more advanced the divi-
sion of labor, however, the less convincing the fantasy of self-sufficiency and the
greater the obstacles standing in the way of the group’s desire to instantiate its
fantasy. Because of dependence in it on an advanced division of labor, urban life
does not offer fertile ground for the realization of the aspirations of groups organ-
ized around shared identity of the kind at stake in the struggle over government’s
role. Rather, it tends to foster groups organized around partial forms of identity,
such as professional identity, forms of identity that do not incline members to
demand that others share their way of life; and, because of this, problems of the
kind discussed here are at least muted.

***

The link to the group suggests how we might understand the attitude of the
opponents of the health-care law to democratic process. Viewed as political strat-
egy, the tactics used to block the implementation of the health care law involve
the effort of a relatively small minority to take over first the Republican Party
and then the power of government itself so that they can become the malignant
objects they seek to escape through projection.
Missing in all of this is acceptance of a basic element of a democratic society,
which is that the minority accept the rule of the majority (Dahl 1956). Instead
116 Affordable care

of this, there is insistence that the minority get its way regardless. “What the
Republican hard-liners have decided … is that even though they don’t have the
necessary votes they should still get their way, and, in order to accomplish that,
they’re going to hold the economic well-being of the country hostage.” In their
world, the legislative process would no longer be an expression of the public
will as dictated by the outcome of elections; it would be instead “about which
party was more willing to take the government, and with it the economy, over
the cliff” (Suroweicki 2013). None of this is surprising if we bear in mind that
the hoped-for community of those who would take over government is not a
democracy; it is not built around regard for difference and respect for reason
but around identification, which Freud describes as the “earliest expression of
an emotional tie with another person” (1959: 37). What the opponents of gov-
ernment would have, rather than a democracy, is the total community in which
separate identity is lost. And this total community is imagined to be the way, as
adults, we can return to the primitive world of seamless gratification. Democracy
can have no place in fantasies of this kind.
This total community based on identity is not government, nor is it the soci-
ety of those able and willing to be governed by a democratic process. Govern-
ment does not care for us. If government claims to take on the responsibilities of
care it cannot be trusted. Perhaps we can trust in God, in our family, and in our
community, all of which are connected to us by bonds of identification, but what
would it mean to trust in government? Recourse to government for care is not
only risky business for these reasons, it also represents an attack on the reliability
of the community, in a way an attack on its very existence and certainly on our
ideal of it as our external being. If government undermines community, it takes
away our place to be. We end up living in an alien world without care: the mod-
ern world of civil society (Levine 2011). This is the vital difference that motivates
those who see government as a threat to community.
I think it must be acknowledged that government does not care about us. It
does not know us and has no emotional bond with us. Indeed, government is not
the kind of object about which it is reasonable to speak of caring. In this, it stands
in stark contrast with the family and the group; because of this, government, in
its effort to substitute for the group as the source of health care, by undermining
the connection of individual to group places the individual in an uncaring world
ruled by a power that does not (because it cannot) care.

***

If what is at stake is nothing less than a world to live in, the intransigence of
the radical antagonists of government is not surprising nor is their willingness
to destroy the world in which they cannot exist in order to achieve their ends.
During the conflict over the health care law, this willingness to destroy took
the form, most notably, of a willingness to destroy the economy by failing to
approve a budget or defaulting on the national debt. By bankrupting government
 Affordable care 117

or undermining the trustworthiness of the currency, those intent on blocking

the hellish law indicate their willingness to destroy as a means of preventing an
intolerable outcome. But, who can be faulted for their willingness to destroy the
institutions of Satan? So far as the urge to destroy comes out of a conviction about
the harmful intent of institutions and individuals who must be destroyed, the
willingness to destroy appears as a virtue, which is clearly how the radical critics
of the health care law think about what they are doing.
But if, rather than seeking to destroy an evil force, we seek destruction as a
way of sharing our experience of living in a destroyed world, which is a world in
which no one cares about us, then destruction is not destruction of the devil but
something done in his service. This reversal is important if we consider that op-
position to the new law involves an intent to take care away from others, which is
another way of moving them into a destroyed world, a world where no one cares.
The reversal occurs when the expectation is no longer that the wished-for world
of community can be preserved or reinstated and the best we can hope for is to
communicate to others how we feel in the only we way we know how: which is
to share our experience of the inner world with them.
The reversal to which I have just referred motivates the shift in the contro-
versy from a debate over the evils of the new law to a debate over who will
be responsible for the government shutdown and default on the national debt
resulting from the stalemate over what to do about implementation of the new
law. This is a struggle over responsibility for destruction. Of special importance
in the struggle over responsibility for destruction is the pleasure gained by those
who can shift responsibility from themselves to others, especially the pleasure
they gain from the intense and futile anger they can make others experience.
The pleasure, then, is not only in the harm done but in making others bear the
burden of responsibility for it and in the shame they experience as a result of
their impotence and futility. Considered in this way, impotence becomes an im-
portant goal of the attack on government associated with the effort to block the
new law. In other words, the end of gridlock in government is not only to block
the implementation of the law but to convey to others the feelings of impotence
so dominant in the psychic landscape of those who would bring government to
a halt.
Thus, the intensity of emotion in the debate stems from the way it is organized
on an emotional level as a struggle over who has the power to make the other
feel impotent. If this struggle begins with unconscious feelings of impotence and
the rage spawned by them, then its purpose is to shift those feelings onto others.
Success in doing so brings with it a parallel shift in feelings of rage and the desire
to destroy. Then, the locus of rage and destruction is placed outside, and the other
is not only imagined to be the Prince of Darkness, but is made to act the part as,
in this case, the Democrats would be made to take responsibility for the shutdown
of government and default on the national debt.

***
118 Affordable care

A particularly important dimension along which we feel assaulted by the actions

of the radical antagonists of government involves the way they make the world
a place in which reason is not welcome. All claims regarding the reality of the
Affordable Care Act and its real consequences are summarily rejected as an effort
to deceive citizens into a complacent acceptance of the transition to the world
ruled by the devil. The devil is, after all, well known for his mendacity. So, any
appeal to reason and evidence on his part must not be trusted. His use of reason is
meant to confuse us, and the evidence to which he appeals has been fabricated to
enhance his power over us. Viewed from this perspective, reason must appear as
a strategy shaped by the devil to lead us into, rather than away from, his control.2
The fact that we cannot reason with those who see the Affordable Care Act
as the work of Satan not only makes us feel powerless, it also means that we can
make no connection with them. Indeed, the attack on reason is an attack on any
connection that respects the separation of persons and the idea of coexistence
of difference in the world (Levine 2008b). Those who reject reason hold to the
more primitive form of communication, which is the sharing of experience that
makes all of us the same.
Reasoning with others is the relationship through which mutual respect is
realized just as the attack on reason is part of the insistence that the world cannot
be shared with those who differ from us. In this respect, the attack on reason is an
aspect of the constitution of public life as a setting for group phenomena of a par-
ticular kind, the kind captured by the notion of a “basic” group (Bion 1962). The
hostility of such groups to reason is noted by Pierre Turquet when he observes
how such groups are “self-contained , closed systems” that “have little desire to
know, since knowledge might be an embarrassment, might cause disturbance in
the internal harmony or ‘groupiness’ of the group” (1985: 77).
The problem that the radical antagonists of government have with reason
(and more narrowly with science) stems, I think, from the way they experience
reason as a threat to gratification and more specifically to the seamless gratifica-
tion associated with the experience of the original maternal setting in which the
object that satisfies need is provided either in anticipation of, or as an immediate
consequence of, the assertion of need. Because need, or at most the expression
of need, created its own satisfaction, all experience could be considered part of
an internal or subjective reality. There existed no other reality of objects outside
the sphere of omnipotent control. Reason is our way of engaging a reality over
which we cannot exert omnipotent control.
This experience of seamless gratification is another way to speak of the world
that has been lost. It is an especially useful way to do so because it directs atten-
tion to the psychological meaning of “care.” The world that has been lost, or that
it is anticipated will be lost, is a world of care for the self of the special kind in-
volving seamless gratification. Government represents this limit to gratification
associated with a world that does not exist as a manifestation of our need. Fami-
lies and local communities represent the continuation of care beyond the primi-
tive setting of the holding environment. The Affordable Care Act represents the
 Affordable care 119

need for care outside the holding environment and its symbolic representation in
family and community.

***

Opposition to the Affordable Care Act based on the perception that it stands as a
dangerous alternative to community and the special gratification community is
imagined to provide differs from the opposition that sees in the law a way to un-
dermine individual self-reliance. The former sees the law undermining depend-
ence on community and family. But opposition has also developed on a different
basis, which is that the law encourages dependence when institutions should be
shaped to assure that we do not become dependent.
The formation of a malignant inner world follows an experience marked by
the failure of those we depended on to provide adequate care when that was most
needed. Parental neglect and/or abuse can leave the child living in a world with
which he or she is ill-suited to cope. The child must manage the intense fear,
anger, and aggression provoked by this on his or her own, as there is no rela-
tionship with an adult that can assist in the process. When this effort to manage
aggression involves use of projection, it creates an external world of objects that
pose a threat. This means that managing aggression through projection requires
that there always be available in the world outside objects capable of acting as
containers for destructive impulses that originate internally.
While this situation is spawned by an intense neediness that can only be dealt
with in relationship with a reliable adult on whom we can depend, it makes de-
pendence for the satisfaction of need a dangerous state, while, at the same time,
fostering an intense distrust of anyone, or any institution, that claims to offer
a reliable object on which it would be possible to depend. The rhetoric of the
movement against government, when formulated not in the language of pre-
serving the older bonds of community but in the language of autonomy, offers
ample evidence of a group of individuals convinced that any object on which we
come to depend must do us harm. This conviction can spawn a profoundly held
conviction that our dependence causes impairment of our ability to manage for
ourselves. Only if this is true can there be hope that we can shed our impairment
and with it our need to depend on others. In other words, the harm done to us
can be dismissed if dependence can be removed.
There is in this a desperate wish that we can thrive on our own despite the
deficits of early childhood experience. In other words, the deficits of childhood
have no enduring impact in life, but, if anything, are the factors that endow us
with the capacity to make our way as adults. That the Affordable Care Act is in-
tended to assure that children receive care means that it will deprive children of
the experience of lack of care, or possibly of malignant care, those who attack the
Act have had. To their way of thinking, this means that the Act, rather than help-
ing children, deprives them of the opportunity to become successfully function-
ing adults. On this, consider the comment of Ted Cruz, US Senator from Texas
120 Affordable care

and one of the most virulent opponents of the Affordable Care Act: “Thank the
good Lord that when my dad was a teen-age immigrant in Texas fifty-five years
ago, how grateful I am that some well-meaning liberal did not come and put his
arm around him and say, ‘Let me take care of you. Let me give you a government
check. Let me make you dependent on the government. Don’t bother washing
dishes. Don’t bother working’” (Toobin 2014: 3).
Those who have projected their own dependent, needy, impaired selves onto
the clients of the welfare state desperately need it to be true that those dependent
on the welfare state can thrive without care and the dependence the need for
care implies. For the opponents of the new law, it must be true that the absence
of care, or the experience of malignant care, can make us whole and assure our
wellbeing because, if it is not true, they have no hope for themselves. The inten-
sity of this need drives the intolerance, indeed hatred, of those who would assure
care; the fragility of their belief in their ability to thrive in spite of the deficits
caused by parental failure leads to their unrelenting attack on the object they
consider a threat and on those associated with it. Our dependence and impair-
ment are caused by those who would minister to us. The powerful seek to make
us dependent on them so that we will always be subject to their power. The most
important thing is to liberate ourselves from them. And that is all we have to do
to overcome our impairments and therefore our limitations.
This impulse to liberate ourselves from dependence forms itself into a gran-
diose fantasy of the self as an all-powerful unit capable of securing without as-
sistance all that it needs (Kernberg 1986). In relation to this fantasy, government
is the embodiment of the reality principle and the limitations implied in it, and
they will have none of it. The welfare state represents the reality of limitation and
fallibility. It represents our acknowledgment that the economy does not always
work and therefore must be regulated and that, even when it does work, some
people cannot function well enough in it to thrive (Levine 2008a). Government
recognizes and sets limits. If we accept the need for government, we accept the
limits on wishing and willing it represents. Among the wishes, most notable is
the wish that childhood deficits and the impairments that result from them can
be magically transformed into the basis for successful adult living and the wish
that successful adult living means the successful pursuit of a limitless desire born
of early experiences of deprivation.

***

In the end, the heart of the matter is the complex relationship the opponents
of the new health care law have to the idea of care. After all, the new law is
the “Affordable Care Act,” whose stated purpose is to assure that all citizens
receive the care they need. The intensity of opposition to the act stems from
the profound ambivalence many of those who oppose it have toward the idea of
providing care. They are torn between a desperate need for care and an equally
desperate fear of it.
 Affordable care 121

This ambivalence has three important roots. The first is profound distrust of
those who would provide care. The second is the prospect that others will re-
ceive the care they did not and therefore the prospect of the intense envy the law
promises to provoke in them. The third is the existential hope that the absence
of care does not produce a fatal impairment especially in the capacity to seek and
gain gratification. To the radical opponents of the bill, successful implementation
of it makes a powerful statement, which is that deprivation is not the necessary
basis of adult living, but rather an absolute impediment to it. Success of the act
constitutes a mortal blow to their constituting self-fantasy and therefore to their
emotional survival as they understand it. It should not be surprising, then, that
when their actions threaten to lead to the shutdown of government and default
on the national debt with potential significant economic dislocation, their re-
sponse clearly indicates that they just don’t care.

Notes
1 In a clinical setting, the process applied here would be termed “countertransference”;
see Racker (1968) and Tansey and Burke (1989). Because the clinical setting and the
training of the analyst are especially designed to make it possible to identify what is
and is not countertransference, while countertransference may be experienced out-
side that setting, analyzing it poses problems.
2 In his discussion of schizophrenic thought, Wilfred Bion (1967) discusses the relation
between destruction, the “menacing” internal presence, impairment of connection
with reality, and containment. While, in considering the thought processes dominant
in public life I am not concerned with the extreme states discussed by Bion, the pres-
ence in public life of mental processes combining the factors he emphasizes is worth
noting.

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macare-delay/280096/?google_editors_picks=true; retrieved 9/29/2013.
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10
TRUTH IN POLITICS

In June of 2016, shortly before the Republican Party convention at which

Donald Trump would be officially nominated to run as the Party’s candidate
for President, a US citizen born to a family of Pakistani origin opened fire on a
gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people. In response to this event,
Trump offered a thinly veiled suggestion that President Obama was responsible
for the attack not only by having been negligent in protecting US citizens, but
because he had secretly supported America’s enemies. This was only the most
extreme instance of the pattern of Trump’s campaign, one that involved a series
of assertions offered with little or no substantiation. Many of these assertions
involved implicit or explicit conspiracy theories suggesting the preoccupation on
Trump’s part with hidden motives and a sharp disparity between appearance and
reality. Trump is hardly alone in this practice, and, indeed, the specific assertions
about the President’s questionable allegiance to the country were widespread in
some political circles, especially those linked to the more radical wing of the
Republican Party.
Political commentary regarding Trump had for many months centered on
what were characterized as self-serving lies, demagoguery, and racism, the as-
sumption being that Trump and those who shared his views were well aware
that what they said about the President and about their other political opponents
had no basis in fact. My interest here, however, is with a different dimension of
the problem. This is the dimension along which many in politics and elsewhere
endow themselves with a special power, which is the power to create reality.
I would like to suggest that this special power is important in politics. I would
also like to suggest that those who, for example, accuse Obama of conspiring
with our enemies know that he does so because they relate to him not as one
might relate to an object in the external world, one having objectively verifiable
properties, but rather as a character in an internal drama or fantasy.
124 Truth in politics

As I have emphasized throughout this book, we use the term fantasy to refer
to a content of the mind held apart from any testing against external reality. This
would seem to separate fantasy from truth. But, fantasy has its own kind of truth,
a truth that is as important as the truth to which we normally apply the term.
Failure to acknowledge this special kind of truth makes it impossible for us to
understand a vital part of the communication that goes on in the world around
us, including the public realm. Thus, the radical elements in the Republican
Party know that Obama sympathizes with our enemies because doing so is the
role of the internal or fantasy character Obama represents, and they know the
fantasy is true both because of the power it exerts over their own perception of
external reality and because of the way they extend that power over objects in
fantasy to objects in the world outside. This latter can be considered the power to
create reality, which is the power to align reality with fantasy merely by insisting
the two are the same.
For Obama’s critics, describing him as he is in fantasy rather than as he claims
to be or appears to be in his external incarnation is not to lie but to reveal a
hidden truth. In all of this, fact checking is at best beside the point as it sets
the internal truth against an appearance designed to hide that truth; at worst
fact checking is collusion with the false appearance of the fantasy object in the
putatively “real” world. When, in attacking Obama, his critics speak what others
consider untruths, even lies, within their group their words are received as rev-
elations of a hidden truth because they are consonant with the truth of a shared
fantasy. Thus, in holding Obama responsible for shootings of police officers in
spite of the lack of overt evidence supporting the claim, Trump offers the follow-
ing comment: “I watched the president. Sometimes the words are OK. But you
just look at the body language—there’s something going on … There’s just bad
feeling” (Stableford 2016).
The ability to know a hidden truth works hand in hand with the power to
create reality. If we have the power to create reality, especially the reality of self
and other, by saying it is so, then what we say about ourselves and about others is
ipso facto true. The ability to know the hidden truth and the power to create real-
ity are linked by the quality of the inner world that it is, in one important sense,
subject to our control. It is under our control in the sense that we can exert there
the power of imagination and create fantasies consistent with our wishes. This
means that when fantasy imposes itself on our perceptions of external reality, the
power of control over objects in the world of fantasy (the inner world) becomes
the power to control objects outside, and in this sense to make them what we
need them to be.
These considerations make the matter of lying more complex. If to lie means
to make statements that knowingly and willfully deviate from the truth, it is no
lie to insist against the evidence that President Obama supports our enemies if
that insistence represents a communication that is honest, which is to say true, to
the internal reality of Obama that stands opposed to his deceptive presentation of
himself. This raises questions about the common assumption that whether we tell
 Truth in politics 125

the truth or not is a simple moral decision since the more complex the construc-
tion of truth in relation to the presentation of self, the less statements that run
contrary to the appearance, which is to say the evidence, should be considered
lies, at least in the narrow sense of the term.
Recourse to a fantasized power to create reality can be considered one among
a group of strategies for protecting ourselves from a possible encounter with
an unwelcome reality, one that exists outside our control. Use of these strate-
gies entails mobilization of a considerable measure of aggression against what
Freud refers to as the reality principle, which is the principle that realty imposes
limits on gratification (Freud 1911). The effort to exercise the fantasized power
to create reality seeks to make individual and subjective what might otherwise
have a claim rooted in its objectivity and independence of individual wishing
and willing.
The fantasy that we have the power to create reality has its roots in our expe-
rience of a real exercise of that power early in life. This experience of the power
to create reality exists in two forms. The first is what Winnicott refers to as the
infantile illusion. This is the illusion fostered by the mother who anticipates the
infant’s need, or responds on demand to expressions of need, by assuring satis-
faction. The second is the experience of a relationship with a parent who creates
in the child a knowledge of who he or she is by ascribing characteristics to the
child and relating to the child as if he or she were nothing more than the locus of
those already known qualities. By doing so, the parent creates the child’s reality.
In a way, the second form of the power to create reality simply inverts the first
since it amounts to little more than role reversal, a reversal in which the child
exists for parent rather than for self in contrast to the first case where the mother
essentially exists for the child.
In the second case, the power to create reality is the power of the parent to use
words that, in describing the child, create within the child the shape of a self con-
sistent with the parent’s description. This use of words to determine what kind
of person we are can be a powerful early childhood experience, one that instills
in us the conviction that who we are is a product of external perceptions. This
external determination means we are in an important sense created by forces
that seek to define us in a way meant to serve their ends. As Stanly Gold puts it,
we are constructed by others in a way determined more by their internal worlds
than by our own (Gold 2016). This replacement of an internal determination by
a factor originating outside can be thought of as a kind of colonizing of the inner
world (von Broembsen 1989). Internalization of the relationship within which
we are seen to be what others need us to be sets up an alien internal object in the
form of a character in an ongoing fantasy dialogue and narrative. This character,
while an aspect of our internal experience and in that sense a part of us, is also an
alien and hostile presence. As an alien and hostile presence, this character in our
fantasy life can hardly be thought of as under our conscious control.
The predetermination of being and the associated colonization of the inner
world by an alien object is the essence of the phenomenon typically referred to
126 Truth in politics

in the language of racism. One way to understand racism is that, in its essence,
it is knowing the defining characteristics of others based on qualities ascribed to
the groups to which they are assigned or assumed to belong. Racism, then, is the
effort to impose a predetermined and alien identity on members of designated
groups. Racism therefore means denial of what is unique, or self-determined,
about the individual personality. It means that being for self is always displaced
by being for other.
Politics oriented toward denigration of racial identity is also the politics of the
imposition of an identity. It is not surprising, then, that issues of racial or ethnic
identity play a large role in the politics associated with Trump and his followers
when we bear in mind the centrality of the power to create reality as a factor in
their political engagement.
Reference to the internal situation just briefly summarized can also, I think,
help us account for the preoccupation of a significant part of the electorate with
aliens and borders, and it can also help to account for the powerful feeling they
express that our problems arise not only from the failure of authority to secure
borders, but from the collusion of authority with an alien invasion. It can also
help to account for the feeling provoked in us that our world is an unsafe place
because the world outside is now populated by externalized representations of
the hostile internal authority and alien self it would impose on us. This con-
struction is most notable in the conviction that the President is an agent of an
alien power and that he colludes with our enemies in a conspiracy to destroy
everything that has meaning in our lives, here represented by nation and culture.
Nation and culture come to represent what is internally generated and original
to ourselves; foreign culture represents the feared substitution of a foreign power
within our self-boundary now externalized onto the nation.

***

An important quality of contemporary political discourse is that real and im-

portant issues are replaced by the clash of personality and engagement with
others not on the level of policy and its consequences but on a purely personal
level. Describing Trump’s response to harsh comments by the President on his
plan to ban all Muslim immigrants, one commentator notes that “the Trump
show went on. He dismissed the rejection of his remarks by the President as
though the two were engaged in a personal quarrel” (Reston 2016). It was not,
however, “as if ” the two were engaged in a personal quarrel. For Trump, it
could be said that the two were engaged in a personal quarrel. And this is, in its
way, the essence of the matter. It is the essence of the matter because the most
important reality to be created by an act of will is the reality of self and other.
Thus, Trump’s speeches are filled with derisive comments about, and evince
a tangible pleasure in attaching labels to, his opponents: Little Marco (Marco
Rubio), Lyin’ Ted (Ted Cruz), Crooked Hillary (Hillary Clinton). For Trump,
success in making these labels stick indicates that he possesses the power to
 Truth in politics 127

determine by an act of will the qualities of character associated with his oppo-
nents. Trump’s opponents have not hesitated to respond in kind by labeling him
a bigot and a racist, thus assuring that political debate will devolve into little
more than name calling and moral posturing. In the resulting world, there exists
nothing other than competition among those whose ends are to undermine the
personal standing of their opponents.
Dominance of internal over external reality also appears in the way politicians
project qualities of their own character onto their opponents, insisting that their
opponents tell lies or use their positions for personal gain when they themselves
could with justification be convicted of the same transgressions. The aggression
so tangibly surrounding political candidates who employ this strategy can be
considered to have its origins in the way the targets of aggression respond to
being told who they are, for example being told that they are liars by someone
who lies all the time or that they are corrupt by someone unacquainted with
ethical conduct.
Assuming that the anger provoked in others by these candidates is the anger
they feel themselves, we can draw the conclusion that the anger so prominent in
the whole phenomenon is that of a group of people struggling to cope with the
most fundamental kind of injustice: conviction for a crime you did not commit
but that was committed by those who have accused and convicted you of it. This
dimension has often been emphasized with regard to Trump’s supporters, many
of whom experience themselves as victimized by open borders that invite cheap
labor to compete for their jobs or by affirmative action policies that give prefer-
ences to others and implicitly or explicitly hold them responsible for “privileges”
they have enjoyed as a result of discrimination against excluded groups.
On one level, the demand for justice can be thought of as a demand that oth-
ers speak the truth as those demanding justice know or imagine they know it.
Contemporary political struggle can be considered, in important part, a struggle
over who among us will bear the burden of responsibility for the injustice of
being made guilty of crimes committed by his or her accusers. Those on each
side consider those on the other side responsible for their deprivation and suffer-
ing. All parties can be considered, on one level, to be engaged in the activity of
identifying external containers for characters in an internal drama of guilt and
innocence. Indeed, the power of the drama and the intensity of the aggression
deployed on both sides to determine who is cast in what role suggest that we are
dealing here with internal or psychic reality. And, what is most essential about
psychic reality is the displacement of responsibility outside evident in the use of
designated opponents as targets of aggression (Gold 2016).
It needs to be emphasized that displacement of responsibility for injustice is a
common part of many contemporary social conflicts. Because of this, conflicts
tend to involve radically different interpretations of reality, and advocates on all
sides marshal evidence in support of the factual validity of their claims regarding
the answers to questions such as: Are undocumented immigrants really responsi-
ble for loss of jobs by citizens, or are other factors primary? Is racism, hidden or
128 Truth in politics

overt, really the primary cause of poverty and violence in black neighborhoods,
or are there other important factors internal to the black community? While
engaging the matter at the level of fact checking may seem relevant, the failure
of the evidence to sway those who feel themselves victims should alert us to the
possibility that those held responsible for their suffering are being forced into a
role in an internal drama. It is even likely that, in at least some cases, the opposing
parties to the struggles over injustice are surrogates for each other. When this is
the case, we need to consider the internal drama being played out in the external
world and the assignment of roles in it. Then, the struggle over justice is a strug-
gle over whose truth will become the truth, in other words, who has the power
to create reality by saying what it is.
It can be said that in politics we live in a world where what matters is not an
objective truth, but who can make their subjective truth dominate: the truth of
belief rather than the truth of verification and objective assessment. This is the
truth of what we already know rather than the truth of what we might learn if
we approached the world without prior assumptions and without the need to
reassure ourselves that reality is shaped by the same forces that shape our fantasies
about it.

***

Our ability to come to know objects in the world through a process of learning
about them is simply the other side of our ability to give up our conviction that
our fantasies about objects are real or can be made real by an act of will. Exercise
of this ability is the enemy of those strategies employed to hide what is feared to
be the truth about the self: that its moral failings make it unworthy of love. The
electoral process is one in which candidates often treat the voters’ ability to think
about and assess policies as an obstacle to be overcome through the use of emo-
tionally charged rhetoric. Doing so is not surprising if we bear in mind the emo-
tional threat the exercise of the capacity to make contact with reality can pose.
Yet, politics is also the work of creating reality through policy. Indeed, pol-
itics would be irrelevant if it were impossible, through human action, to make
the future different from the past. Accepting this does not, however, eliminate
the importance of reality testing as an activity by which we determine what can
be real from a wish-invested fantasy that dismisses all limitations reality places
on what can be. That we desire a cure for cancer, and that we are willing to
spend large sums of money pursuing a cure, does not assure we will cure cancer.
That we desire to bring back manufacturing jobs does not mean that there exist
policies that will lead to that result. That we wish to eliminate terrorism does
not mean that we can destroy all the terrorists by declaring war on them. That
we desire to halt if not reverse global warming does not mean that there are
effective policies to achieve that end or that there is any way those policies could
be implemented. Reality testing remains necessary if we are to distinguish the
possible from the fanciful.
 Truth in politics 129

What can be made real and what is nothing more than a reality-denying
fantasy can only be determined if we first accept the distinction between fantasy
and reality and accept that the latter places limitations on the world we can live
in and the life we can lead there. Having accepted the existence of reality, we
can then go about the work of exploring what changes are possible and what are
not. Conversely, so far as we reject the idea of limits, we can never come to know
what possibilities exist within those limits. Under these conditions, change can
be imagined, but it can never be realized. Then, in response to the inevitable
frustration implied in the very existence of reality, we turn from the realization
of fantasy within the real to the destruction of reality as an end in itself. In other
words, when we find reality an obstacle we cannot overcome we turn from the
pursuit of change to the kind of revenge against reality expressed in the effort to
destroy it. The fantasized power to create reality can be considered both a flight
from reality and an attack on it.
As the fantasy of change evolves into, or reveals itself to be, a fantasy of
destruction, the world outside is experienced more and more as one faced by
impending doom. This was made vivid in an awkward moment during a speech
given by Senator Ted Cruz only weeks before he announced his intention to run
for President. During that speech, the Senator states that “the Obama economy
is a disaster, Obamacare is a train wreck,” as is “the Obama-Clinton foreign
policy of leading from behind—the whole world is on fire.” In response to this
statement, a three-year-old girl in the audience echoes his alarm: “The world
is on fire?” she asks. “The world is on fire, yes,” Cruz responds, turning to the
girl. “Your world is on fire” (Stableford 2015). What he tells the girl is that the
challenges we face as a nation are existential threats: a poorly functioning econ-
omy is depicted as a conflagration; the border with Mexico is open to hordes of
dangerous aliens; and the Affordable Care Act creates hell on earth.
Yet, it can be argued that the radical changes in policy the Senator advocates,
far from preventing catastrophe, are likely to promote it. To secure the borders
means to divide families and to exile family members. To abolish the Affordable
Care Act is to leave millions without access to medical care. To deny the reality
of climate change is to invite significant destruction and dislocation. Understood
in this way, the darkness in the world would be less the problem to be resolved
than the result of the turn toward destruction noted above. After all, so far as the
struggle against the dark forces outside—the President, Islamic terrorists, undoc-
umented immigrants—is a struggle against fantasy figures, it is an enactment in
the external world of an internal conflict with internal aliens and terrorists, in
other words with our own destructive impulses as evidenced in policies that will
create the catastrophe they are meant to avert.
The Senator’s exchange with the three-year-old girl suggests how important
anxiety about destructive feelings is in shaping contemporary politics. But, it
is not only anxiety that fuels the fantasy, but the problems posed by managing
anxiety. The method employed by many active in contemporary politics to deal
with anxiety involves raising the stakes to the point that, for each specific issue
130 Truth in politics

in the campaign, survival is at stake. It can be said that, for Senator Cruz, and
presumably for those who are attracted to the rhetoric of his campaign, the only
issue is survival, and survival is always at stake.
It can prove helpful to consider this matter of apocalyptic rhetoric in the con-
text of the parent-child relation, which is the original setting that shapes the way
we relate to anxiety. The job of the parent is to keep the child’s anxieties within
bounds and to help the child develop the capacity to manage anxiety internally,
which also means countering the tendency to magnify anxiety and the destruc-
tive force that fuels it. In his encounter with the three-year-old girl, and in the
quality of his political rhetoric on most, if not all, issues, we find Senator Cruz
doing the opposite. He tells the girl what he knows from experience: the world
is on the brink of an apocalyptic conflagration. Doing so assures that her fear
will rise to the level of his own. Only if it does so will she be prepared to cope
with the catastrophe that awaits her. To prepare yourself for adulthood is not to
develop the ability to manage anxiety, but to come to recognize the oncoming
catastrophe.
It can be said that politics organized around the apocalypse amounts to little
more than sounding the alarm (Ludwig 2015). If there is one message in the
apocalyptic rhetoric, it is that we face a catastrophe and that those responsible for
us, far from attending to the threat, are its cause. Those who claim to provide
care are those at whose hands we are abandoned and abused. While we can easily
dismiss this communication as fear mongering and manipulation, we can also
see it as an expression of a psychic reality. Driven by this psychic reality, politi-
cians turn manageable problems into catastrophes; those who oppose us or think
differently than we do are magnified in the harm they can do and their destruc-
tive intent. Political opponents become agents of the devil. Those crossing our
borders become a wave of destruction threatening to overwhelm the nation and
destroy its connection to its God-given destiny.
The relation between politician and audience organized around sounding the
alarm reenacts the experience of the child with a parent who, rather than help-
ing the child moderate emotional response, participates in the child’s impulse
to accentuate that response. The resulting shared intensity of emotion pushes
both parties away from reason and in the direction of more primitive thought
processes organized around splitting of good and bad and projection of the bad
outside. The more survival is at stake, the less reasoning with others is possible.
This is in part because the use of projection makes others the carriers of an
extreme form of the bad object that must be controlled or destroyed rather than
treated as a partner in a reasoning process. But, it is also because when survival
is at stake, the nature and magnitude of the threat are not up for discussion, as
time taken for thinking about the problem is time provided for the devil to do
his work of destruction.
The sense of urgency to which I have referred is important in understand-
ing the emotional tone and meaning of contemporary politics. When anxiety
becomes too great, the psychic pain associated with it intensifies to the point that
 Truth in politics 131

release through action cannot be delayed. If delay is not possible, then think-
ing and deliberation are not possible. Urgency in politics is, then, the enemy
of reason, which is to say of deliberation, compromise, reality testing, and any
processing inside of emotional states that would make taking action not the
immediate and inevitable response to a perceived threat (Levine 2008: chapter 3).

***

Where fantasy dominates in politics, we should expect to find a discourse shaped

by intense emotions, harsh rhetoric, and disrespect for opposing views. Ulti-
mately, this all derives from the dominance in politics of the principle of sub-
jective causation, which derives in turn from the inability of those engaged in
the political process to conceive others separately from characters in an internal
emotional drama. We can see the operation of the principle of subjective causa-
tion when the frustrations we experience in our lives are attributed to individuals
or groups assumed to have the power to place their own needs ahead of ours or
to frustrate us simply so they can enjoy our suffering. Intense animosity toward
the head of state when he or she is seen to represent those who threaten us (for
example “aliens” who would replace our way of life with their own) is a particu-
larly notable example of this. But subjective causation is also the dominant factor
where epithets such as “racist,” “nativist,” or “fascist” are used to explain the
source of our frustration. When rhetoric of this kind dominates, it is clear that
the only explanation needed for our frustration is the evil intent of our enemies,
and when this situation develops there can be no civility in politics.
It should be clear that the principle of subjective causation dismisses reason
and science in favor of moral judgment. It should also be clear that the dismissal
of reason and science is an expression of the intensity of frustration and the una-
vailability to the individual of any means to relieve frustration through internal
processes (Bion 1967: 112). It needs to be emphasized that, however committed
the individual may be at the conscious level to reason and science, where the
principle of subjective causation dominates in emotional life, that commitment
will be undermined at all turns by a powerful unconscious rejection of science
and movement toward the flight from reason expressed in that rejection.

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Levine, D. (2008) Politics without Reason: The Perfect World and the Liberal Ideal. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Ludwig, D. (2015) The paranoid style of Ted Cruz. The Atlantic, March 22, http://www.
theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-paranoid-style-of-ted-cruz/388391/?
google_editors_picks=true; retrieved 3/23/2015.
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Reston, M. (2016) CNN Politics, June 16, http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/16/politics/

donald-trump-entertainment-politics/; retrieved 6/16/2016.
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new-hampshire-video-185928147.html; retrieved 3/23/2015.
——— (2016) ‘There’s something going on’: Trump questions Obama’s ‘body language’
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INDEX

abortion 56–9 deprivation 63–4, 70, 86–7, 89, 94, 120,

adaptation 37, 45, 55, 79 121, 127
anxiety 28–30, 73: defenses against 61–2; destroyed world, fantasy of 25–7, 117, 129
management of 26–7, 129–30 development 29, 54, 99, 107: hatred of 98
difference 98
basic assumption 87, 98–103, 108, 118 Duke, D. 104
bin Laden, O. 105
Bion, W. 8, 69, 72–3, 87, 98 embedded meaning 21, 28
Black Lives Matter 66–8 empathy 10–13, 16, 30, 78, 80, 85
blame 67 enactment 12, 29
Bollas, C. 13, 21, 37 envy 55, 102, 114
Bowker, M. 46 externalizing 10

Cameron, S. 19, 24
capability 9, 13
Caper, R. 10, 46, 59, 72
care 111, 115, 120–1: by government 116,
120; psychological meaning of 118
change 13, 14–16, 28, 30, 85, 93–4, 129
childhood, premature termination of 53–5
civility 45–6, 53, 131
Clinton, H. 66–7
closed system 16, 30, 42, 59, 65, 70
community, fantasy of 113–16
concepts, use of 8
containment 43, 44, 79, 93
control: see subjective control
countertransference 7, 92, 112, 121
creative living 97–8
Cruz, T. 119–20, 129–30
democracy 115–16
dependence 119–20
Fairbairn, W.R.D. 15, 16, 31, 59, 62, 64, 95
false self 25, 37, 38, 42–6
family 45, 54–5, 75, 99–101, 111
fantasy 19–21, 73, 112, 124: public 25–6;
and thinking 67
Franks, T. 111
Fraser, N. 104
Freud, S. 69–70, 91, 102, 110, 112, 116, 125
Frosh, S. 59
Gilligan, J. 70, 103
Gold, S. 125, 128
greed 48, 60, 80, 86–7, 95
group 8, 91, 95, 110: attack on reality in
114, 118; identity 25, 37, 52–3, 69–70, 88
guilt 14, 48–52
hate 16, 30, 43, 60, 80, 88–9, 90, 91, 97–108;
of self 100
Hegel, G.W.F. 108
134 Index

hikikomori 39–44 nation 104–5, 126

history, as destiny 16 negative moment 10–13
holding environment 35, 38, 113:
internalization of 44 object loss 15, 27, 51–2, 63; see also loss
hope 104, 105–6 open system 30
oppression, celebration of 66
idea 77: internalization of 9–10
identification 1, 69: with oppressed groups pleasure principle 69
89–90 potential space 38, 42
identity 25, 59: fantasies of 113–14; group power 73, 90
32, 53, 86, 88–9, 108, 115, 116, 126; pride 43, 53, 87; see also shame
individual 100; projective identification 72–3, 74
impaired object 65 psychoanalysis 85–6: and social movements
impingement 36–9, 43, 45, 51, 54–5, 60, 62: 90–1, 93
as form of violence 68
infantile illusion 125 racism 125–6
inner world 53, 54–55 Racker, H. 15, 30, 80, 121
instinct 31, 69–70 reality: attack on 129; creation of 123–4,
intergenerational transmission 26, 36, 51–2, 128; social construction of 95
55, 65, 87, 94 reality principle 125
internalization, 20 reason 78, 101, 118, 130–1
internal object 18–21, 30; alien 125; good recognition 53, 87–8
and bad 12, 14, 24, 63–4 regression 29–30, 98–9, 102
interpretation 13, 20–1, 92–3: struggle reparation 50, 60
over 28 repetition 2, 20, 29
rights 93
Jackson, J. 88
justice 64–6, 68, 76, 88, 102–3, 108, 127–8 safety 23–4, 29, 30, 42, 54, 55, 58, 67, 126
Schafer, R. 16, 30
Kernberg, O. 89, 120 Schwartz, H. 80
Klein, M. 31 Segal, H. 8, 67, 80
knowing, ways of 12, 19, 30–1 self: flawed 28–30; good and bad, 24; hatred
Kohut, H. 10, 51, 85 of 100; idea about 13–15; integration of
29, 30, 59; see also true self
Lacan, J. 79 self-interest 48
Loewald, H. 100 shame 20, 25, 43, 48–53, 61, 66, 75, 76,
loss: acceptance of 94; in groups 102; 86–9, 112, 117
mourning of 106–7; see also object loss social movements 52
love: equated with admiration 43 society: and adaptation 79; being in 46; civil
lying 124–5 107, 116; and group experience 99; and
hiding the true self 38; modern, 97; and
making things matter 37–8, 56, 86 self-integration 60
Marx, K. 92, 93 state, destruction of 104
McDaniel, C. 110–11 Stein, H. 108
Menzies, I. 61 subjective causation 20, 27–8, 49–50, 64, 131
method of introspection 10 subjective control 11, 19, 60, 67, 78, 118,
Miller, A. 43, 50, 87, 89 124–5
Modell, A. 37, 46, 60 subjectivity 59–60
modern 97, 105, 107 superego 14, 112
moral defense 2, 64–5, 68–70
moral injury 64, 65 Tansey, M. and Burke, W. 121
moral order 2, 65, 68–70, 96 technical terms, use of 8–9
Morrison, A. 50 theory making 20–1
mourning 94, 106–7 thing in itself 73
 Index 135

thinking 9, 12–13, 28–9, 77: and fantasy 67; victims 23, 64, 66, 92, 94, 127, 128:
place of in social systems 79–80 innocence of 65, 91
thought control 73 violence 50, 63–4, 68, 102
Todorov, T. 106 Volkan,V. 70, 102
Trevarthen, C. 20, 31 von Broembsen 125
true self 36–8, 46: hiding of 38, 40, 46,
50–2, 55; isolation of 35, 46 will 20
Trump, D. 123, 124, 126–7 Winnicott, D. 25, 35–9, 45, 46, 54, 59, 97–8,
Turquet, P. 119 107, 113, 125
words, power of 15, 73–4
unconscious 1 work 46, 54, 87
unthought known 13, 21, 29–30