Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Object Relations 9780231544788

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TRANSITIONAL SUBJECTS

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

Amy Allen, General Editor New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections. For a complete list of books in the series, see page 271.

TR A NSITIONA L SUBJECTS C R I T I C A L T H E O RY A N D O B J E C T R EL AT I O N S EDITED BY

AMY ALLEN AND BRIAN O’CONNOR

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allen, Amy, editor. | O’Connor, Brian, 1965– editor. Title: Transitional subjects : critical theory and object relations / edited by Amy Allen and Brian O’Connor. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2019] | Series: New directions in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018048961| ISBN 9780231183185 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231183192 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231544788 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Critical theory. | Object relations (Psychoanalysis) | Psychoanalysis and philosophy. Classification: LCC HM480 .T73 2019 | DDC 150.19/5— dc23 LC record available at https: //lccn.loc.gov/2018048961

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Chang Jae Lee Cover image: Francesca Woodman, Providence, Rhode Island, from Space 2, 1976 copyright © 2018 Estate of Francesca Woodman/Charles Woodman/ARS, New York

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

A m y A llen a nd Br i a n O’Connor

I CONCEP TUAL FOUNDATIONS 1 Fusion or Omnipotence? A Dialogue

23

A x el Honne th a nd Joel W hitebook

2 Hate, Aggression, and Recognition: Winnicott, Klein, and Honneth 51 C. Fr ed A lfor d

3 Narcissism and Critique: On Kohut’s Self Psychology 75 A lessa ndro Ferr ar a

II HISTORICAL ENCOUNTERS 4 Progress and the Death Drive A m y A llen

109

vi Y Contents

5 Transitional Objects, God, and Modeling the Commodity Form 135 Ow en Hul at t

6 A “True-Enough Self ”: Winnicott, Object Relations Theory, and the Bases of Identity 159 Ja mes M artel

III POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS 7 Intersubjectivity on the Couch: Recognition and Destruction in the Work of Jessica Benjamin 185 Joh a nna Meeh a n

8. Politics and the Fear of Breakdown 209 Noëlle McAfee

9 Who Is the Perpetrator? The Missing Affect in Torture’s Violation of Human Dignity 235 Sar a Be ar dsworth

Index 261

INTRODUCTION Amy Allen and Brian O’Connor

T

he first task of critical theory was to explain—though not necessarily to overturn—the deformities of everyday life in the modern world that had been so compellingly identified by Karl Marx and György Lukács. Marx and Lukács influentially encapsulated the impoverished ways of relating to the world that mark human beings socialized under the conditions of capitalist production and rationalistic conceptions of social organization. And both endeavored to explain why those who suffered within such a world—that is to say, those whose experience was interpreted as inhuman—seemed in some sense to accept their lot. It was posited that the institutions and practices of modernity came to appear natural to those socialized within them. As artifacts of second nature, rather than of freedom or human connivance, these institutions and practices seemed to lie beyond the reach of negotiation. The critical categories of alienation and reification are efforts to describe the subjective experience and rootedness of modern social formation. And looking back on those categories we might now think that, although they were originally developed independently, they nevertheless are strikingly resonant with some of the core insights of object relations psychoanalysis. They each describe

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damaged kinds of human relating. Alienation, among other things, involves a form of response in which others are perceived to be opposed or hostile. Human beings cannot experience each other as opportunities for shared mutual self-realization; indeed, they cannot experience their own laboring activity as a form of self-realization. Thus the very idea of self-realization gives way to  self-preservation. The sense of “species being” is lost where separation is normal and the human capacity for creative selfdetermination is extinguished. With reification, for its part, the world—including the world of objects, other subjects, and even our own selves—is reduced to things. The qualities that we ideally associate with human interactions, where unexpected and enriching new features of the world can be revealed, are replaced by measurable, calculable, predictable quantitative evaluations. Given this conceptual background and the pervasive influence of Western Marxism on the development of critical theory, it is perhaps unsurprising that the early Frankfurt School forged a strong theoretical alliance with psychoanalysis. In its early phase, however, although critical theory took these phenomena as fundamental to the ontology of modern life, its engagement with psychoanalytic theory consisted mainly of the attempt to explain the resilience of these phenomena in the face of sensible political critique—why did the working class accept its exploitation and thereby fail to carry out its world-historical mission?— rather than on their effects on emotional and affective development per se. Theodor W. Adorno was the exception. He hewed more closely to the focus on damaged modes of human relating in his efforts to understand the distinctive brutality of the twentieth century, famously identifying “coldness” among the manifestations of the withering of experience: it is the absence of a capacity for love. In a quasi-therapeutic mode, he suggested that emotionally limited teachers reproduce the same coldness among their students. The result is a tendency to conceive of others as

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remote and somehow not subject to the same human needs as our own. The main line of early critical theory’s inquiry, however, was the continuing adherence of oppressed and exploited subjects to institutions that necessarily impaired their freedom. Erich Fromm, for example, both the most committed and expert psychoanalytical theorist within the early Frankfurt School, outlined the entrenchment of capitalism and its class relations and could reach only pessimistic conclusions.1 Later, nominally empirical studies of the phenomena of authority and commercialism, for example, by other members of the Institute for Social Research continued to pursue psychoanalytically adumbrated explanations of self-abnegating social conformism. As Rolf Wiggershaus puts it in his magisterial history of the Frankfurt School, “the orthodox Marxist schema of superstructure and base was elaborated, under the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, into an analysis of the relations between the economic process, the psyche and culture.”2 The results of a wide range of studies from the first phase of critical theory largely closed off a picture of social processes that might be amenable to effective change. The emergence of a renewed idea of critical theory, led by Jürgen Habermas, would quickly find little use for psychoanalysis. Although his early work contained a serious engagement with Freud and even took psychoanalytic method as a model for emancipatory critique, Habermas soon abandoned this project and turned instead to the cognitive-developmental psychology of Jean Piaget.3 In one respect, Freudian theory represented a significant component of those hyperbolic and totalizing critiques that Habermas no longer deemed productive. He was not attempting to simply to finesse an inherited methodology. By abandoning a psychoanalytically informed interpretation of social relations, Habermasian critical theory turned its attention

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to a different—more determinable—tier of human action. The key thing, now, was to discover the possibility of a rational society— and emancipation from domination thereby—that could be derived from an idealized reconstruction of implied yet failed processes of reasonable, transparent exchanges among participants. From this perspective, the notion that socialized individuals were irredeemably gripped by patterns of experience— alienated or reified or false consciousness or whichever—that only a psychoanalytically accented Marxism could reach was firmly abandoned. That major transformation in the core commitments of critical theory alerts us to the complex relation within each of its iterations between its implicit philosophical anthropology, its conception of the power of reason, and its view of the reach of social domination. In the wake of the Habermasian turn, and in light of Habermas’s massive influence on contemporary critical theory, it might have seemed unlikely that critical theory would eventually reengage with a psychoanalytically informed philosophical anthropology. Arguably this new development was, in some respects, unwittingly invited by the developmental story that Habermas’ notion of an autonomous agent, capable of productive communicative action, depended upon. The many insights offered by George Herbert Mead’s theory of symbolic interactionism might help to explain the appearance of certain human capacities. And Habermas’s surprising fascination with Lawrence Kohlberg’s research into the development of a hierarchically conceived set of moral competences showed that critical theory was still willing to turn to disciplines beyond the conventional boundaries of philosophy and sociology. But there were other forms of human experience—forms that were far from marginal to what happens between people but were not to be captured within the spectrum of “rationality” as such—that might also need to find their own theory. This new phase of

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inquiry is associated with the work of Axel Honneth. Without eroding the foundations of Habermasian critical theory, Honneth refocused attention on previously passed over questions about both the nature of interpersonal interactions that are not geared toward political or even democratic objectives and the unsatisfied yet socially deliverable psychological needs that lead to unhappy individual experiences. For Honneth, philosophy could capture much of what was at stake here; his theory of the devastating experience and social consequences of disrespect had some basis in G. W. F. Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit. Equally, Hegel contributed a great deal to Honneth’s understanding of how inadequate recognition impoverishes of the quality of freedom. Although philosophy might be therefore be credited with orienting us toward these insights into the “pathologies” of modern life, it could do little more than gesture at the psychological dimensions of those experiences. Why does the withholding of recognition damage those who experience it? Which are the human needs that are failed under those circumstances? What motivates individuals and social groups to struggle to achieve the recognition that has been withheld from them? In light of these questions, there is evident promise is the general orientation of object relations psychoanalysis. It offers an account of the inner needs, and the pathologies of the failure to enjoy those needs, that lies beyond the competence of dialectical philosophy. The notion of an “object” as a category of psychotherapeutic psychology is first articulated in Sigmund Freud’s early work. In “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” Freud sets out to deny what he takes to be the standard view of sexuality: the absence in children of a sexual drive, the developing sexual drive (Trieb) as connected with the development of attraction between the sexes, the sexual drive aims at achieving sexual union. He

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introduces the following distinctions as a beginning to his departure from that set of ideas: “Let us call the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the sexual object and the act toward which the instinct tends the sexual aim.”4 The sexual object is “the thing towards which we feel attraction.”5 After a consideration of various sexual orientations, he goes on to argue that the standard view has mistakenly conjoined the sexual drive with the “sexual object.” We should therefore, Freud proposes, “loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct (Trieb) and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.”6 What Freud wants us to see, then, is that the sexual instinct operates independently of the objects at which it aims. According to Freud, an instinct is the mental presence of an internally produced bodily or somatic energy. It contrasts with a stimulus that is prompted by “excitations coming from without.” As he further explains, the “source of an instinct is a process of excitation occurring in an organ and the immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus.” 7 If this is correct, then the object for the sexual instinct is simply a means to its own satisfaction. The sexual aim is the form in which that satisfaction is sought. The sexual instinct does not strive to bring the individual into closer union with its object. Object cathexis is the investment of the sexual instinct in a particular object. Although even for the early Freud there can be no expression of a drive without at least an implied object,8 these object-cathexes are impermanent. The “libido”—the sexual instinct—moves “from one object to another and, from these situations, directing the subject’s sexual activity, which leads to the satisfaction, that is, to the partial and temporary extinction, of the libido.”9

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Although Freud maintained this basic conceptualization of the sexual object as a means for the sexual instinct throughout his lifetime, his relatively late work “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” is at least suggestive of an object-relational approach.10 Whereas the form of “object relations theory” implied by his early conception is “one that is firmly based on the primacy of the drives and of the object’s being an intrapsychic mental representation cathected with sexual and aggressive energy,”11 in his later work one can at least find the outlines of a more object-relational intersubjective approach. Although Freud still maintains in this late work that “repeated situations of satisfaction have created an object out of the mother”12—that the experience of drive satisfaction, and thus of drives, precedes the creation of the object—he simultaneously reverses his understanding of the relationship between anxiety and repression in a way that can be seen as opening the door to the object relations perspective. Whereas Freud’s early model understood anxiety to be the result of repression, he now understands anxiety as repression’s cause. In his elaboration of this claim, Freud offers a proto-intersubjective account of the origin of anxiety according to which anxiety results from the child’s feelings of fright and endangerment at being abandoned by its primary caregiver. “Here,” Freud writes, “anxiety appears as a reaction to the felt loss of the object.”13 This account emphasizes the high degree of dependence of human infants on their primary caregivers for survival, which in turn explains why the presence of the primary caregiver is so crucial to the infant and why her disappearance is experienced as so dangerous. With this basic outline of Freud’s position in mind, we can, following Howard A. Bacal and Kenneth M. Newman, identify several main points of departure from Freud’s early conception that was to give rise to the distinctive domain of object relations theory. It should be noted that from these contrasts we can gain

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only a general and provisional definition of what is characteristic of object relations theory. It is not a school of thought as such, but a collective term given to the work of psychoanalysts whose ideas were often developed independently of each other and with quite different therapeutic approaches in mind. The list of theorists includes Melanie Klein, W. R. D. Fairbairn, Michael Balint, D. W. Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Ian D. Suttie, Harry Guntrip, and John Bowlby. The detail of each theorist’s work throws up sharp points of separation—sometimes on quite fundamental principles—among those considered under this general grouping. Part 1: whereas classical Freudian psychoanalysis focuses primarily on the intrapsychic dimension—that is, on the patient’s internal fantasies and psychic reality— object relations, while not denying the salience of the intrapsychic, also works on the intersubjective dimension—that is, on the patient’s struggles in terms of their relating to others. However, the focus is not on specific individuals but rather on how the “object” is perceived through particular framing interpretations which—in some cases—will produce unhappy experiences. A tendency, for example, to experience emotional relationships as doomed to failure may be explained by a framing preconception of what is to be expected from others, a preconception carried by the struggling individual into all interactions. Although these framing interpretations are rooted in the individual’s experience with his primary object, object relations, in contrast with classical psychoanalysis, is, in this respect a “movement from a one-body to a multi-body psychology.”14 Part 2: we have seen how Freud’s notion of the “object” develops within the framework of his instinctual theory. As Bacal and Newman explain, there is broad commitment within object relations to move the “focus from the  vicissitudes of instinct—their source, discharge, or aim—to the vicissitudes of relatedness, whether the relatedness

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is primarily instinctual or not.”15 The role of the instincts is not, then, necessarily abandoned, but the drives either lose central significance as an explication of disrupted or unsuccessful experience or are reconceptualized in more relational and intersubjective terms. Part 3: consistent with the focus on the intersubjective dimension, there is a particular new emphasis on “an average expectable environment in which the organism can adapt and develop.”16 The range of identified conditions is virtually synonymous with the work of the object relations theorists: for example, the quality of conditions for companionship, recognition, and affirmation from the “good enough” caregiver, parental tenderness, holding, attachment. Significant failure in the provision of these conditions leads to a fragile capacity to negotiate the world, with adaptations often taking the form of a range of psychic defensive postures that deepen the patient’s maladaption. The particular claims of a number of object relations theorists will be developed more closely in the chapters that comprise this volume. But it is worth noting at the outset how well these features of object relations psychoanalysis harmonize with core thematic commitments of critical theory. The emphasis on the importance of intersubjective relations for the development and modification of psychic structure coheres with critical theory’s understanding of the individual and the social as thoroughly intertwined. It would not be correct, however, to conclude from this emphasis that object relations theory is driven by unwarranted optimism about the possibility of secure, intersubjective harmony. For example, Klein, whose work is central to a number of this volume’s contributions, places the death drive at the center of her understanding of the psyche. Even more mainstream object relations theorists, such as Winnicott, despite their abandonment of drive theory, do not neglect the role of

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aggression in their developmental stories of the emergence of functioning individuals. None of the theorists in object relations imagine that human individuation can be perfectly achieved through relationality. The destructive side of human relationships is a challenging feature of intersubjectivity. Moreover, this approach arguably differentiates object relations psychoanalysis from approaches, such as Jacques Lacan’s, that focus primarily if not exclusively on intrapsychic dimensions of experience. This is not to deny the significance of Lacan’s work or its impact on critical theory in the broad sense; it is simply to suggest that the object relations perspective offers distinctive and, in our view, relatively underexplored resources for critical social theory.17 Although the contributions to this volume do not engage with the work of the so-called left-Lacanians,18 it is our hope that the volume provides alternative directions for the psychoanalytic critique of social conditions in contemporary capitalist countries (see the chapters, especially, by Hulatt and Martel). While not discounting the importance of the intrapsychic, or of the ways in which phantasy, projection, and other intrapsychic representations shape and structure our interactions with others, object relations approaches explore the complex, ambivalent, and shifting relationships “between real, external people and internal images and residues of relations with them, and the significance of these residues for psychic functioning.”19 This at least provides for the possibility that object relations psychoanalysis can preserve the philosophical anthropological insights that underpin critical theory’s efforts to expose what it sees as pathological forms of socialization. This is a research interest that has emerged explicitly in recent critical theory. However, the various intersubjective reorientations of Freudian theory that are evident in Adorno and arguably implied in Herbert Marcuse seem too to seek that elusive account of the possibility of undistorted

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human development that is articulated within object relations theory. Thus it should not be surprising that, when the interests of critical theory are lined up beside the insights of object relations theory, many innovative possibilities seem immediately to suggest themselves. And, although groundbreaking work has been done on the relationship between these two disciplines, much that is of tantalizing significance has remained untouched. This volume both includes considerations of some of the most important achievements in the field to date and offers original new contributions to the ongoing significance of object relations theory for critical theory. What is notable is that the best work in this area does not simply exploit the psychological material for evidence of claims that were antecedently established on a purely philosophical basis. The scope of what might now be considered pursuable questions for critical theory has, as this volume shows, been shaped by the work of a range of object relations theorists. In short, object relations opens up new spaces for critical theoretical inquiry. This is not to say, however, that such an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of societally generated social suffering is necessarily seamless. Object relations accounts of environmental conditions, and the consequences of their failures, are not conceived in a form that makes them readily deliverable to the explanatory interests of critical theory. Because critical theory is not currently disposed—as it once was—to describing the world as a totality in which all relations are reified, or in which the possibility for freedom is barely even conceivable, it remains to be explained why environmental deficits are a matter for social theory and not instead appropriate only to the domain of individual psychotherapy. No one, in other words, is going so far as to claim that the conditions of modernity have destroyed all traces of effective caregiving, which means that methodological

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caution is required in projecting individual circumstances into social generalities and vice versa. If the turn to object relations is motivated by the effort of critical theory to ground its philosophical claims in the secured results of another discipline, then the status of that discipline comes into sharp focus—in which case the highly contested nature of all fields of psychoanalysis would be a cause for grave concern. This, however, is not quite what is in play. For one thing, psychoanalysis offers a theoretically rich and highly developed set of reflections on philosophical anthropology that provides an important counterpoint to the tendencies toward excessive rationalism and moral idealism in Habermasian critical theory. Moreover, it has always been a special characteristic of critical theory to turn to other disciplines in order to enhance its explanatory and diagnostic powers.20 Reference to the key claims of another discipline is not simply a matter of finding new evidence of the provisional truths of critical theory (though there is certainly some element of that). Rather, those claims or theses lend explanatory richness to our diagnoses of social pathologies while also supporting the idea that the pathologies in question—be they failures of recognition, instances of social aggression, or lack of resistance to oppression— rest on deeply rooted and highly resilient features of the human soul. In this orientation, the critical theory tradition is far from unique. Just as Marx and Lukács articulated critical concepts that resonate with psychoanalytic concerns, it is hard to imagine, for example, given Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of amour propre or Thomas Hobbes’s conception of natural human predation, that either philosopher would have been uninterested in the claims of psychology had they been available to him. The first set of chapters in this book consider some of the foundational issues in the very possibility of an object relations– influenced critical theory. In the dialogue between Axel

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Honneth and Joel Whitebook, based on the edited transcript of a public conversation that took place in late 2014 at Columbia University, these two thinkers debate their respective positions on the significance of psychoanalysis for critical social theory. Honneth and Whitebook have been engaged in a decades-long debate on the issues that are central to this discussion, and “Fusion or Omnipotence?” represents the most definitive statement of their respective and mutually contrasting positions to date. Much of the discussion turns on how best to characterize early infant experience— as a pleasurable fusion with the caregiver or as an expression of infantile omnipotence— and the implications of such a characterization for how we are then to theorize aggression, recognition, and intersubjectivity. The implications of the transition away from Freud and toward object relations are contested. Whitebook wants to defend the “divide” embodied in Freud’s startling break with conventional notions of reason and agency. The preference for a relational psychology, as seemingly endorsed by critical theory, threatens to diminish the importance of the divide, taming the notion of the antisocial self. Whitebook contends that it is perfectly possible to deny, as he does, the classical thesis of primary narcissism while retaining the symbiosis thesis, a thesis that opposes the claim—promoted within object relations ideas of development—of an original object orientation. Whitebook also maintains that there is a primary self which may indeed be worked over in processes of interaction and socialization. It nevertheless remains a part of the self that is irreducible both to the space of the linguistic turn and to the genetic accounts of individuality found in Mead and his followers (Habermas explicitly, though Honneth implicitly). Honneth’s responses to Whitebook’s prospectus occasions a valuable clarification of aspects of his own sense of the uses and limits of relationality and object relations for understanding the emergence of the self. He shares with Whitebook a desire to

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protect the Freudian divide, endorsing Freud’s special contribution to an unprecedented grasp of the complexity of our moral psychology. The gap between Whitebook and Honneth, though, may be narrower than it initially seems. Honneth acknowledges the phenomenon of fusion—the symbiotic phase—although he diverges from Whitebook by declining to consider that phenomenon in terms of “omnipotence,” that is, the world entirely from the perspective of the prelinguistic infant. He argues that development beyond the fusion phase produces those anxieties of separation that can never be fully resolved. Revealingly, this is true even within experiences of genuine recognition, essentially because recognition involves the interrelation of two independent selves rather than the reenactment of lost fusion. It is also notable that Honneth does not believe that those processes of intersubjectivity which permit and largely explain the development of the self entirely cover over the influence of the prelinguistic self. There is much at stake in this debate if we interpret the phenomena of reification and alienation as pathologies of relating. Emphasis on primary fusion positions an object relations–inflected critical theory to account for those pathologies in terms of the failure of nurture. In “Hate, Aggression, and Recognition: Winnicott, Klein, and Honneth,” C. Fred Alford makes the case for the work of Klein over that of Winnicott as a resource for social theory. With Honneth’s work in view, Alford suggests that the basic worldview of Winnicott lends itself too comfortably to contemporary assumptions about the individual as both interconnected and separate, yet without the sharp edges. If we take as our context the confused, unreasoned, and violent events that unfold before us on a daily basis, a less affirmative psychoanalytic theory seems more appropriate. Alford suggests that the required resources can be found in the work of Klein, who

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unromantically portrays the origins of the human capacity for paranoid defense. And in Klein’s version of the theory of the death drive we can locate an explanation of what seems like our ineradicable tendency to destroy rather than conciliate. Alessandro Ferrara’s chapter draws the philosophically neglected self psychology of Heinz Kohut into consideration as a valuable model for critical theory. Kohut’s work, he contends, encompasses many of the key insights of the object relations field. But it also has the capacity to offer a more detailed tracing of the connection between the pathologies of subjectivity and the failures within early processes of recognition, an analysis, Ferrara contends, with potentially greater depth than Winnicott’s accounting for the appearance of the “false self.” Kohut’s work also provides a resource for understanding the complex from which domineering exhibitionistic and narcissistic personality profiles emerge. Kohut’s work does not simply have significance for the diagnosis of pathological personalities: it also explains the conditions in which healthy self-concern and creativity can emerge. Among the politically significant attributes of the nonpathological personality is the capacity for a democratic disposition and an openness to responding transformatively to the often exemplary actions of others. Amy Allen considers the difficulty that Freud’s notion of the death drive presents to critical theory’s interest in social progress. The notion of the death drive that was introduced in the late Freud, but arguably first fully integrated into psychoanalytic theory in the work of Klein, is often presumed to entail the possibility of historical progress and thus the futility of all attempts to improve the human condition. Within the Frankfurt School critical theory tradition, Marcuse is noteworthy for his attempt to reconcile belief in the death drive with faith in the possibility of progress. Allen argues, however, that a more promising route

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to addressing this question can be found in the work of Klein, particularly when her understanding of the death drive and her resulting account of subjectivity are read in light of Adornian negative dialectics. Thus Allen suggests that Klein’s distinctive version of object relations theory provides the key for understanding how the death drive can in fact be compatible with belief in the possibility of progress. Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object is developed in Owen Hulatt’s explication of the “commodity form.” An explanation of how goods can undergo a “phantasmagoric” transformation into objects with an intrinsic exchange value was never properly developed by Marx. And the theory of that transformation was entirely neglected by those philosophers of the Frankfurt School who followed Marx and Lukács by adopting the notion of commodity fetishism as a convincing diagnosis of social transactions. Hulatt contends that the very idea of a transitional object might be one way to develop that missing explanation. With children, transitional objects gain their significance by the meanings or properties they project on to them. Transitional objects occupy a space between imaginative and objective forms of experience. Winnicott, as Hulatt explains, identifies the spheres of art and religion—where God as its central object is experienced as “a congeries of real facts”—as adult forms of transitional objects. Using that model, he contends that commodity forms are derived varieties of transitional objects, occupying a space between projection or imagined value and use. Through their projected qualities, commodity forms take on an independent reality—in the manner of a transitional object—that turns back to influence human action. The question of what conception of the self is appropriate to critical theory, particularly in light of its engagement with psychoanalytic psychology, is pursued by James Martel. In its most

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audacious formulations, critical theory seems to doubt the very idea of the self, leading in the Althusserian-Nietzschean school to the conclusion that the self is an artifice that falsely takes itself to be a whole. As a whole, it can thereby become a bounded and socially controllable object. Martel proposes that Winnicott’s work provides a plausible alternative to the nihilistic view. Without surrendering the idea of a true self, Winnicott addresses the phenomenon of a self that can be false. But the true self does not involve the kind of solidification criticized in other theories by the radical strain of critical theory. Martel contends that we can take from Winnicott a theory of a “true enough” self that subsists in its object relations. This idea of the true enough self represents a challenge to alternatives that rest on conventional liberal ideas of the self. Among those addressed by Martel’s challenge are Habermas and Honneth. The contribution of Jessica Benjamin to the object relations turn in critical theory is examined by Johanna Meehan in her chapter “Intersubjectivity on the Couch.” She elaborates on the difficulties in any position, such as that of Habermas, that emphasizes the primarily rational qualities of interaction. From the psychoanalytic perspective occupied by Benjamin, the psychic and affective dimensions of interaction cannot be  forgotten, not least because they may underpin violently destructive relations whose dynamics are missed when interactions are interpreted through the reasonable expectations of well-intentioned participants. In the absence of an appreciation of the significance of psychic relationality—where the roles of affect, fantasy, and desire exert their influence—interactions are understood flatly as intersubjective self/other relationships. Meehan shows that, for Benjamin, only when the arational, extralinguistic dimensions of intersubjectivity are recognized can we begin to perceive the mechanics of domination. This

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does not, however, lead to the conclusion that rationality is effectively absent from interactions and that the ideals of Habermasian discourse can be discarded. Rather, a managed tension between the affective and intellectual levels of interpersonal engagement can allow a genuinely ethical intersubjectivity to emerge. Noëlle McAfee proposes that Winnicott’s notion of the fear of breakdown can help us to understand the exaggerated and sometimes historically unfounded anxieties a community might experience at the prospect of a loss of wholeness. Like a number of other contributors to this collection, she opposes the efforts of the relational turn in psychoanalysis to deny the notion of fusion. The fusion thesis makes sense of the challenges human beings may face in achieving sociality. The task of coping in separation from the primary state can fail in many ways, as Winnicott explains. Anticipations of loss— or fear of loss—recapitulate the original loss of fusion. The structure of that anticipation is, then, informed by what has already happened. McAfee suggests that political anxieties—particularly where there are issues of identity at stake—can take the form of a fear of a loss of originary and mythic oneness, a departure from a unity that was never experienced, a sense of security in a world somehow unspoiled. She locates a connection between the apparently private space of caregiving and the politics of anxiety through a sociohistorical conception of the caregiver. The latter’s holding is not merely biological but is a space within which the mother imparts the unconscious desires and fears that have formed her own relation to the world. Sara Beardsworth’s “Who Is the Perpetrator?” develops the central critical-theoretical interest in the connection between negative experiences and the realization of implicit dignity. Drawing on the work of Adorno and J. M. Bernstein, she positions this approach to dignity as a victim-oriented perspective

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that can ground the very idea of moral agency. The experience in focus is torture. Its visceral cruelty seems to affirm the immediate violation of human dignity. Beardsworth, however, explores the troubling phenomenon of the disappearance of the torturer, that is, the apparent dissociation from torturous acts by their perpetrators. She explores the “missing affect” that appears to detach torturers from their acts. Drawing on casework from Klein, especially as framed by Julia Kristeva, she develops an original explanation of that missing affect. And she also proposes that the absence of moral experience within the perpetrator might explain the asymmetries of torture’s aftermath, in which the victim is the party left with a sense of moral loss and interpersonal insecurity.

NOTES 1. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 56. 2. Wiggershaus, 453. 3. For his early engagement with Freud, see Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1972). For critical discussion of his turn from Freud to Piaget, see Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). 4. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 7:135–136. 5. Jonathan Lear, Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005), 72. 6. Freud, “Three Essays,” 148. 7. Freud, 168. 8. On this point, see Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 9. 9. Freud, “Three Essays,” 217.

20 Y Amy Allen and Brian O’Connor 10. On this point, see Axel Honneth, “Appropriating Freedom: Freud’s Conception of Individual Self-Relation,” in Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. James Ingram (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). For critical discussion, see Amy Allen, “Psychoanalysis and the Methodology of Critique” Constellations 23, no. 2 (June 2016): 244–254. 11. Peter Buckley, ed., Essential Papers on Object Relations (New York: New York University Press, 1986), xiv–xv. 12. Sigmund Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 20:170. 13. Freud, 137. 14. Howard A. Bacal and Kenneth M. Newman, Theories of Object Relations: Bridges to Self Psychology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 11. 15. Bacal and Newman, 4. 16. Bacal and Newman, 5. 17. The divisions between Lacanian and Kleinian metapsychologies may sometimes be drawn too sharply even if they depart from each other in fundamental ways. One study that helpfully draws out the intersections between those positions is The New Klein-Lacan Dialogues, ed. Julia Borossa, Catalina Bronstein, and Claire Pajaczkowska (Oxford: Routledge, 2018). 18. See Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007). 19. Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, 12. 20. See Axel Honneth, “The Work of Negativity: A RecognitionTheoretical Revision of Psychoanalysis,” in The I in We: Studies on the Theory of Recognition (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

I CONCEP T UA L FOU NDAT IONS

4

1 F USION OR OMNIPOTENCE? A Dialogue Axel Honneth and Joel Whitebook

Joel Whitebook: This discussion has a long history. In fact, it’s almost twenty years old now. It goes back to the academic year of 1995–1996, when I was teaching in the philosophy department in the psychoanalytic studies program at the New School, and Axel [Honneth] was the Theodor Heuss Professor for the year. Axel’s book The Struggle for Recognition had been translated into English and was being widely discussed. And in psychoanalysis this was the heyday of the relational movement. “Relationality” had become the hot topic. Steve Mitchell and Jay Greenberg’s text had become something of a basic text of psychoanalysis which everybody was using. In The Struggle for Recognition, Axel drew on material from the relational psychoanalysts, from infant research, and from Donald Winnicott and tried to integrate that into his analysis of the young Hegel and Aristotle. But the use he was making of analysis, the analysis he was appropriating at the time, was from this very lively world of relational psychoanalysis and infant research. Jessica Benjamin had tried to do something similar before that with her synthesis of Winnicott and Hegel around the theory of recognition. Now, I had serious reservations about the relational turn, and I still do. While I think it made an important contribution,

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and while it helped to open up the dogmatically enclosed world of American psychoanalysis, there are some real problems with it. The things that made me uncomfortable about relational psychoanalysis in general applied mutatis mutandis to Axel’s appropriation of it. We decided to have a debate, or a discussion— an Auseinandersetzung. I therefore taught a course on narcissism, and Axel taught a course on recognition. We attended each other’s classes and then tried to formulate a written debate afterwards, which appeared in the journal Psyche.1 But I think both of us were dissatisfied with the result. We felt that the issues really never became clearly defined. And we’ve never seriously gone back to it in the intervening years. I want to make it clear I think Steve Mitchell, perhaps the leading figure in the relational turn, made an enormous contribution to the development of psychoanalysis and was a very creative person both theoretically and politically. At the same time, however, I think, in some ways, relational psychoanalysis became a new dogma. Kristeva observed that after what she called Freud’s intervention into the history of Western rationality things have never been the same. It was some sort of break, some sort of caesura, which one can’t really go back behind. I am tempted to borrow a term from Jan Assmann, where he talked about the Mosaic divide, I would talk about the Freudian divide. What that divide involved were certain ideas about the nature of the subject, about the nature of rationality, about the nature of childhood, about the nature of the anthropological sociability of the human animal, and so forth. My concern with the relational turn was that that divide, that break, was being lost. However you want to characterize it—and you can characterize it in many ways—however the world was radically different after the Freudian intervention, I had a feeling that that radical difference was being flattened out and lost.

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Even before we began this discussion, I had already criticized Habermas for what I thought was his domestication of psychoanalytic theory, his losing sight of the break. In my view, Habermas was determined to show the sociability of the human subject all the way down, which meant he was determined to show that the self is linguistic all the way down. In technical terms, this resulted in his ex cathedra denial of a prelinguistic unconscious. He flatly denied Freud’s distinction between “thing representations” and “word representations,” believing he had demonstrated that the self was linguistic all the way down. At the time, I wanted to articulate what it was about the Freudian divide that should be preserved, what it was that I feared was in danger of being lost. But because I didn’t have a very good way to articulate it, I borrowed the term from André Green, which he had taken from Hegel, namely “the work of the negative.” This became a catch phrase that I employed to try and capture what I thought was being lost in Habermas’s appropriation of psychoanalysis, in the relational turn, and in Axel’s work. The problem is that “the work of the negative” remained very abstract. And I feel like in my criticisms of Axel I employed this idea, but didn’t give it much content. From the beginning of psychoanalysis, there has always been a spectrum of opinion, moving from conservative Freudianism, on one side, to I’ll say what on the other side. The spectrum is roughly similar to the spectrum of left to right, but not exactly, because one finds a radical analyst like Marcuse or Castoriadis very close to the conservative Freudian end of the spectrum. I would say that the opinions line up around the question of how sociable, or how mutualistic, or how reality-oriented one believes that the human animal is, beginning with the human infant. Freud’s pessimistic anthropology begins with the very strong claim, which he articulated mainly in Civilization and its

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Discontents, that humans are antisocial. He refers to a primary mutual hostility between individuals and maintains that the program of the pleasure principle, which governs the psyche, is at loggerheads with the reality principle. Because of its intrinsic antisociability, one can refer to this pessimistic anthropology as Hobbesian. Throughout the history of the discipline, there have been many debates over this question. In the early days, before the Second World War, it was basically fought out over the question of the death drive, innate destructiveness, and primary masochism. On one side you have the orthodox Freudians, and on the other the interpersonalists, the culturalist psychoanalysts, relational psychoanalysts, and the intersubjective psychoanalysts, and that was sort of the spectrum. Then after the war—with the preoedipal turn in psychoanalysis and the new emphasis on the early stages of development—the debate has been fought out over the questions of primary narcissism, symbiosis, the omnipotence of thoughts and how to characterize the initial stages of development. Concerning the debates about what Freud called the “original psychical situation,” Marcia Cavell observed that every major analyst has a narrative which she entitles “in the beginning” and which correlates with their views on human nature. Cavell argues, and I think she’s right, that to a significant degree these debates are more about Weltanschauung than about scientifically decidable questions. They are infused with prescientific intuitions, prejudices, what have you, about Weltanschauung, and to that extent aren’t that amenable to being adjudicated by more demonstrable scientific arguments. I think the way I posed my criticisms of Axel were too much in terms of Weltanschauung, too much in terms of the goodness or badness of the human animal. I think we do have different

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views about those questions of worldview—I’m closer to a Freudian pessimist, and he’s much closer to a more sociable view—but that is something we should discuss over a bottle of wine in a Frankfurt Weinstube some night and not in public. Therefore, in an effort to make our debate more productive, I’d like to formulate some more concrete points—both within and outside of psychoanalysis—which aren’t these global assertions about Weltanschauung and abstract claims about “the work of the negative.” The points I want to make are these. First, Freud’s theory of primary narcissism must be criticized. The critique or, better yet, the rejection of primary narcissism was tied very much to the question of the sociability or the degree of the infant’s orientation to reality, owing to the fact that Freud’s theory of the omnipotence of thoughts was predicated on his theory of primary narcissism. The more socially oriented analysts—the analysts who wanted to demonstrate more mutuality, more sociality, more object-relatedness in the infant—went after the theory of primary narcissism because they also wanted to undercut his theory of the omnipotence of thoughts. If your strategy was to refute the idea of the omnipotence of thoughts, the realitydenying nature of the infant, then you seek to refute the theory of primary narcissism and to demonstrate that the baby is already object-related, as the English put it. I’ll come back to this in a very important way, but for now I want to point out that the hidden assumption of this strategy is that interaction equals mutuality. In other words, if you demonstrate that the self is generated through interaction, then ipso facto you’ve demonstrated the mutuality or sociability of the infant. The locus classicus of the critique of primary narcissism is Winnicott. He keys in on a footnote from “Two Principles of

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Mental Functioning” where Freud uses the model of the chicken and the egg to describe primary narcissism and demolishes it. That is where Winnicott famously asserts that there’s no baby without a mother, which means you cannot talk about a monadic, self-enclosed infant without a mother. On a more theoretical level, Laplanche argues that Freud’s theory of primary narcissism is exactly analogous to the Cartesian cogito. That is, if you begin with the self-enclosed monadic starting point and construct it the way Descartes or Freud do, then there’s no escape, no way out, unless you bring in God as a deus ex machina. In terms of Freud, there’s no way to explain the turn to reality if you accept the presuppositions of primary narcissism as he characterizes it. Let me be clear: With one exception, I don’t know of anybody today who defends the notion of primary narcissism as Freud originally formulated it. The exception is Castoriadis who stuck to it with notion of the monadic core of the psyche.2 Therefore, the first point to be made is that Freud’s theory of primary narcissism has been rejected. The second development I want to call attention to, which came from the clinical realm, is the full acknowledgment of the ubiquity and the force of countertransference. It took Freud a while to acknowledge “transference” (he finally does it in 1905 with “Dora”), but it took psychoanalysts a remarkably long time to acknowledge the existence, the ubiquity, and the power of countertransference; it really didn’t happen until the forties and the fifties, and to do so was much more of a threat because it undermined psychoanalytic claims to neutrality and objectivity. The acknowledgment of countertransference has dangerous consequences: it throws the asymmetrical model of the clinical setup—where the analyst is a neutral observer in a privileged position whose unconscious instinctual fantasy life is not

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impinging on him so that he can make objective observations about the patient’s inner psychic life—into question. But once you acknowledge the power of countertransference, it is difficult to maintain that privileged position. With Winnicott you get the idea that early development involves interaction. And with the acknowledgment of countertransference you get clinical practice as also involving interaction. And there are many theorists who have tried to understand the clinical process insofar as it is interactional in terms of mother/infant interaction. Then, in addition to the refutation of primary narcissism, the admission of countertransference, one had infant research, which really started in a serious way in the sixties. Perhaps the main figure in this regard is Daniel Stern. Stern wanted to demonstrate that the baby is reality-oriented from the get-go. In order to do that, he criticized the theory of Margaret Mahler on separation/individuation, which was very influential in the sixties and seventies, though she’s hardly discussed today. More specifically, he contested her notion of an autistic and symbiotic stage. But I would argue that he rejected in general terms, neglecting some technical details, the undifferentiated symbiotic stage at the beginning of development. Mahler was very old at the time that Stern launched his critique of her; and Stern was very attractive, narcissistic, and charming—with matinee idol looks—and sort of seduced her; she never really was able to take him on and died shortly after she had become enthralled with him. But another analyst, Fred Pine, a colleague of Mahler’s, wrote a critique of Stern, of which I won’t go into the details, but which I think carries a lot of force. Stern acknowledges Pine’s critique in a footnote, but more or less brushes it off en passant. He never really addressed the challenge. I would maintain the claim that the idea of symbiosis has been refuted is one of the current dogmas in

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the psychoanalytic world today. It’s taken as a given; as Freud would say, it’s treated as Holy Writ. And it’s one of the dogmatic axioms of the relational turn. Nobody has addressed Pine’s arguments. Strikingly, one of the members of the Fonagy research group, which was committed to demonstrating that the infant was reality-oriented, György Gergely—a Hungarian, who was actually trained as a research psychologist at Columbia and then went back to Hungary to be an analyst—has presented very interesting experimental evidence supporting the idea of a symbiotic phase. In a very honest, selfreflective, self-critical piece of work, Gergely went against the thrust of the whole Fonagy project. I can only sketch his argument as follows. Gergely examined some of the experiments having to do with what’s called the contingency between the infant and the image, and he reinterpreted them. He showed, on this evidence, that there was something one could maintain approximating a symbiotic or undifferentiated phase at the beginning. To be sure, it’s not conclusive, but it’s very interesting work, and the fact that it came out of the Fonagy group, which had considerable influence on the psychoanalytic world, is quite interesting. My point is that while the denial of symbiosis has become a dogma of the relational turn, there are good reasons to question it. There is generally a ten-year lag between what goes on in philosophy and what goes on in psychoanalysis. Different representatives of the relational movement, in addition to people like Roy Schafer, and other more mainstream analysts, took up the theories of intersubjectivity, social constructionism, and the hermeneutical critique of positivism and tried to use them to elucidate and defend their psychoanalytic positions. There were borrowings from the linguistic turn, hermeneutics, the postKuhnian philosophy of science, Hegel’s theory of recognition,

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and George Herbert Mead’s theory of the self, which were adopted in one way or another to try and articulate and defend the relational turn. Mitchell was very good in this regard here and did us an important service. He appropriated the Kuhnian, postempiricist philosophy of science and critique of positivism and directed it against the reigning New York ego psychology establishment. The ancien régime based its authority on the claim that they had strict scientific foundations for the work they were doing, but in fact they had very weak shaky scientific foundations. Mitchell and his colleagues mobilized the arguments from philosophy to  subvert their claims to scientific legitimacy and thereby to subvert their authority. Politically, that really opened things up in analysis. There had been a theoretical logjam for a long time. The hegemony of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and New York ego psychology had cast a pall on things, and Mitchell’s intervention, which was quite intentional, served a very important function. Add to this the theories of intersubjectivism, constructivism, and so on were used in an attempt to elucidate and defend an interactive conception of the mother-infant and the analystanalysand relationship. People also drew on Mead’s theory of the development of the self in this context, and in fact the statement “the self is a product of interaction” became something of a slogan, which, like the rejection of symbiosis, became one of the dogmas of the relational turn. Given this historical sketch, these are the loosely connected points, problems, questions that I would like to suggest Axel and I discuss. There are three points we should be clear about: First, there is nobody today who defends the notion of primary narcissism in Freud’s sense (although they do defend symbiosis, and we can come back to the difference). Today, to attack primary

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narcissism is to really beat a dead horse. Second, there is a consensus about the ubiquity, importance, and inescapability of countertransference. There is nobody who is taken seriously who holds the position that the analyst is this well analyzed, well-analyzing machine who is (completely) neutral and has mastered all of his conflicts. Third, in general, everybody accepts the Meadian dictum that the self is a product of interaction. At that level of generalization, no one is going to disagree. The question is, how should it be interpreted concretely? What are its details? And what are its implications? These are three points about which there is consensus and that I think are off the table for debate. There is one point where the relational analysts’ misuse— distortion— of Winnicott is particularly apparent. They take Winnicott’s critique of primary narcissism as a point of departure and his slogan that there is no baby without a mother as a rallying cry, but they totally ignore another side of his theory that is equally important. Winnicott was a theorist of omnipotence every bit as much as Freud. The baby is omnipotent and dependent at the outset, and the task of the first three years of development is what he calls “reality acceptance.” In fact, he says the mother’s job is to reinforce the baby’s illusion in the beginning, to increase the sense of omnipotence, because that’s the only way illusion and omnipotence can be overcome. The really pertinent point is that Winnicott’s great discovery of transitional phenomena, and the transitional object, only makes sense given the presupposition of omnipotence. The whole function of the transitional object is to make overcoming omnipotence, to make relinquishing narcissism, tolerable. So the relational appropriation of Winnicott only goes half way, and the second half of him is ignored. Now I want to come back to a point I mentioned en passant before. Beatrice Beebe, who is a famous infant researcher and is

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more or less part of the relational movement, made a very astute observation, which made many of her relational colleagues uncomfortable: that interaction does not guarantee mutuality and sociability. In other words, by demonstrating that the development of the self takes place through interaction, one hasn’t eo ipso demonstrated that the baby is sociable, mutualistic, and reality-oriented. On the contrary, we are familiar with many forms of malignant mother-infant interaction that lead to very severe forms of psychopathology. As Joyce McDougall put it, we not only acquire our images of heaven at the mother’s breast but also our images of hell. Just to state it clearly: I reject the idea that the symbiotic phase has been disproven. We can discuss its nature and how to interpret its significance. But this donnée of relational psychoanalysis— that Mahler has been refuted once and for all—in my opinion, is simply wrong. Turning to a more philosophical point. In spite of its enormous and productive contribution, the linguistic turn was carried too far both in philosophy and then in psychoanalysis. And I would say it has revealed its limits. It had many productive consequences, especially concerning the critique of positivism, but, again, insights were turned into slogans—for example, that the philosophy of the subject has been superseded by the linguistic turn, by intersubjectivity. For example, we see this in philosophy with the return to philosophy of mind and the problem of consciousness, on the one hand, and the questions of realism and reference on the other. Philosophy of the subject, philosophy of mind, was not left behind once and for all, it was suppressed for a period. Within psychoanalysis, Ricoeur, in a very important article, argued that what he calls the linguistic reformulators of analysis— which would include Lacan, Habermas, Schafer, Marcia

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Cavell—cannot do justice to the nature of psychoanalysis. The application of the linguistic model, whether in French structuralism, German hermeneutics, or Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy, can’t capture the uniqueness of psychoanalysis’s “mixed discourse.” In fact, Jean Hyppolite stood up in one of Lacan’s seminars and made precisely this point, namely, that Lacan was ignoring Freud’s claim that the unconscious consisted in thing-representations. Similarly, in Marcia Cavell’s attempt to use the work of Donald Davidson to explicate psychoanalysis, she gets herself in a trap when she takes the very strong position that mind is linguistic as such and that there is no such thing as nonlinguistic or prelinguistic mind. For then she is confronted with the dilemma of how to characterize the first eighteen to twenty-four months of life, before language comes on the scene. She can’t do it. I would suggest that the following point is one that Axel and I could fruitfully take up. It has become clear that linguistic intersubjectivity, linguistic interaction, is only one strata of interaction in the self. I would propose that, rather than using intersubjectivity, we take interaction as the overarching term, and then identify different types of interaction, and different layers of interaction, and attempt to understand the way they get structured in the strata of the psyche. Intersubjectivity is perhaps obviously, enormously important and the highest layer, but it’s not clear how far down it goes. Here I think Stern is right when he argues that interaffectivity is prior to linguistic intersubjectivity, and what’s exchanged in mother-infant interaction, what’s communicated, the object of communication, are affects. What is transmitted back and forth between them are affects. And, more than that, the linguists and the researchers into language acquisition have demonstrated that the mother-infant affective dialogue, the preverbal dialogue, the facial gaze dialogue, is

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where the infant originally gets a sense of communicative competence, dialogic competence. And this is the strong point: gaining that sort of dialogic competence, preverbal dialogic competence, is a precondition for actually entering into language. The infant, so it is argued, can’t enter into the world of language as such if it hasn’t acquired these dialogic skills beforehand. Then, from neuroscience, Antonio Damasio argues that the narrative self again is just the uppermost layer of the self and there are many stratas of selfhood below it having to do ultimately with core bodily and affective representations. Again, no matter how important the narrative self is, it is far from the whole story. To conclude, to return to Mead’s slogan, that the self is a product of interaction, stated at that level of abstraction and generality, raises several serious problems. Although, in principle, Mead talks about the I and the me, and that the me is formed through the internalization of the other, the idea of the I is almost a cipher in his theory; it is just gestured at, but never really developed with sufficient content. First, this raises a purely logical problem: if there isn’t some sort of I precursor, some kernel of the I at the outset, how is the infant going to recognize itself in the mirror, in the other, its mother’s face, or the visual mirror, or the auditory mirror? There has to be some prereflective intuition of the self—which Habermas wants to completely deny— there has to be some prereflective intuition of the self just to get the whole process of reflection going. That is, there must be some prereflective intuition of the self that can recognize itself in the other and then internalize it. Second, Ernst Tugendhat has criticized Mead for the conventionalist implications of his position. If the self is primarily formed through the internalization of the other, he asks, how does one account for individuation and difference? Tugendhat goes so far as to say that Mead’s theory points in the direction

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of Heidegger’s das Man and that we would all be indistinguishable ciphers. Habermas in one of his usual clever moves— sophistical, I would say—in an attempt to try and circumvent the Freudian opposition of the individual and the group, the individual and the collective, instinctually embodied, driven individual who has to submit to the requirements of civilized social life, takes the slogan from Mead that individuation is socialization, and socialization is individuation. There is a certain truth-content to that, but it leaves out the whole intrinsic opposition between the embodied, driven biological individual and the demands of the collective. The first generation of the Frankfurt School clung to Freud’s instinct theory, even though it may have had reactionary implications, because they thought it presented a limit to how far socialization, administration, assimilation could go, that it placed some limits that could be seen as a safeguard, a preserve of individuality. Axel Honneth: Thank you. There are many points, and I don’t know whether I can go into all of them. Let me make one general remark at the beginning, and then I would like to come to two main points, because I think some of the other points are connected with these two central points. The general remark is that I completely agree with what you pointed out at the beginning about the Freudian divide, and that means that the only reason we have to keep returning to psychoanalysis, and to the Freudian program (if not in its original form), has to do with the fact of certain elements of unsociability between human beings or with certain elements of negativity within human life. I think it wouldn’t make any sense to go back to Freud if I would not be  driven by the intent to explain and to gain certain access to the conditions of such a negativity or such an unsociability. This seems to me to speak heavily against the overly optimistic revisionist movement within psychoanalysis, which probably

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unintentionally somewhat got rid of all that. This general remark means that this is also true for me. The reason I believe that within critical theory there should be a permanent rethinking of the Freudian program has to do with skepticism against a too easy kind of rationalism within our social theory. We should be skeptical of a too easy rationalism for at least two reasons. First, I think critical theory has very good reasons to be skeptical about the assumption of a rational moral self. It should be interested in a more complex moral psychology because we have sufficient good reasons to believe that the moral agent is also always driven by some not completely conceivable and therefore probably unconscious drives. So our moral psychology should be much more complex than that kind of moral psychology that is normally offered within courses on ethics and moral theory. So this is one reason. The second reason is a simple reason, namely, that when you try to explain social reality, and when you try to explain social action, it is in my view undeniable that a lot of those actions cannot be sufficiently explained without recourse to some kind of unconscious motives. And I’m not even sure whether somebody who is half a well-oriented social theorist would deny that. It is so undeniable that people don’t act simply out of rational reasons, but are very often driven by motives, wishes, needs that they are not conscious of, that it needs some kind of explanatory strategy to get a more detailed picture of the origins of these unconscious motives. And I believe that, for that job, the psychoanalytic tradition is still the best alternative. And therefore I think we have to come back again and again to the Freudian program and try to rearticulate it and to reactualize it with the empirical research of our time in view. I think we both probably agree about that. We can’t simply take on the Freudian project while ignoring what has gone on in

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infant research, for example, over the last thirty years. There are a lot of observations and indications, which make it very difficult to defend all Freudian hypotheses. So there is not only a permanent need to go back to Freud, but there is probably also a permanent need to reform Freud and to correct Freud. And this is simply because research is ongoing. Today we know probably much more about the infant than Freud ever could know. For example, we know there is a very early competence or ability of the very young child to differentiate between not only itself and the surrounding world but also to identify within that surrounding world intentional subjects. Which implies that the baby has the capacity from very early on—Stern says the third month or something like that 3—to differentiate the core self from other intentional subjects. The baby can identify the primary caretaker, is probably even able to identify other intentional subjects in its surrounding, and can demarcate even the intentional subjects from the world. I even read research which was incredibly interesting—but which is probably not very helpful for our discussion—that babies at the age of three months can differentiate between an animal and a human being, which means they make differences between degrees of intentionality, which is unbelievable. If you have a dog in your household, a baby at the age of three months can distinguish between levels of intentionality and segments of nonintentional reality. OK, we have learned all this, which has a lot of implications for Freud’s reconstruction of the development of unconscious drives. This remark simply means that I think we are under both injunctions, namely, on the one hand, to go back to Freud endlessly, because of this divide, because of this huge insight in the importance and unavoidability of the unconscious and connected with it the insight into a certain unsociability of the human being, and, on the other hand, permanently to revise Freud because of

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the progress in infant research. This is simply a very general remark. Let me readdress the question in the following way: How can we keep the Freudian idea of an unsociability, or even an antisociability within the human being when we have to take into consideration the empirical research about the very early competences of the young child to be able to make differentiations within social reality and within its environment, which doesn’t allow us any longer to keep to the original Freudian idea of primary narcissism. What does that change, and how can we preserve an idea of the unsociability when we on the other side have to accept the classical idea that the driving motor for this unsociability is primary narcissism? So that seems to me to be the task. And this is how I understand what we are confronted with. So let me come to the, in my view, two main points, where there are certain differences between us. I would call it, first, the question of the antisocial self and, second, the prelinguistic self. I think we agree more about the second than about the first. So the antisocial self, which means now the task to explain given all the empirical research today on the table, the possibility of a certain antisocial temptation, drive, antisocial impulse in human beings. So I take it that, or I agree with you that, the critique of Freud’s concept of primary narcissism does not require from us to give up the idea of very early stages of fusion or periods of fusion. So with respect to that I am on the side of Fred Pine and always try to stick to Pine’s wonderful criticism of Stern.4 Which means, roughly, even when we accept all of what I just said about the very early infant, we can’t exclude— and there is no good empirical evidence that we should—that this young infant and even the primary caretaker are going through episodes of affective moments of fusion. This means that in the very early beginning there are obviously

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moments of enormous importance for the emotional development of the infant, where it is experiencing—as Hegel would put it—being one with the primary caretaker. I guess that there is, at least when you take Pine and others, very good empirical confirmation for believing that the child is going through such moments, which indicate, in my view, that even when there is a core self from the beginning able to differentiate, that beside that core self must be a kind of fusion self. I mean that there must also be, momentarily and over episodes, a self, which is experiencing the other as not an independent being but as a being with which it is completely fused or merged. These two developments and these two stages can go together, though they probably have different cognitive and affective importance for the development of the child. The substantial question with regard to these periods or episodes of fusion is how exactly to describe them and how to understand their ongoing importance for the further development not only of the child but also for our existential situation. My guess at that point is probably different from yours [Whitebook’s] because I would avoid using the concept of omnipotence to describe these moments or episodes of fusion. I don’t see really why that notion should be of any help. I think it is much better to use concepts like fusion, which means the experience of being completely sheltered, held, taken care of by a primary object, with which therefore you are so fused that you don’t see any resistance and independence in the other. It’s the absence of independence of the other which makes these moments of fusion so important. They are so important because that means the experience of separation or of loss of that fused primary object is accompanied by feelings of anxiety, sorrow, panic, which are therefore refused. So there is a first, let’s say, initiative, drive for the refusal of the independent other, and that goes back to the momentary,

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episodic experiences of being fused with the other. This is how I see things at the moment. It all depends on how you understand Winnicott, but I think I am in agreement with Winnicott, even if Winnicott has a tendency to use the term omnipotence to describe these moments. I would avoid that terminology and then say that his enormously important insight into the internal relevance of transitional objects not only for the child in the very early stages, not only for the adolescent, which is now clearly shown by other research on adolescence, but also for us as adults can best be explained by reference to it because the transitional object is exactly that kind of ontological experience on which we are dependent in order to solve the panic experience of the independence of the other. We are somewhat driven along—I mean, our whole life—to somewhat fall back into that early experience of fusion in order to cope with the independent other. This would be for me the best way to explain the relevance of the transitional object: the anxiety which plays an enormous role for most of irrationally driven actions within society. I would therefore replace some of the Freudian notions by two or three other central concepts, of which he was aware. I still take Freud’s article of 1926 on inhibition, symptoms, and anxiety as the one of highest importance because that is already an indication of the possibility of object relations theory. That article is his way of finding out about the importance of interaction between—in his terms—mother and child, and anxiety is there: anxiety at the loss of the loved object and the anxiety of being confronted with an independent, no longer fused object. So I would replace primary narcissism not with an early stage of fusion, but rather with the experience of the infant of momentary affective stages of being fused with the other. This is the driving force behind avoiding the independent other. The infant is afraid of losing the illusion of fusion, and therefore of being

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confronted with the other as no longer the completely resistless and therefore completely the other as the one with which I am fused. So much about the antisocial self, it practically comes down to the idea that all that there is of antisocial drives in us and the many many different forms it takes, and the many reminiscences this has for the life of the adult, can be best explained in my view—when we take all the empirical research about early development into consideration—by these early experiences of being fused with, and the anxiety stemming from being confronted with the experience of the independent other, be it now the primary caretaker or other persons with which the early infant, and probably even the growing infant, feels him or herself fused in specific moments. The other question about the prelinguistic self is in my view completely independent of that, and I don’t see how these two concepts are related. Let’s put it this way, I can bring in recognition later, when we discuss this, but with regard to recognition what I just said means that the social patterns of recognition, those forms of institutionalized recognition in which we grow up, are always something which we, in certain moments of life, can’t experience as fully satisfying. They all equally fall short of that quality of fusion. All patterns of recognition are patterns of  relationships between independent subjects, and therefore there is probably a certain drive for rebellion against the existing forms of recognition, which also can explain why we are never fully content with even the highly developed forms of differentiated patterns of recognition. There is an uneasiness with recognition because it is a relationship between independent subjects, and these are not models of fusion between subjects, these are patterns of relationships between independent subjects. So the prelinguistic self, I think this is an enormously complicated question, I have to say, so let’s put it that—and I don’t want to

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speak about Habermas because I’m not sure whether you have presented him correctly, but I don’t want to go into Habermas exegesis now—I think what we simply have to accept, and I think there is nobody who would deny it, that there is a prelinguistic self. How to deny it, when all empirical research is demonstrating that there is something like a core self— and core self means now—what does it exactly mean?—it means that the early infant has the capacity at its disposal to experience itself being differentiated from the outside world. This means that the infant has a certain capacity to differentiate between self and the world. The infant even has the capacity to differentiate in that world between different types of entities: things, animals, human beings— degrees of living, degrees of life. This must mean and must include that there is a prelinguistic self. This is not the same as the presocial self because the idea of a presocial self is a little bit hard to understand, especially when you accept the empirical research, which shows that the infant is already capable of identifying intentional human actors and therefore has a certain very early impression of its relation to other subjects. I mean, the smile, the smile of the primary caretaker. If we accept Stern’s descriptions, and if we accept therefore the idea of a core self, then the infant or baby is capable of having the idea already of an interaction, an affective interaction, an emotional interaction, between itself and the other. And the episodes of fusion are accompanying these experiences of a core self and these countertendencies within this early period, obviously. So there is a prelinguistic self, which is probably already from quite early on a social self, because it places itself within the social world. I mean it is obviously able to identify others as others. In specific moments not accepting their independence, which is something else. There is in that sense clearly a prelinguistic self.

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So what does that imply for all the rest? It probably indicates that there is from quite early on a very primitive I-perspective, the perspective of an I differentiated from a we or a they or a you. That can help to explain why all developed forms of intersubjectivity and of interaction are, or have, one of their moments in that I-perspective. And that I, the prelinguistic self, which is a very primitive perspective of the self, is developing, and the question is what are the central mechanisms of that development. I think that the whole idea that linguistification is one of the central mechanisms of the growth of that self is still the most plausible one. As far as I can see, not even philosophers of mind deny that language takes over a lot of the task to socialize that self. That kind of linguistic socialization or the integration into shared language contributes to the development of a lot of further capacities of the growing infant—for example, probably reflexivity and definitely rational argumentations. Reflexivity because—if you follow Wittgenstein and others—it is only by being part or becoming part of a linguistic life form that we can have a kind of reflexive responsiveness to our own needs. The articulation of our needs is dependent on being integrated into a linguistic life form. So that means that it is only the reflexive self or the rational self—rational now meaning that self, even when it is driven by some unconscious drives, born in anxiety—is a linguistic self. This means I would accept the idea of the existence of a prelinguistic self, but I would deny that that prelinguistic self outroots or diminishes the importance of language, because language then is the medium by which that prelinguistic self develops certain further competences, capacities, by which it becomes a full member of the social world. That would mean that the acceptance of the core prelinguistic self, and therefore of an early developed I-perspective, is something we can’t get rid of—which means there is always an undeniable,

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unavoidable I-perspective on everything I experience within interaction. So that prelinguistic self doesn’t exclude in any way the enormous role of language for the formation of the mind. JW: There are I think two points I’d like to respond to. In some ways, it seems like ours is just a terminological disagreement, but I think there are more substantial consequences at stake. I just want to key in on one point. Axel agrees with Pine, and I agree with Pine, that what the infant researchers have shown is, as Pine put it, the baby is far more reality-oriented than the Freudian picture had ever imagined. But what Pine argues, and Axel and I agree with this too, is that alongside these moments of reality-orientedness, there are also moments of fusion.5 In fact, he makes the point that the baby has to be in a nonexcited state of reality-orientedness in order to run the experiments on them that determine their reality-relatedness. That is the petitio principii of infant research. And they’re only in those states for a small part of the day. For a major part of the day they are either sleeping or in more stuporous states. One analyst made the clever remark that real infant research would be to try to get into the infant’s mind when they’re in these nonreality-oriented states. But that’s not the main point. So we agree there are fusional experiences. Pine suggests seeing a baby, satiated at the mother’s breast and falling asleep, and the bodies molding together, and the boundaries pushing together—we can’t prove it, but there’s reason to assume there’s something like the experience of fusion in those moments. So, we agree that the baby is more reality-oriented than the Freudian picture had it, but we also agree that that doesn’t rule out the existence of fusional states. The important question becomes: how much importance to attach to them? Now I want to key in on Axel’s claim that we shouldn’t use the term omnipotence to characterize these fusional states. I think what he’s done is in

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fact describe omnipotence but not name it. If I understand him properly, we have these very, very powerful fusional states, and when they break down, when separation occurs, that produces anxiety and distress. When the baby recognizes the independence of the object, recognizes that the object can be frustrating as well as satisfying, that produces what Kleinians call primitive anxieties concerning the independence of the object. At that point, the infant, in an attempt to deal with those intense anxieties, mobilizes what the Kleinians call primitive or manic defenses. Now, to me, that’s omnipotence. The baby’s task is to learn to accept the independence of the object. The unfolding of the process consists in the experience that every time it gets a hint, a taste, of the independence of the objects, according to the Kleinians—and I think they’re right—the baby mobilizes manic defenses: splitting, dissociation, projection, projective identification, and so forth. All these defenses are designed to deny the independence of the object, and I would call that omnipotence. I would call them omnipotent defenses. One way to conceptualize omnipotence is the attempt to deny the independence of the object, to think that the object is not independent but that it is governed by my wishes, by my needs, by my desires. I think maybe whatever we call it, where we might differ here, and where this might affect our views on sociability, and where I might be influenced more by my experience as a clinician, I think it is the prevalence and the use of those omnipotent defenses that is one way to explain our antisocial tendencies, that throughout life the acceptance of the independent object is a problem— AH: We agree on that, but we don’t agree about how to describe the experiences which explain that unwillingness to accept the independent other. And I think there is a slight difference between describing these moments, or the reason for

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the cause for the fear and anxiety at the loss of omnipotence, whether you describe it as loss of fusion. Simply because loss of fusions mean the child is afraid, like the adult, of being no longer secured, held, cared, because the other has become independent, or is at risk of becoming independent. So the driving force is probably the wish for fusion, not the wish for omnipotence. There is a difference in your [Whitebook’s] account between using the notion of the wish for fusion, or the wish or need for omnipotence. Even if it’s a slight difference, it has another touch. The two notions are indicating another way to explain it. For me it is, let’s say, it is the—you can put it differently—it is the original experience to be so fully loved that the other is resistless and not independent, so that all your wishes, ambitions, intentions are experienced somewhat automatically, in a kind of fusional process, fulfilled. This is, if you want, the experience of fusion, and the anxiety, which develops very early on, is to lose that, and to have to become an independent subject, by the experience that the other is independent. And by saying the  other is independent we mean he is suddenly no longer resistless. He or she is a resistant element to your own wishes, intuitions, and intentions. JW: Axel, I grant you that the primary experience is fusional perfection, plenum, presence— as our French friends would say—no privation, and that’s the state of perfection that Freud describes in “On Narcissism.” And when that begins to break down, when the child experiences anxiety, privation, deprivation, and so on, it’s at that point—I’m not saying that omnipotence is original; I’m agreeing with you that the fusional experience is original— but when that starts to break down, the primitive anxiety that that creates mobilizes attempts to deny, disavow the independence of the object, through different omnipotent defenses. Omnipotence is the attempt, the manic

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attempt to try to deny the independence of the object. So omnipotence is not primary, I’m granting you that the wish to preserve the fusional state is primary, but, in the face of the anxiety when the fusional state breaks down, the child mobilizes different omnipotent defenses to deny the independence of the object. AH: I could say something, but I won’t say something now. I would love to say something [laughter], but I repress myself. JW: I think what’s interesting—I thought of it as you were saying it—there’s a paradox here. Because the whole struggle— if we believe the Kleinians and Winnicottians and so on—the whole struggle to accept the independence of the object is so monumental, and so difficult in early development, and—it occurred to me as you were talking—recognition, in a way, really assumes that sort of acceptance of the independence of the other, the independence of the object. In a way, it presupposes a very sophisticated state of subject-object differentiation. But there’s a way. When Loewald talked about it he got in a lot of trouble, but I think he was right. He says when we really understand our patients, recognize and accept them in their own rights, that’s when we love them the most. And he quotes several scientists, who say that when they finally solve a mathematical formula, for example, when they grasp the object in its own right, that’s when they love it the most. AH: I would like to come back to the question of omnipotence. I try to avoid that notion, and the reasons for why I try to avoid it are because it describes the mechanisms by which the infant tries to avoid or cope with the expectation of loss in a too-self-centered way, as if what this is all about is gaining control, of gaining power over the world. But this is not what is at issue in these mechanisms which the infant tries to apply in order to avoid separation, to avoid the loss of the fused object. I  would much more prefer to describe them with the notions

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I  think Winnicott very often used for these defense mechanisms when he describes the transitional object. The transitional object is the exploration of an ontological sphere where the separation between independence and dependent world is not existing. That is the definition Winnicott gives. It is an ontologically specific place. For us, listening to music, for the adult, that is what Winnicott is saying. When we are listening to music, that is a transitional object for us. What makes it so specific is that it doesn’t allow a distinction between the independent world and, let’s say, my world. I would much prefer to describe the different defense mechanisms along these lines, namely that these defense mechanisms are not about regaining some omnipotence or some kind of power over the world, which then is at my disposal, this is too self-centered. I think that these defense mechanisms are about avoiding the experience of separatedness and independence. And the transitional object exactly does this. JW: Yeah, but here you’re really, I think, exemplifying my worries about the use of Winnicott. Because there are transitional phenomena that allow the child to negotiate separation and independence in a felicitous way, they allow us to continue negotiating separation and independence as adults—that’s fantastic. But you’re really leaving out the dark side of Winnicott. Because he talks about control of the object, he talks about aggression—even destruction of the object. AH: Sure, I mean there is room for aggression; aggression is not a defense mechanism—with aggression the child tests the independence of the world. By beating the mother, he tries to test whether there is an independent world. That’s where aggression is coming into play— JW: to control the mother, to block her independence . . . under the use of the object—

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AH: I read him differently, but I would say the aggression comes in because it is that instrument, aggressive acts are that instrument by which the infant tests, in order to avoid the experience, tests the independent reality, by beating— JW: I would say that—I mean you see this really in his clinical writings, what the patient does with the analyst—is not so much to test the independence of the object, but is to control the object in order that it won’t become independent, to exert its power over the object to disallow its independence. AH: That would make a big difference in the description.

NOTES

1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

This chapter originally appeared in Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 23, no. 2 (June 2016): 170–179. Joel Whitebook, “Die Grenzen des ‘intersubjective turn’. Eine Erwiderung auf Axel Honneth,” 57 Psyche 250 (2003). This aspect of Castoriadis’s position is elaborated in Joel Whitebook, “Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche: Habermas and Castoriadis on the Unconscious,” Praxis International 9 (1989): 347– 364. Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Fred Pine, “The ‘Symbiotic Phase’ in Light of Current Infancy Research,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 50 (1986): 564–569. See also Fred Pine, Drive, Ego, Object, and Self: A Synthesis for Clinical Work (New York: Basic Books, 1990), chapter 11. Moments is Pine’s technical term; see Pine, chapter 11.

2 HATE, AGGRESSION, AND RECOGNITION Winnicott, Klein, and Honneth C. Fred Alford

F

or several decades now, D.  W. Winnicott has been drawn upon by social theorists. Perhaps the most influential is Axel Honneth (1996, 1999), whose theory of recognition is based on Winnicott at least as much as on Hegel. My argument is that Winnicott’s theory lacks the resources to explain the degree of organized hate and aggression we have seen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Melanie Klein provides a more useful way to think about hate and aggression. Honneth integrates Winnicott to his account of mutual recognition. Klein resists integration. In many respects, this resistance is good. Klein’s account is fundamentally liberal: about the individual psyche in a world of individuals. Nevertheless, the reparative element in Klein is strong and provides the intellectual and emotional resources to build a more just world. Winnicott’s account is, on the surface, better suited to the reconciliation that has been the goal of three generations of the Frankfurt School: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse in the first generation; Jürgen Habermas in the second; and Axel Honneth in the third. In fact, Klein is a theorist of love, guilt, and reparation. In this regard, she deserves our attention, even as it is

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difficult to weave her account into an emancipatory social theory. Klein does not serve utopia but a more humane world. What is it about Winnicott that makes him so popular? For Honneth, it is Winnicott’s account of the symbiotic relationship between mother and child. In fact, Winnicott’s account is subtle, different from the way in which symbiosis is commonly understood.

BLOOD, HATE, AND WINNICOT T The twentieth century was the bloodiest in world history: over 100 million killed in armed conflict— over 160 million if one includes “democide,” such as the 40 million Russian deaths ordered by Stalin. The twenty-first century is not starting out as bloody, but it is terrible enough. More than 100 million people have been displaced around the world due to war and persecution, the largest movement of refugees since World War II (www .unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html). The level of violence in parts of the world is staggering. Aleppo and Mosul are exemplary. Al-Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL are cultures of the death instinct. No one has ever rigorously counted the number of dead during and subsequent to the United States invasion of Iraq, but most estimates place the number at well over half a million (www .iraqbodycount.org). It is unnecessary to posit a death drive, as Freud does, in order to explain this violence, but any criticaltheoretical account must take humanity’s propensity toward hatred and violence seriously. According to Melanie Klein (1975a), aggression is an expression of envy, hate, and sadism, all of which are manifestations of the death instinct. Since the death drive is innate, so too are envy, hate, and sadism, even in the newborn infant. How Klein’s

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concept of the death drive (Todestrieb) differs from Freud’s is important. This difference is addressed later, as Klein’s relevance to the project of critical theory is clarified. For Winnicott, on the other hand, the mother hates the baby before the baby hates the mother (1958). There is no need for reparation, as Klein calls it, for there is no place for sadism, primary envy, and the evil that takes pleasure in destruction for its own sake. For Winnicott, aggression is an expression of creativity and a way of acknowledging the reality of the external world. Best known for his account of transitional spaces and relationships, toward the end of his career Winnicott turned to another way of thinking about relationships, what he came to call the use of an object. The use of an object is marked by the ruthless exploitation of the other, the greedy consumption of everything the other has to offer and more. That sounds bad. Winnicott thinks it is good, for it is through this process that the reality of the external world is created. “It is the destructive drive that creates the quality of externality. This is central in the structure of my argument,” says Winnicott (1989:226). If, that is, the object resists destruction. The result is not just the recognition of an objective reality outside the self, but frequently joy at a world outside me, one that I might take pleasure in. Only through the unsuccessful attempt to destroy objective reality do we come to recognize a reality separate and distinct from the self. Winnicott treats the ruthless use of an object as a type of communication, frequently inventing little dialogues (mock Punch-and-Judy dialogues, Adam Phillips calls them) to illustrate the relationship. “The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you. You have value for me because of your survival

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of my destruction of you. While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy’” (Winnicott 1971:90). Consider, Winnicott (1989:227), continues, a man who buys a beautiful painting. He cares for and protects the painting in order to destroy it in unconscious fantasy over and over again. If he didn’t, he couldn’t really relate to the painting; it would never be an independent source of enjoyment, one that “can feed back other-than-me substance.” Of course, were his painting to be destroyed by a vandal, that would be entirely different. It would be the difference between fantasy and reality. It would not, however, be a difference in the strength of the destructive impulses, only in the ability to sublimate them creatively (1989:232). Maturity is about destroying the object in fantasy so that one can use it in reality. “The price that has to be paid [for the reality of the external world] is acceptance of the ongoing destruction in unconscious fantasy” (1989:223). Winnicott’s idea is stranger than first appears. For Freud (1911), one would destroy the object because it is beyond one’s omnipotent control, because its independent reality frustrates the will. This, not just the overarching death drive, is a source of aggression. The autonomy of reality denies my place at the center of things and makes me angry. Winnicott is saying the opposite. For Freud, the otherness of reality is infuriating. Otherness comes first. For Winnicott, it is the destructive impulse that creates the quality of externality or otherness, and it is this externality that makes the object available for satisfaction. With the term creates, Winnicott means something like Kant’s synthetic a priori: destructiveness allows us to discover in nature what our minds allow to be there, the real separateness of the object. Not the act of reparation, by which we attempt to make amends for our destructiveness, but the mother’s continued

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survival in the face of her child’s attacks, is what makes her not just a separate reality but a valued one (Klein 1975a:283– 289). The mother survives on her own, and the child is overjoyed. Now the  child has someone to use, which brings pleasure to both mother and child. People want to be used. It is a deep source of satisfaction. “For most people the ultimate compliment is to be found and used” (Winnicott 1987:103). Using and being used by other people is one of the ways people get close to each other, almost as though one could reach out and take what one needs from inside the other person. It sounds destructive, invasive, and it is, but only if we can’t distinguish between reality and fantasy must it hurt the other. If it is just through a ruthless encounter with the other that we become convinced of the other’s separateness, then the absence of this encounter must make it seem as if the other is not only incredibly vulnerable (as one has not had the experience of the other successfully resisting one’s attempts to destroy it) but also not quite separate. The other’s otherness will continue to be recognized, but somewhere there will always be a doubt, if not about the other’s otherness, then about the other’s ability to survive—that is, to be autonomous and free. For Winnicott, then, aggression is an innate part of creativity, in which I must imagine the destruction of the other in order to be able to make the other real and to make it usable to me. It is worth comparing Winnicott’s account with that of the founders of the Frankfurt School. For Horkheimer and Adorno, intellectual appropriation is an act of destruction by which the object is reduced to its concept. With concepts, we appropriate the world, what the Frankfurt School called instrumental reason. The result is to deform the object, subjecting it to human needs. There is no “ruthless use of the object” that does not result in its appropriation.

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For Horkheimer and Adorno, the world is more fragile than Winnicott’s good enough mother. To make infancy the model of intellectual appropriation underestimates the power of the concept to overwhelm the separate reality of the object. To make the resistance of the object to destruction evidence of its reality must make those objects (people) who are destroyed somehow less real. Read in this vein, Winnicott is onto something important about human destructiveness, even if he never drew this conclusion. Destructiveness runs so rampant because its victims are not quite real. Victims derealize themselves by virtue of their own destruction. Winnicott is not usually read in this way: as a theorist who helps explain the way in which victims derealize themselves by being victims. Not in reality, of course, but in the eyes of their victimizers, who only become more vicious. I’m not sure if this is true. It is not the way Klein thinks about aggression, but it’s not terribly important than Klein be right and Winnicott wrong. What’s important is to recognize human destructiveness, and its seemingly endless appeal.

HONNETH Honneth would renew critical theory by substituting developmental psychology for Habermas’s account of transcendence through the presuppositions of language. In doing so, Honneth turns to object relations theory, particularly the work of Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin (1988). Both better explain, he believes, the forms of intersubjectivity that lead to the development of the self. Winnicott is especially valuable in this regard because his account of prelinguistic intersubjectivity gives content to Hegel’s notion of love as a form of recognition or “being oneself in another.”

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In order to use Winnicott in this way, Honneth interprets Winnicott’s account of being held as a form of symbiosis. Symbiosis is primary intersubjectivity. The care with which mother and others hold the child, says Honneth, “is not added to the child’s behavior as something secondary but is rather merged with the child in such a way that one can plausibly assume that  every human life begins with a phase of undifferentiated intersubjectivity, that is, of symbiosis” (Honneth 1996:98). For Honneth, object relations theory is well suited to the phenomenology of recognition, because it renders the bonds established early in childhood the medium through which a balance is struck between symbiosis and self-assertion (1996:98). As Honneth puts it, We can then proceed from the hypothesis that all love relationships are driven by the unconscious recollection of the original experience of merging that characterized the first months of life for “mother” and child. The inner state of symbiotic oneness so radically shapes the experiential scheme of complete satisfaction that it keeps alive, behind the back of the subject and throughout the subject’s life, the desire to be merged with another person.

(1996:105)

In “Postmodern Identity and Object Relations Theory,” Honneth makes a similar claim, arguing that the “primordial experience of symbiosis” is an “anthropological and ontological condition that the subject is continually compelled to replicate and reexperience throughout her life” (Honneth 1999:240; Petherbridge 2015:158). While not entirely mistaken, there is a subtlety to Winnicott’s account of “symbiosis” (Winnicott never uses the term) not captured by Honneth. In Honneth’s account, “If it is true that small children only learn to organize their mental capacities by

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internalizing an early pattern of interaction through the stable care provided by the mother (or another primary caretaker), then this phase must be preceded by an experience of unity, a lack of separation between the subject and reality” (Honneth 2012:208). It’s hard to see why the internalization of an early pattern of care must be preceded by symbiosis. In fact, for Winnicott there is no real difference between these two stages. The pattern of care with which Winnicott is concerned is called attunement, in which the parent mirrors the child, generally in another dimension. The child smiles, and mother laughs and wiggles her shoulders in response. This is what Winnicott calls holding, and if it works the child is unaware that he or she is being held. The child is free to be. What looks like symbiosis from the outside is actually an interaction between two people. Perhaps this is what Honneth means when he calls symbiosis “undifferentiated intersubjectivity.” Otherwise, the term is hard to understand. If the child is held securely, she does not have to think about being herself. She just is, free to experience life, free to be. In failed holding, the child must hold herself, containing her overpowering feelings. The result is the development of what Winnicott calls a “false self,” always responding to others. Why not just call it symbiosis and leave it at that? Because the child experiences himself neither as fused nor separate. The question does not arise, and Winnicott believes that our most authentic moments of being have this quality. To call it symbiosis is not wrong; it just doesn’t differentiate between the experience as seen from the outside versus experienced from the inside. From the inside, it’s not symbiosis. It’s just being, especially for the child. Allowing the child to experience just being is the outcome of attention, but not too much, or too little. Too much crushes the child with its overbearingness; too little drops the child with its inattention. Symbiosis, if that is what one wants to call it, is hard work.

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Joel Whitebook (2001:278– 280) and Danielle Petherbridge (2015:150) are critical of Honneth’s positing of an original symbiotic state. The empirical work done by Daniel Stern (2000) and  collected in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, establishes that infants as young as two months begin to establish a “core self,” able to make predictions about what he or she can expect from his or her environment. Through this process, the infant becomes aware of its own qualities (Stern calls them “self-invariants”), which help the child distinguish itself from its environment. The child also develops generalized representations of its interactions with its primary caregiver during this time, a concept developed by attachment theory (Bowlby 1983; Ainsworth 1968). Particularly important is the caregiver’s ability to help the child regulate its emotions, as when the child is overexcited, and mother holds her or him calmly. Eventually, the child will internalize these experiences, learning to contain her or his own  emotional state. At other times, mother will mirror the child’s emotions, as discussed earlier. Both are necessary for human emotional development. At around seven months, the child becomes aware that her or his thoughts and experience are different from those of others, that there is a gap between her or his subjective reality and that of others. At around fifteen months, the child develops the verbal ability to represent objects. Before this the infant and young child is preverbal, but not a presubject. Subjectivity is not a verbal state; it is a state of awareness that requires a distinction between self and other. Stern has demonstrated that this begins as early as two months. It’s a process, not just an achievement. Stern (1985:163) is rightly ambivalent about the achievement of language, recognizing that for all the gains language allows, a certain immediacy of experience is lost. Without words, all

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experience is something like the experience of the sublime. Rilke calls it the terror we are still just able to bear (Duino Elegies, first elegy). Without words, experience threatens to overwhelm us, much like the chestnut tree that threatened to overwhelm Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea, so overwhelmingly real it was about to absorb him in its mere being. With words, experience is broken down into pieces. Adam’s naming of the animals was the first act in the human domination of nature, according to Horkheimer and Adorno (2007:205). I devote so much attention to Stern because Honneth’s response is interesting. Referring to Stern, Honneth argues that “a lot of effort ought to go into refuting the empirical objections raised today against the assumption of a primordial state of symbiosis” (Honneth 1999:233). Why should so much effort be spent on refuting Stern? 1 Because without symbiosis there can be no utopia of mutual recognition. For the first generation of the Frankfurt School, utopia was represented by the ganz anders, the entirely different. It is this built-in moment of negation in all of us that is the source of protest against the given. To be sure, the ganz anders is generally suppressed, but it finds expression in literature and art. Consider Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Almost a maid . . . she made herself a bed within my ear And slept in me . . . Within her slept the world. You singing god, o how Did you perfect her so she did not long To be awake. She rose and slept. Where is her death?

(first elegy, quoted in M arcuse 1955:162)

Asked how he could talk in terms of a theology without God, Horkheimer replied that both he and Adorno had always referred

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not to God, but to the “yearning for the entirely Other” (Sensucht nach dem Anderen). Elaborating, Horkheimer said that the prohibition of uttering the name of God “was a hidden Jewish Maxim in critical theory.” In this act of not naming, as Dialectic of Enlightenment argued, lay the subversive power of the Jews and critical theory as well (Rabinbach 2014:272). Honneth has a fallback position. It is an act of saving the appearances, as Owen Barfield (1988) called it, but a particularly good one. In my view, a way out of this dilemma, which today appears to represent a scientific anomaly within psychoanalysis, would be to assume that the early phase of infancy represents not a permanent state of fusion, but momentous episodes of fusion with primary objects. Although children are often capable of sensing a core self that is separate from the external world, they sporadically enter into a state of experience in which the actions of their primary caretakers appear as extensions of their own needs, to the degree that they can experience themselves as fused with their primary caretakers.

(Honneth 2012:226)

Though Winnicott relies more on what he calls transitional objects to resolve this tension between autonomy and fusion, Honneth and Winnicott seem to be talking about similar experiences. Whereas the first generation of the Frankfurt School sought to maintain utopia by the power of the ganz andern, Honneth would save it through original experiences of organic relatedness, experiences that can never be realized again even if the child is fortunate enough to have experienced it with his or her caretaker through mirroring and holding. Honneth puts it this way. “As

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deep-seated feelings of security lost forever, they compel us to strive for those fractured forms of intersubjectivity that take on the form of mutual recognition between mature subjects” (229). A faint echo of Marcuse is present here. As the pleasure principle (Eros) leads us to long for nirvana, the peace that passes all  understanding, so experiences of being perfectly understood, mirrored but not anticipated, lead us to try to find it again in “fractured forms of intersubjectivity.” Attunement lost leads us to find its unfinished replacement in social relationships as adults. Trouble is, this desire unmet also leads to the fusion of following charismatic leaders and mob psychology. One does not have to be a liberal rationalist to recognize that the longing for fusion is risky business once it enters the political arena. Better it should be satisfied in love relationships, families, and communities. When the need for fusion is met there, it is not so likely to intrude into politics in perverse form. This is the thesis of Erich Fromm (1994), a first-generation Frankfurter whom Marcuse (1955:241–245) read as a “neo-Freudian revisionist.” But about this point Fromm seems correct.

KLEIN Melanie Klein is the founder of object relations theory. Hers too is a social theory, but her vision of humanity differs considerably from Winnicott’s. For Klein, the infant is possessed by the death drive, expressed as envy of the giving mother so powerful that the infant would destroy the source of life itself (Klein 1975a). In order to protect its mother, and so the source of life, the infant and young child splits the mother into the good mother and the bad mother. 2 Klein calls this the paranoid-schizoid position, a

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normally occurring psychotic state, a formulation for which she was often criticized. Unlike stages of development, positions are never outgrown. The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions vie with each other throughout life. The death drive that Klein writes about is in some respects more troublesome, more extreme, than Freud’s death drive, which ultimately seeks the cessation of stimulation, death as nirvana, the peace of the womb (Freud 1920:55–56). For Klein, the death drive is an expression of hatred against life itself. As Meira Likierman (2001:110) puts it, “to attribute destructive impulses to the infant was one thing; it was quite another to propose a curious anti-life tendency which underpins attacks on the very mothering resources that are essential to mental growth.” For Freud, the death drive (Todestrieb) ultimately aims at nirvana, experienced in silence, sleep, night, and death. Aggression expressed in war and otherwise is but a detour from a state of tensionless existence/nonexistence. As Freud put it, And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.

(Freud 1930:121– 122)

For Klein, nirvana plays no role. The death drive expresses itself in the desire to destroy the source of life itself. In this respect Klein’s death drive is more awesome, more terrible.

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This, though, is not the whole story. Klein also writes about what she calls the depressive position, in which the infant and young child desperately desires to make reparation to his mother for all the harm he has caused her, at least in phantasy.3 Eventually, reparation comes to include genuine love and concern for the other. Originally, reparation too is a selfish impulse, as the infant is motivated by fear that he has destroyed the source of life itself (Klein 1975b). Of course, this infant does not think this way to himself or herself. Klein is writing about unconscious phantasy, a terrifying world that is nonetheless not bereft of love and concern. Indeed, it is the fragility of love in the face of hate that makes this unconscious world so terrifying. Dividing the world into good and bad objects is originally a way of protecting the good object from one’s own aggression. The successful division of the world in this way preserves the good object, allowing for the later integration of good and bad, love and hate. Some people never do this, remaining in the paranoid-schizoid position all their lives. Among them are political leaders. Most people revert to the paranoid/schizoid position under stress, for positions are not stages to be outgrown, but psychological tendencies that remain with us all our lives. For Klein, analysis was interpretation, in which she would interpret the child’s or adult’s phantasies back to him or her. In this way, she confronted the patient with the content of his or her unconscious. The theory, which seems right as far as it goes, is that knowledge of the drama of love and hate within would make it more bearable, less likely to express itself in symptoms, such as anxiety. How Klein made interpretations depended on the age of the patient. With children, she used the play technique, which she developed in order to work with children too young to verbalize their terrors. Ultimately, it should be remembered, this

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terror is of the self and the destructiveness it would unleash on those we most love and depend upon. For contemporary Kleinians, the goal is not so much interpretation of anxiety as it is the containment of anxiety, in which the analyst uses the “transferencecountertransference,” as it is called today, to experience the patient’s anxieties in a more mature way, returning them in less terrifying form (Grotstein 2009:8). The origin of this way of thinking is laid out by Hanna Segal (1981:134–135), Klein’s most influential student. When an infant has an intolerable anxiety, he deals with it by projecting it into the mother. The mother’s response is to acknowledge the anxiety and do whatever is necessary to relieve the infant’s distress. The infant’s perception is that he has projected something intolerable into his [mother], but the [mother] was capable of containing it and dealing with it. He can then reintroject not only his original anxiety but an anxiety modified by having been contained.

Analysis mimics the original mother-baby relationship, which comes closer to contained warfare than symbiosis, though perhaps symbiosis is not so passive or static as most imagine. The less terrifying the anxiety, the closer it can be brought to consciousness, with the result that the self is not so split. Splitting is the primordial defense against terror (Klein 1975c). It is also the primary barrier to reparation. The details of the analytic process are not so important. Important is Klein’s depiction of an inner world with which we all begin, populated by “holy babes in holy families plagued by the devils of the split off death instinct,” as Donald Meltzer (1978, part 3:115–116) dramatically puts it. This world, generated by the infant’s and young child’s anxieties, is a long way from Winnicott’s world

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of the ruthless use of the object. It could more accurately be characterized as a world in which one’s own hatred is always threatening to overcome the good, including the goodness upon which our own life and sanity depends—that is, the goodness of those who love and care for us (Klein 1975b:72– 75). Both Winnicott and Klein recognize childish destruction that persists into adulthood. But for Winnicott destructiveness is ultimately a form of creativity, one that helps make a world. For Klein, the infant’s first encounter with the outside world comes from sadistic attacks on the mother’s body (Klein 1975a:276). For Klein, the child’s sadism also makes a world, but not one we should want to live in, populated by antagonistic and destructive part objects threatening both self and loved ones. For Klein, creativity is how we make reparation for all the harm we have done in phantasy, and that comes later, when the self is not so split. For many, reparation never comes at all, as adults project their destructive hatred into others, finding and attacking it there, as though it were not originally our own. To be sure, the world is filled with real enemies, but there is nothing people desire more than to find worthy objects of their own hatred and destructiveness. This, though, only alienates us further from our own selves. Fear of destruction of the ego by the objects of one’s own aggressive phantasies is universal, or so Klein and others argued. In fact, no one has ever done the cross-cultural research to back this up. Like Freud’s Oedipus conflict, what is universal may in fact depend on how children are raised in different societies. The most we can say is that human destructiveness is so widespread that, if Klein is correct, fear of one’s own aggressive phantasies is universal, even as different cultures encourage different defenses. Human destructiveness stems from an attempt to alienate psychotic anxiety (that is, anxiety that threatens to annihilate

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the core self) in others, and fighting it there. Much of group life is an attempt to contain this psychotic anxiety. Groups do this in various ways, one of which is to attribute the fear group members feel to the machinations of outside agencies. Since groups generally are under threat by outside agencies (whether it is a department in a university fighting for scarce resources or a nation threatened by other nations), this defense is easily confused with reality. Frequently the leaders of groups and nations are those most adept at articulating its members’ and citizens’ paranoid-schizoid anxieties in narrative form, locating it in external agencies or, worse, internal saboteurs, a term borrowed from Ronald Fairbairn (1954). “Psychotic anxieties are ubiquitous, underlie all thought, provide the rationale for all culture and institutions and, in particular cases, help us to make sense of especially galling ways of being.” (Young 1997:71). One can readily read Hobbes’s Leviathan (1982 [1688], chapter 13) as an account of life in which the lack of culture and institutions means that each individual is left to her or his own to devices to confront her or his terror. This usually means inflicting this terror on others. Every man is enemy to every man. . . . Men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry . . . no knowledge . . . no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

In Hobbes’s account, human hatred and destructiveness become pathetic, as people experience not pleasure in destruction, but only temporary relief from their own psychotic anxiety, made real

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by the psychotic situation they find themselves in. Perhaps we are attached to our psychotic anxieties as we are attached to those we hate, and for the same reason: both give a locus and a focus to our dread of disintegration. Here, by the way, is a connection between Winnicott and Klein, both recognizing fear of disintegration as the deepest human anxiety, what holding contains in Winnicott, what enemies contain in Klein (Anderson 1997:152). If so, then attachment theory, particularly as developed by Ainsworth (1968), looks different from a Kleinian perspective. Not only are we attached to others, but these others contain parts of ourselves: horrifying parts, and good parts too, as well as an otherness we envy. Kleinian theory is not merely an alternative to attachment theory. Hers is an elaboration of attachment as defense against paranoid/schizoid anxiety as well as an opportunity and motive to make reparation. Indeed, it is the connection between attachment theory and Klein that makes her the first object relations theorist.

RELEVANCE FOR CRITICAL THEORY TODAY Honneth’s use of Winnicott is helpful, but only if we see symbiosis as more complex than fusion. Symbiosis is attunement. Such an account is compatible with Stern’s objection, for it takes an infant or young child able to distinguish self from other to participate in games of attunement, as they might be called. If I cannot feel the difference between myself and another, attunement is no different than being alone. The advantage of Honneth’s perspective is that it allows for a new vision of utopia, one not requiring the dialectical acrobatics of Marcuse necessary to transform Freud into a theorist of utopia.

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Instead, utopia is represented by the recollection as an adult of fragments of almost perfect recognition as a child. Here is the basis for the utopian element in Honneth’s mutual recognition. Nevertheless, there remains a difficulty not easily overcome. If Klein is right, and I believe that the state of the world supports her vision, we live in a world in which love is always at risk of being overwhelmed by hate. While individuals may make reparation in the depressive position, it is almost impossible for large groups or nations to do so. While individuals are often able to overcome the paranoid-schizoid position, groups almost never do. The paranoid-schizoid position is the foundation of nations: we are good, they are bad. Any badness in us is the result of the viscous intrusion of the other. Recall Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic, Moral Man and Immoral Society (2013). Unlike individuals, nations find it impossible to feel contrition for their sinfulness. Klein has been called a theorist of original sin. It’s an exaggeration, but it is true that hate and fear comes before love, as the paranoid-schizoid position precedes the depressive position. Unlike individuals, many of whom achieve and remain in the depressive position, almost everything about groups keeps them in the paranoid-schizoid position. Large groups and nations generally depend on their existence by creating enemies, dividing the world into enemies and allies. It’s an old story. Recall the ending of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a  Greek tragedy about the foundation of justice in Athens. The Furies have been tamed, and in response they encourage the  Athenians to unite. “Let them hate with a single heart. Much wrong in the world thereby is healed” (Eumenides, lines 986–987). Much wrong is healed, and as much or more will be done to others. The Oresteia was Klein’s (1975d) favorite Greek tragedy, the subject of a late essay of hers (Alford 1993). Hatred

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as a political force has received far less attention than love and fear, its emotional complements. Love, we learn early, may be translated into patriotism and loyalty, fear into obedience and the corruption of national spirit in diverse ways, from militarism to appeasement. But what of hatred? Hatred infiltrates and corrupts all the political virtues, such as patriotism, community, loyalty, tolerance, and citizenship. What is needed is the analysis of the way in which each of these virtues has its dark side, its correlate rooted in hatred, as when loyalty to one’s own nation depends on hatred of others. There is little that is utopian about this exercise, but it is necessary. Any serious account of politics must keep it firmly in mind.

NOTES 1. At the same time that Honneth is refuting Stern, he is using Stern to refute Joel Whitebook’s (2001:280– 285) argument that without an original experience of omnipotence posited by Freud, critical theory must lack the negativity required to criticize society and imagine a new one (Honneth 2012:222). Honneth does not value even the fantasy of omnipotence, for it too destroys mutual recognition. 2. Klein refers not to good and bad mothers but to the good and bad breast. She does so because she believes the infant only relates to part objects. I see no reason to adhere to her terminology here. 3. Kleinians spell phantasy with a ph to emphasize that it is unconscious phantasy they are talking about.

REFERENCES Ainsworth, Mary. 1968. “Object Relations, Dependency, and Attachment: A Theoretical Review of the Infant Mother Relationship.” Child Development 40:969–1025.

Hate, Aggression, and Recognition Z 7 1 Alford, C. Fred. 1993. “Greek Tragedy, Confusion, and Melanie Klein: or, Is There an Oresteia Complex?” American Imago, 50 (2): 157–169. Anderson, Robin. 1997. “The Unconscious: A Kleinian Perspective.” In The Klein-Lacan Dialogues, ed. Bernard Burgoyne and Mary Sullivan, 149–157. New York: Other. Barfield, Owen. 1988. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 2d ed. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. London: Virago. Bowlby, John. 1983. Attachment. New York: Basic Books. Fairbairn, Ronald. 1954. An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality. New York: Basic Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1911. “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 7:213–226. London: Hogarth, 1953–1974. Freud, Sigmund. 1920. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 18:7–64. London: Hogarth, 1953–1974. Freud, Sigmund. 1930. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24:59–148. London: Hogarth, 1953–1974. Fromm, Erich. 1994. Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt. Grotstein, James. 2009. But at the Same Time on Another Level. London: Karnac. Hobbes, Thomas. 1982 [1688]. Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson. New York: Penguin. Honneth, Axel. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Honneth, Axel. 1999. “Postmodern Identity and Object-Relations Theory: On the Seeming Obsolescence of Psychoanalysis.” Philosophical Explorations 2:225– 242. Honneth, Axel. 2009. “A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life: A Sketch of Adorno’s Social Theory.” In Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. James Ingram, 54– 70. New York: Columbia University Press. Honneth, Axel. 2012. The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition. Malden, MA: Polity.

72 Y C. Fred Alford Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 2007. Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Klein, Melanie. 1975a. “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of ManicDepressive States.” In Love, Guilt, and Reparation, vol. 1, The Writings of Melanie Klein, 262– 289. New York: Free Press. Klein, Melanie. 1975b. “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant.” In Envy and Gratitude, vol. 3, The Writings of Melanie Klein, 61– 93. New York: Free Press. Klein, Melanie. 1975c. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.” In Envy and Gratitude, vol.  3, The Writings of Melanie Klein, 1–24. New York: Free Press. Klein, Melanie. 1975d. “Some Reflections on the Oresteia.” In Envy and Gratitude, vol. 3, The Writings of Melanie Klein, 275–299. New York: Free Press. Likierman, Meira. 2001. Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context. London: Continuum. Marcuse, Herbert. 1955. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud. Boston: Beacon. Meltzer, Donald. 1978. The Kleinian Development. Perthshire: Clunie. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 2013. Moral Man and Immoral Society, 2d ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Petherbridge, Danielle. 2015. The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Phillips, Adam. 1988. Winnicott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rabinbach, Anson. 2014. “The Frankfurt School and the ‘Jewish Question,’ 1940–1970.” In Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, edited by Ezra Mendelsohn, Steffani Hoffman, and Richard Cohen, 255– 276. New York: Berghahn. Segal, Hanna. 1981. “A Psycho-Analytic Approach to the Treatment of Schizophrenia.” In The Work of Hanna Segal, 131–136. New York: Jason Aronson. Stern, Daniel. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books. Whitebook, Joel. 2001. “Mutual Recognition and the Work of the Negative.” In Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory, Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy, ed. William Rehg and James Bohman, 257– 291. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hate, Aggression, and Recognition Z 73 Winnicott, D.  W. 1958. “Hate in the Countertransference.” In Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, 194– 203. London: Tavistock, 1958. Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge. Winnicott, D. W. 1987. “Communication Between Infant and Mother, and Mother and Infant, Compared and Contrasted.” In Babies and Their Mothers, ed. Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis, 89– 103. London: Free Association Books. Winnicott, D. W. 1989. “On the Use of the Object.” In Psycho-Analytic Explorations, ed. Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis, 217– 246. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Young, Robert M. 1997. “Phantasy and Psychotic Anxieties.” In The KleinLacan Dialogues, ed. Bernard Burgoyne and Mary Sullivan, 65–82. New York: Other Press.

3 NARCISSISM AND CRITIQUE On Kohut’s Self Psychology Alessandro Ferrara

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rom the beginning, and across its generations, critical theory has sustained an intense dialogue with psychoanalysis. Early emphasis on Freud’s drive theory— attributed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer more critical import than allegedly “uncritical” ego psychology, undergirding Herbert Marcuse’s vision of an emancipated society, and in its topographical version taken by Jürgen Habermas as a model of knowledge inspired by an “emancipatory interest”— over time gave way to a greater openness toward “object-relation theory” on the part of critical theorists who, like Axel Honneth, have put recognition at the center of their reflections. The self psychology developed by Heinz Kohut during the period 1960–1981 has unduly remained out of the purview of critical theory. The main purpose of this chapter is to briefly reconstruct the main insights undergirding it and to highlight some of the contributions that it can offer to critical theory.

THE DYNAMIC VIEW OF THE SELF Psychoanalytic theory is traversed by a deep rift that opposes drive-theoretical to object relations accounts of the psyche. This rift

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is no invention of psychoanalysis but constitutes a disciplinespecific version of an ancient controversy within Western philosophy and social sciences.1 Political and social philosophy, long before psychoanalysis had come into its own, already were the locus of a polarization between an atomistic view of the human being (inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes) as coming into the world equipped with a drive for self-preservation, rationality, and an unbound desire for power destined to clash with the similar unbound desire of others and, on the other hand, a view of human beings (championed by Plato and Aristotle, in modern times by G. W. F. Hegel and George Herbert Mead) as intrinsically social or intersubjectively constituted. According to these rival views, human beings are destined to play out their inborn social nature or to derive abilities and motivations from interaction with significant others in the formative stage. The sociological tradition is traversed by a similar rift, being divided between methodological individualism championed by Herbert Spencer and Max Weber, and the variously holistic approaches of Émile Durkheim, Mead, Talcott Parsons. It is not surprising, then, that psychoanalytic theory should exhibit an analogous pattern. In psychoanalysis, however, the atomistic view of the individual (which in political and social philosophy arose as a modern reaction against two thousand years of hegemony of the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of the human being as embedded in community) was embraced by Sigmund Freud, the charismatic founder of the tradition. Then the drama was played in reverse order. The schools of ego psychology (Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm), object relations (W. R. D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, Harry Guntrip), and self psychology (Heinz Kohut) came to fruition subsequently and always tried to hedge, qualify, and mitigate their substantial rejection of the

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Freudian drive model, 2 with a figure like Melanie Klein occupying a unique position.3 The need to emphasize intrapsychoanalytic continuity, for the sake of increasing survival chances amidst a psychodynamic field crowded by many competing and more mainstream paradigms, explains at least partially why drive terminology occasionally continues to pop up even in the authors, like Kohut, who most markedly side with object relations. The drive model posited the presence of two equiprimordial instincts in each individual—libido and aggressiveness—that do not derive from experience but determine experience. They are internal forces with a specific evolution (more so libido, which goes through stages, less so aggressiveness), a target, and an intensity. They animate psychic dynamics by encountering gratification or frustration. While gratification generates pleasure and leads to an internal experience of satisfaction, frustration mobilizes all sorts of reactions, some of which are pathological. Freud’s drive/structure paradigm underwent reformulations that cannot be reconstructed here.4 Underneath these revisions, however, are two general assumptions subsequently subjected to deep scrutiny by object relations theorists. First, the idea that the clash of intrapsychic forces against reality or internalized commands (the superego) suffices to explain psychic life, and external (social, cultural, environmental) factors play only the role of stimuli but are never creators of psychic structure. Second, the idea that the self is just a representation of the whole of the psychic internal reality, inert from a dynamic point of view. Admittedly, this somewhat stylized rendition accounts more for the drive/structure paradigm as expounded by Freud in his “official,” explicit prises de positions than for the nuanced plies of his work, sedimented by accretion and left for interpreters to decipher in a properly balanced way.5 However, the gist of the paradigm and not the subtle nuances of Freud qua author is needed

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for the purpose of highlighting, by contrast, the novelty of Kohut’s contribution. Both assumptions, as well as Freud’s account of narcissism, became highly contentious in the object relations paradigm, and especially in Kohut’s self psychology. Kohut’s radical innovation consists of attributing not just a representational meaning, but a fully dynamic valence to the self. This move originated from the observation of certain clinical phenomena, notably narcissistic personality disorders, that fit neither the category of neurotic disturbances nor that of schizophrenic loss of contact with reality. For Freud, narcissism—a way station between the primitive autoerotism of the infant and the object love of the mature psyche—raises the difficulty of imagining a kind of libido distinctive of the ego and directed at the ego itself. Narcissism stands in an opposite relation to object love—“the more of the one [ego-libido] is employed, the more the other becomes depleted”6—and a “narcissistic object choice” represents an imperfect development, a kind of arrest on the way to object love, that the analyst must unblock in order to set the maturational process in motion again. Instead, dealing with patients with good adaptive skills, socially functioning, without gross symptomatic manifestations, yet lamenting feelings of unreality, phoniness, meaninglessness amidst material gratification, Kohut in The Restoration of the Self breaks decidedly with the whole drive imaginary. As he puts it, the attempt to make sense of these narcissistic patients’ condition with the aid of drive psychology and of the conceptual framework of the structural model of the mind— defenses vs. drives, ego vs. id; drive maturation vs. drive regression (or drive fixation); ego development vs. ego regression (or developmental arrest)—can be compared to the attempt to explain, within the framework of

Narcissism and Critique Z 79 aesthetics, the beauty or ugliness of a painting by examining the types and distribution of the pigments used by the painter.7

Kohut’s alternative is to understand the self no longer as an ego-generated representation, as up to Hartmann it was customary,8 but as a dynamic psychic force of its own.9 As a psychic structure, the self emerges from an optimal object relation with selfobjects capable of satisfying the child’s needs for both mirroring and idealization, the two human needs posited by Kohut as fundamental on the basis of his clinical experience. The child’s self—only a potential self at birth—“expects” empathic responses from the human environment in the same metaphorical sense as her body “expects” to find oxygen at the moment of detachment from the mother’s body. A bipolar self— or tripolar for the later Kohut—coalesces if the selfobjects, especially the mirroring one, are able to include the baby within their adult psychic organization and to respond to its need to be recognized as an autonomous human being. One caveat related to cultural history is in order, at this juncture. Kohut’s formative years were the 1940s and 1950s. By 1964 he was established enough to serve as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He could not have imagined that what was obvious to him (and to Winnicott, Kernberg, and many other object relation theorists)—i.e., that in the society familiar to him and them it is by and large women who do the postbirth mothering, and are then on the frontline as “first selfobject” or “mirroring selfobject”—half a century thereafter would become so contentious, in the light of the feminist critique of genderassociated roles, as to expose his psychoanalytic insights to the risk of running up against a wall of hermeneutic rejection. While it goes without saying that mirroring selfobjects need not be women, but only because of the gender division of labor

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prevailing, and rightly criticized by feminists, end up being mostly women, nonetheless it would be unfortunate to dissipate the groundbreaking insights conveyed by Kohut’s psychology of the self just because of their vulnerability to “less than charitable,” if not downright ideological, readings. For that purpose, with the sole exception of direct quotes from Kohut, in my reconstruction of his thought all references to “mothers” will hereafter be duly modified to gender-neutral “caregivers.” Thus, the caregiver who plays the role of mirroring selfobject must respond to the baby, later to the child, as a whole person, by attributing will and responsibility to her or to him and by accepting with spontaneous joy the expressions of her or his infantile grandiose exhibitionism and omnipotence. The key to a healthy development is not drive gratification but recognition. A child defecates and offers a fecal gift to his or her mirroring selfobject: whether the selfobject “accepts the fecal gift proudly— or if she rejects it or is uninterested in it—she is not only responding to a drive. She is also responding to the child’s forming self. She responds—accepting, rejecting, disregarding—to a self that, in giving and offering, seeks confirmation by the mirroring self-object.”10 The caregiver’s response, in turn, projects an echo in the child’s internal state. The child will experience not just the satisfaction of her or his need for cleanliness but “the joyful, prideful parental attitude or the parent’s lack of interest.” This attitude counts “not only as the acceptance or rejection of a drive, but also . . . as the acceptance or rejection of his tentatively established, yet still vulnerable creative-productive-active self.”11 Arrogance and self-centeredness—two traits commonly associated with narcissism—for Kohut are never the result of empathic mirroring, but compensatory reactions to faulty mirroring or “misrecognition.”

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For instance, a rejecting response on the part of the caregiver—e.g., indifference or concentration on disposing of the fecal gift without addressing the demand for recognition undergirding it and without offering inclusive emotional contact to the child— will result, especially if such response is part of a long-established relational pattern, in the fact that “the child’s self will be depleted and he will abandon the attempt to obtain the joys of selfassertion and will, for reassurance, turn to the pleasures he can derive from the fragments of his body-self.”12 Faulty mirroring leads to compensatory fixation on single parts of the body, bringing drive satisfaction back into the picture.13 A similar observation holds in relation to food. It is not the “need for food” as such that plays a psychic structuring role, but the need for “a food-giving self-object.”14 The child needs “food giving, not food,” and “if this need remains unfulfilled (to a traumatic degree) then the broader psychological configuration— the joyful experience of being a whole, responded-to self— disintegrates and the child retreats to a fragment of the larger experiential unit, i.e., to pleasure-seeking oral stimulation (to the erogenic zone) or, expressed clinically, to depressive eating.”15 Mirroring can also be in excess. Rare though it might be, excessive “mirroring” exists and produces pathological outcomes: “full gratification— «spoiling»—deprives the child of the opportunity for building psychic structure” and the ego “does not sufficiently develop its drive-controlling, drive-modulating, and drive-sublimating functions.”16 The passage shows that Kohut, far from advocating an overidealized (male) fantasy of a totally dedicated mother, operates from the premise that parental mirroring is always going to fall short (as caregivers resume their normal work life) and frustrate some of the child’s need. There is nothing wrong with these frustrations encountered by the child—the key psycho-developmental difference being

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whether they are gradual and can be metabolized or are traumatic and give rise to compensatory reactions. Adequate mirroring, however, is not all there is to a healthy self. The self goes through a second phase which can compensate, if needed, for the faulty outcome of the former: during this phase the need to idealize someone and to feel part of something great, calm, and strong must be fulfilled. If the new selfobject accepts with joy being idealized by the child, then the insufficient degree of empathic mirroring that may have characterized the relation with the first selfobject will not give rise to the exhibitionistic and narcissistic pathologies of the weak self.17 However, the caregivers who play this role can severely damage the burgeoning self of the child by refusing idealization due to their own pathological feelings of inadequacy, by turning a nonempathetic cold shoulder to their children’s need to merge with an idealized (for Kohut, paternal) figure, by expressing a demeaning attitude, by being unreachably distant because of involvement in their own narcissistic projects, or simply by being depressed and unavailable. Such occurrences then elicit a proneness to replace the failed figure with ever-shifting models for idealization in the hope of quelling the narcissistic vulnerability of the self by merging with something incomparably greater and more stable. For Kohut, then, need satisfaction is secondary. As a psychodynamic entity, the bipolar self is brought into being by the mutual encounter of demands for mirroring and idealization, empathic responses, innate potentials and expectations on the part of the selfobjects. The crucial variable is what could be called anticipatory recognition: the human environment reacts to even the smallest baby as if it had already formed such a self. . . . The crucial question concerns, of course, the point in time when, within the matrix of mutual empathy between the infant and his self-object, the baby’s innate

Narcissism and Critique Z 83 potentialities and the self-object’s expectations with regard to the baby converge. Is it permissible to consider this juncture the point of origin of the infant’s primal, rudimentary self.18

The individuality of the self emerges out of the selectivity inherent in the selfobjects’ responses: In countless repetitions, the self-objects empathically respond to certain potentialities of the child (aspects of the grandiose self he exhibits, aspects of the idealized image he admires, different innate talents he employs to mediate creatively between ambitions and ideals), but not to others. This is the most important way by which the child’s innate potentialities are selectively nourished or thwarted.19

Be that as it may, a conspicuous trace of the paradigmatic strife internal to psychoanalytic theory emerges from the care put by Kohut in presenting his selfpsychology as reconcilable with the Freudian paradigm. His strategy of accommodation consists of understanding drives as entering the psychodynamic picture only after a self has coalesced: I do indeed feel that the drive-and-defense and the structural models of the mind provide an adequate framework for explaining the essentials of those processes to which a firm self is exposed, or of processes initiated by a firm self, or in which a firm self is a participant, e.g., processes that concern the gradual acculturation of the growing child, including those involved in the Oedipus complex— as they originally occur and as they are re-activated in the classical neuroses of adult life.20

What happens to aggressiveness within Kohut’s theory? Here the clash with Freud’s view of an originary drive for

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aggressiveness could not be more evident. For Kohut, destructiveness is always derivative: It arises originally as the result of the failure of the self-object environment to meet the child’s need for optimal—not maximal, it should be stressed— empathic responses. Aggression, furthermore, as a psychological phenomenon, is not elemental. Like the inorganic building blocks of the organic molecule, it is, from the  beginning, a constituent of the child’s assertiveness, and under normal circumstances it remains alloyed to the assertiveness of the adult’s mature self.21

Even when occurring massively, aggressiveness is still secondary, a by-product of “an injury to the self.” As Kohut suggests, when during analysis a desire to kill is brought to consciousness, this hard-won awareness is still not the bedrock, but an “intermediate station” on the way to the real bottom of the abyss, where inevitably a narcissistic injury lies, which he further qualifies— resorting unwittingly to a Schmittian overtone—as “an injury that threatened the cohesion of the self,”22 a sort of “psychic state of exception.” Resorting to a different vocabulary, the “narcissistic rage” aroused by the breakup of the self, just as the splitting of the atom, releases devastating amounts of energy.23 Let me now turn to the insights, included in Kohut’s self psychology, that are specifically relevant for critical theory.

THE QUALIT Y OF RECOGNITION MAT TERS AS MUCH AS RECOGNITION ITSELF For a critical theory of recognition, Kohut’s work offers an insight into the crucial import of the mode of recognition. From

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the  “how” of the recognition received at the inaugural stage of  life, the destiny of the self largely, though not inexorably, depends. Mothers and fathers, by and large, respond to their children. Only very rarely, in extreme conditions, human infants fail to meet a recognizing figure ready to care for them. Thus the question is not whether at the beginning of the maturational process recognition is present or absent, but what kind of recognition one is met with. If the primary caregiver just feeds an infant, as an uninvolved stranger or a machine might do, without giving the infant contact with a food-providing, caregiving adult, then a defective recognition takes place that fails to sustain the sense of wholeness, self-acceptance, and healthy assertiveness in the burgeoning, yet still grandiose and narcissistically omnipotent, self. If an infant’s act of proud exhibitionism is met with indifference instead of joyous acceptance; if the caregiver’s eye does not light up at the sight of the child; if a gesture that calls attention to something in the world is responded to by the unempathetic caregiver with a countergesture that overrides the priority of the child’s gesture; if the caregiver imposes her own priorities or becomes unavailable on account of them; if the caregiver reduces the child to scan her or his face for indications of her or his mood like an old fisherman scans the horizon for guessing what the weather has in store: then and there, recognition is defective. It is not altogether absent: ministrations are made to the child, his presence is acknowledged, her conduct is taken notice of, but not in the proper way. Perhaps the child hears his name not “as the expression of the mother’s approving enjoyment as she shifts her attention to his total presence” but only “when he has displeased the mother.”24 The child is not being treated with the developmentally crucial anticipatory recognition of her or his self as an autonomous center of initiative; the child is reduced to a “recipient of

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ministrations” and a vehicle for the narcissistic projections of the caregiver. Proper recognition of the child’s self as a center of initiative does not entail prolonging the initial state of more or less complete merger with the selfobject.25 Proper recognition means that the falling short of complete gratification of the infant’s needs, on the part of the mirroring selfobject, is piecemeal within the limits of what the infant can absorb as a temporary yet not threatening frustration—namely, a kind of frustration that is remedied way before the terror of self-disintegration, abandonment, and loss induces defensive fixations on fragments of the body or elicits narcissistic rage. Instead, prolonged exposure to aloof, superficial, not uptaking, phony recognition will produce the pathologies associated with the narcissistic personality: delusive counter-self-images of perfection and grandiosity as a ground bass also of the adult psychic configuration, which when punctured by reality turn into self-deprecatory despondency, depression, and rage. Narcissistically tainted recognition, in sum, instills a vulnerability in the infant’s self, which in turn results in defensive withdrawal, aloofness and detachment, loneliness, compensatory sexual or sexualized activities aimed at reaffirming a sense of self-presence and certainty of oneself. For no other critical theorist is recognition so central as for Honneth. His account of love as the first form of recognition encountered by human beings in the family and of how the self emerges from it could vastly benefit from integrating Kohut’s self  psychology. In his Hegelian-Meadian account of the intersubjective roots of subjectivity, 26 Honneth draws on Winnicott’s object relations approach to the maturation of the self. Winnicott, in his opinion, provides clinical evidence for the Hegelian thesis that love—the medium within which humans

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come into being in the first institution they encounter, the family—consists essentially of “being oneself in another.”27 Furthermore, Honneth takes distance from the Freudian drive/structure model. Indeed, he is the critical theorist who deserves full credit for first jettisoning the widely shared prejudice that the critical credentials of a critical theory of society depend on taking on board the assumption that humans are constitutively equipped with an instinct or drive for aggression 28— which, under the guise of a pretended “realist grounding” of negativity, in fact a remnant of a questionable Hobbesian philosophical anthropology, still surprisingly undergirds much of modern and contemporary political and social theory. He credits Winnicott for understanding the process of maturation, from a mother/infant symbiotic unit to two individuated beings, as the transformation of a relational pattern. The transformation of the symbiotic unit begins when the mother or other “primary caretaker” feels that attention can be gradually diverted from full concentration on the newborn. At that point, need frustration will occasionally occur, the fantasy of total omnipotence will have to be abandoned, but the child will be able to decode visual and auditory cues that her needs will soon be attended, will adopt transitional objects as partial substitutes, and will learn, from the calm and not vengeful persistence of the mother despite his or her directing destructive impulses against her, that she is a distinct being in her own right and not at her or his total disposal. The occasional absence of the mother will be increasingly tolerated as not carrying a threat of abandonment, and a virtual space for attending internal urges and impulses will take shape, with the help also of transitional objects that prefigure an intermediate realm of the imagination—the forerunner of culture, art, values— which is neither objective nor projective.29 Eventually, maturation will lead to a “capacity to be alone.”30

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Engaging Kohut’s work could contribute to solve three problems in Honneth’s account of the psychological birth of the human infant out of recognition. First, it could allay the tension between Honneth’s claim that the drive-centered “orthodox conception of how the child’s instinctual life develops” has to be sidelined in order to properly understand how the mother-child recognition processes could develop and,31 on the other hand, his earlier idea that destructive impulses arise, at some point and literally from nowhere, to test whether the object can be destroyed.32 Where would aggressive impulses come from if a primary reservoir of aggressiveness is assumed only within the drive model? The idea of rebelling against the loss of omnipotence by trying to destroy the object, still presupposed by Honneth in The Struggle for Recognition and later hedged and qualified in The I in We, is hard to understand in non-drive-theoretical terms, unless a narcissistic wound is thought to have been inflicted onto the self by the prolonged unavailability of the object. One of the costs incurred by Honneth for his neglecting Kohut’s work is that there is no sense, in The Struggle for Recognition, of a conceptual threshold between optimal frustrations, which favor maturation, and traumatic ones, which instead cause fragmentation of the self, fixation on bodily fragments, and the search for compensatory structures. In his later work, Honneth downscales the idea of a primitive total merger between infant and caregiver to that of an episodic merger,33 but optimistically he still depicts the process of separation in the ideal terms of a dissolution of these episodes of fusion that is “no longer so sudden or shocking.”34 Little attention is paid to the harm inflicted by the suboptimal detachment of the caregiver. Furthermore, the facets of Winnicott’s work that do point in such a direction— i.e., the idea of a “false self,” into which the real one is inextricably trapped, as opposed to retaining the ability to slip out of it

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at will, or the notion of “degrees of falseness” of the false self 35— are totally ignored by Honneth. In a passage that anticipates Kohutian motifs, Winnicott writes, “The mother who is not good enough is not able to implement the infant’s omnipotence, and so she repeatedly fails to meet the infant gesture; instead she substitutes her own gesture which is to be given sense by the compliance of the infant. This compliance on the part of the infant is the earliest stage of the False Self, and belongs to the mother’s inability to sense her infant’s needs.”36 Again, we find here the idea of a “thwarted recognition,” ostensibly, by all social standards, directed at the infant, but, in fact, in service of the mother’s feelings and failing to treat the infant as a potential source of autonomous initiative. Like Kohut’s “faceless mother,” so Winnicott’s “not good enough mother” fails to reverberate a loving gleam in her eye when providing her ministrations to the child. Second, Kohut could enrich a critical theory of recognition with a differentiated notion of “defective” recognition as either failing to provide “non-traumatically defective” mirroring or failing to provide “non-traumatically defective” acceptance of idealization on the part of the selfobject. Honneth’s model of “recognition in love,” instead, is premised on the crude binary of recognition and to the lack thereof, with very few nuances in it. A serious engagement with Kohut’s theory of the self would not just provide a more fine-grained appraisal of the developmental contribution of the family to the coming into being of subjectivity but also a set of fundamental concepts for making sense of the compensatory practices and mechanisms set in motion by the maturating psyche and of their significance for the larger picture of social action. Whether weak self-cohesion due to narcissistic wounds is compensated through exhibitionist exuberance of the kind “I’m perfect and you should admire me” or through

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gregarious identification of the kind “You are perfect, but I’m part of you” makes a great difference once we move, to use Plato’s metaphor, from the text written with small characters to the one written with larger characters, from the analyst’s study to society. In fact, disastrous idealizing dependency of the sort to be politically feared—identificatory dependence on the figure of a strong authoritarian leader—is for Kohut a compensatory pathological response to traumatic shortcomings of the idealized selfobject, not the outcome of a healthy idealizing relation to a selfobject. Third, in The Struggle for Recognition Honneth always addresses the child’s side of recognition. His intent is to account for how an infant engulfed in the gratification of symbiotic (whether protracted or “episodic”) merger with the caregiving person can extricate itself from that state of relative undifferentiation and come to recognize the caregiver as a separate person. Honneth never addresses the opposite vector, namely how the mother, or whoever plays the role of first caregiver or selfobject, could come to recognize a center of autonomous initiative in the infant to whom she is offering symbiotic enmeshment.37 There is no place for what, drawing on Kohut, could be called “anticipatory recognition”—namely, acting as if the bodily movements of the infant, its proud exhibitionist shows of omnipotence were indeed the actions of an autonomous self to be recognized as a partner in interaction. Although this aspect is addressed by Winnicott, in Honneth’s account it remains as out of focus as the distinction between adequate recognition and a perfunctory one that leads to the formation of a “false self.” At stake here is Kohut’s (and Winnicott’s, for that matter) sense that in order for the self of the child to develop, someone in the immediate environment of the infant has to allow herself or himself to merge with the baby (while remaining a normally functioning adult in the “spare

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time”), to respond optimally to its needs, and then to gradually (as opposed to traumatically) withdraw from this initial merger so that “optimal” frustration will lead to individuation and psychic structure building. Up to here, Honneth is on the same page. But then the caregiver’s perspective, not adequately considered by him, consists of the fact that to be “good enough” at this merging means to respond to the burgeoning self of the infant as though it were an autonomous center of initiative and to respond with joy: the infant must see in the primary caregiver’s eye the glimmer of love, not the indifference of someone who’s checking the proper functioning of a washing machine or the narcissistic engulfment of someone who is pursuing social recognition through parenting. The fact that the human beings performing this function have by and large been women—to repeat once again—belongs to culture and social habitus, not to biological necessity, which stops at childbirth. Winnicott’s and Kohut’s point is that someone must do this, and do it in a certain way described in detail, in order for the infant to develop a self that will enter then the oedipal dynamics and all the rest of the Freudian narrative. Even in traditional societies, this function has occasionally been played by men: Rousseau’s mother died at delivery, so that function was played by his father; in a gay couple that adopts a newborn baby it will be one member of the couple. The way this “mirroring” (Kohut) or “holding” (Winnicott) is discharged makes the decisive difference: in practice no one goes “unrecognized,” but lots of infants suffer “misrecognition,” as vehicles for securing social goods or fulfilling parental desires, and are not received with joy, but rather as burdens—this latter condition being the key juncture where a critical theory of the unfavorably changing social conditions for parenting becomes relevant.

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NONPATHOLOGICAL NARCISSISM AS A RESOURCE Kohut must also be credited for being the only psychoanalytic theorist ever to outline a specific developmental line of narcissism, of invaluable importance in differentiating our image of the psyche. As he puts it, Although the attainment of genitality and the capacity for unambivalent object love have been features of many, perhaps most, satisfying and significant lives, there are many other good lives, including some of the greatest and most fulfilling lives recorded in history, that were not lived by individuals whose psychosexual organization was heterosexual-genital or whose major commitment was to unambivalent object love.38

While Freud never ceased understanding narcissism as an imperfect waystation along the road from autoerotism to object love, Kohut’s groundbreaking self psychology allows us to understand narcissism as a line of psychic development in its own right, parallel and irreducible to the one envisaged by Freud and leading not “back to object love,” but to “higher forms and transformations of narcissism.”39 The unfavorable comparison of nonpathological narcissism to object love is called by Kohut a prejudice linked with “the improper intrusion of the altruistic value system of Western civilization.”40 Narcissism is not the antithesis of object relations but only of object love: many intense object relations of adult life may be infused with narcissistic tones. When the mirroring and idealized selfobjects generate nonoptimal frustrations that cause the child to repress exhibitionistic and idealizing fantasies, these are often projected in uncontrolled ways onto the self or onto

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external idealized objects. Such projections may, however, target compensatory structures that for various circumstances (specific talents, personal qualities, bodily features, opportunities encountered serendipitously) become sources of surrogate mirroring and idealization for the artist, the politician, the public intellectual, the holy person, the charismatic personality in general, and the social critic. Among the “positive transformations” of a narcissistically wounded psyche are a life devoted to the pursuit of creativity, or to the refinement of empathy, or in various other ways characterized by an emotional acceptance of one’s own transiency, by sense of humor, and by a nonsarcastic wisdom as sense of proportions.41 Artists and scientists, academics and intellectuals may of course be pathologically “acclaim-driven,” affected by delusions of grandiosity or prone to wild idealizations, but of import is the intrinsic relation of these figures to their own work. The positive evolution of narcissism consists of the acquired ability, through mastery of certain skills, to invest “idealizing libido” onto an object, one’s own work, which becomes then “included in the context of the self.”42 One could imagine that care for her work, on the part of the creative person, resembles the single-minded devotion of the mother to the child, but for Kohut it reflects more closely “the still unrestricted narcissism of early childhood”: “the creative individual, whether in art or science, is less psychologically separated from his surroundings than the noncreative one; the ‘I-you’ barrier is not as clearly defined.”43 This relative lack of demarcation may, under favorable conditions, result in the creative person’s special awareness of the significance of aspects of the world often unnoticed by others, which may carry significance for her work (the term inspiration somehow gestures at this merging with aspects of the world). Such relative lack of demarcation may also result in the use of an

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external object for solving inner conflicts and as an outlet for wish fulfillment. The narcissistic tonality of such involvement is  often signaled by the sudden ups and downs of self-esteem among creative people or by a pattern of relating to one’s own work as to a transitional object. In the attempt of the creative person to infuse perfection into the product of her work, whatever that is, much is revealed of the pristine perfection that once was reputed to be an attribute of the self.44 Similar remarks are offered by Kohut about the capacity for empathy as a development of the former enmeshment with the mirroring selfobject, the acceptance of transiency as rooted in a certain “cosmic narcissism” derivative in turn from a certain primary identification and merger with the mother,45 the capacity for maintaining a sense of humor in extreme situations as a controlled extension of the narcissistic affirmation of the invulnerability of the self, and finally wisdom as a sense of one’s acceptance of the limitations of one’s physical, intellectual, and emotional powers.46 There is ground to believe that also the ability to cultivate and maintain a critical attitude vis-à-vis existing social arrangements depends on similar dispositions and that these dispositions are rooted in a pristine narcissistic configuration that nourishes the imagination and is linked with a strong idealization of principles and values—and perhaps also on a sense of the invulnerability of critic’s self. Two facets of this claim certainly deserve further investigation on the part of critical theorists with a psychoanalytic sensibility. On the one hand, not just the more tenuous demarcation of the self from the world but also the healthy narcissist’s domesticated propensity to cultivate her perfection for admiration by others (a remnant of the early grandiose compensatory fantasies) can conceivably fuel the power of the creative person’s imagination to soar above what exists, to explore

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utopian configurations, to later bring them into a fruitful interplay with the other faculties of the mind. On the other hand, a sustained critical attitude requires not only cognitive and imaginative powers but also the courage to forgo the advantages of compliance and to face rejection, scorn, ostracism, and, in more demanding historical contexts, even to face physical attacks, up to ultimate sacrifice. No other psychoanalytic theorist has offered a more suggestive account than Kohut of the psychodynamic forces at play here. In “On Courage,” he contends that “one striking characteristic of unusually courageous individuals is that at certain critical moments or stages of their lives they create imagery concerning an allpowerful figure on which they lean for support. This idealized figure may be a personified god or a prototypical historical figure or a charismatic person who is living in the present.”47 Drawing on such cases as the Hans and Sophie Scholl siblings and the Austrian Catholic farmer Franz Jägerstätter, eventually executed by the Nazis in 1943, and analyzing their correspondence, Kohut argues that they exemplify a kind of critical courage, exerted in the service of the uncompromising alignment of the values enshrined in the idealizing pole of their nuclear self and the outer conduct of life—a courage also illustrated, in other contexts, by Luther’s saying “Here I stand. I can do no other,” by Thomas More’s refusal to endorse Henry VIII’s divorce and subsequent remarriage, by Martin Luther King’s irremovable advocacy of nonviolence. On a less heroic scale, “rational resisters”—to whom we might more closely relate—are for Kohut unlikely to  pursue the alignment of the idealized component of the nuclear self and outer conduct in such a radical way, but they nonetheless significantly influence the historical scene if they can prevail over stability- and adjustmentseeking “uncritical subjects.”48 The most interesting cases,

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among the “rational resisters,” are those whose conscious egodirected action is fueled motivationally by, and unfolds under the guidance of, the ideal models enshrined in the idealizing pole of the nuclear self. In sum, in lieu of being the vehicle of self-absorption that it is overhastily associated with, healthy or domesticated narcissism can play a positive role in the service of critical transformation and resistance.

“A H UMAN AMONG H UMANS”: P SYCHIC CONFIGURATION AND DEMOCRACY Since the time of The Authoritarian Personality, critical theory has addressed the relation of patterns of character formation within the family and political propensities. Habermas has touched on the relation of “ego-identity” to autonomy in The Theory of Communicative Action and in writings of the 1970s.49 Honneth in Freedom’s Right sketches an optimistic portrait of the contemporary family as the “nucleus of all the attitudes and dispositions required” in order to “experience early on what it means to participate as individuals in shared cooperation” and deliberative decision-making. 50 Kohut’s self psychology contributes a new chapter to this narrative. His rethinking the selfobject needs on the basis of three kinds of transference opens a path worth exploring further, which can contribute to anchoring key aspects of the democratic ethos in psychodynamic processes. Differently than in previous writings, in his posthumous How Does Analysis Cure?51 Kohut envisages the tripolar self as comprised of a) a pole of ambitions, b) one of ideals, and c) an intermediate area of talents and skills as a result of formative relations with selfobjects that provide i) mirroring, ii) the target of idealization, and

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iii) the experience of alikeness. This new model is grounded in his observation of three kinds of transferences: those in which the damaged pole of ambitions attempts to elicit the confirming-approving responses of the selfobject (mirror transference); those in which the damaged pole of ideals searches for a selfobject that will accept its idealization (idealizing transference); and those in which the damaged intermediate area of talents and skills seeks a selfobject that will make itself available for the reassuring experience of essential alikeness (twinship or alter ego transference).52

Here Kohut moves beyond the previous investigation of the nonpathological line of narcissistic development and discusses psychic needs linked with the sustenance of the self throughout the entire life course: among them the “need to experience mirroring and acceptance; the need to experience merger with greatness, strength and calmness; and the need to experience the presence of essential alikeness.”53 Manifestations of this third type of selfobject need begin to appear between age four and ten and continue throughout life. In the examples, retrieved from clinical experience, of the selfsustenance a young girl receives “from silently working in the kitchen next to her grandmother, that a little boy might get from ‘shaving’ next to his daddy or from working next to his daddy with daddy’s tools in the basement,”54 we see the expansion and development of earlier, less differentiated experiences of “feeling secure,” of “belonging and participating” (for example, just feeling the presence of other people in the immediate surroundings, “their voices and body odors, the emotions they express, the noises they produce as they engage in human activities, the specific aroma of the food they prepare and eat,”55 or, in other words,

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“the feeling that one is a human being among other human beings”). At the same time, these late-childhood experiences of  commonality and sharing—kneading dough and working with adult real tools—are the precursors of a life-long need for “basic alikeness,” horizontal recognition and sharing. Being comrades in a journey, in an enterprise, in a political effort (think of  brother as a term of address in certain social movements), or the metaphor of the “twin soul” or being “best friends” in adolescence—in terms of “participatory parity,” to use Nancy Fraser’s term— or simply relating on an equal basis, one of the values at the core of the democratic ethos, could have a deep root in the developmental narrative of the self as a psychodynamic entity. As Kohut puts it certain people are predominantly creative and self-expressive, and their creative selves are sustained by the actually occurring, or at least confidently expected, approval of the selfobject milieu in which they live. Others are predominantly sustained by feeling uplifted by ideals— all the sustaining forces which our culture puts at our disposal at any given time and place. . . . Finally, there are still other people who derive the sustenance that maintains their selves mainly from feeling surrounded by alter egos. 56

Many in the past, from Plato to Tocqueville, have equated the spirit of democracy with a strong passion for equality and the rejection of hierarchies. Furthermore, the history of political philosophy is studded with influential arguments that connect political forms with deep-seated emotional configurations: for example, Hobbes on fear as undergirding the artificial creation of the political order and authority, La Boétie on voluntary servitude, Rousseau on amour-propre as the key motive underlying social life, Nietzsche on resentment as the emotional basic

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tonality of the morality of “the herd.” No reflection of comparable depth and importance has ever been articulated about democracy and the democratic ethos over and beyond Tocqueville’s discussion of equality.57 The passion for equality, however, needs to be understood along psychodynamic lines if we wish to have a firmer grasp of the affective determinants that favor the affirmation of democracy. Here again, as in the case of the critical impulse, there is fertile ground for future investigations by psychoanalytically oriented critical theorists. Perhaps the enduring fascination of the idea of self-government among equals has a strong anchoring in a deep psychic need for horizontal recognition among peers with whom one belongs together in some kind of bond, immediate or mediated—a bond different from mirroring or idealization that we can begin to understand thorough the contribution of Kohut’s self psychology. The dynamic understanding of the self as an intrapsychic agency, the enrichment of our notion of recognition with a psychodynamic elucidation of its qualitative nuances and their effects on the formation of the self, the exploration of the potentials of nonpathological narcissism and of the psychodynamic roots of the value of equality are only some of the contributions of general philosophical import, and of specific interest for critical theory, that can be found in Heinz Kohut’s rich life work. Several more still await proper investigation. For example, Kohut’s notion of an idealizing transference, rooted in a self-need for idealization, could be put to use in casting light on the deep psychological roots of religious phenomena and their ineliminable presence in the human mind. From Durkheim to Shils to Habermas,58 the need that human beings seem to have for the merging of their associations, societies, communities with something transcending not only the self but also the immanent

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dimension of social life has been highlighted. Furthermore, the recently developing area of philosophical investigation over the aesthetic sources of normativity— authenticity, judgment, exemplarity59—cannot but benefit from Kohut’s insights into the psychodynamic roots of empathy and its workings, as well as from his idea of a dual path to psychological maturation. All these inquiries, however, must be postponed for future occasions. In the meanwhile, the self psychology of this very creative psychoanalytic theorist of the twentieth century deserves to be brought into the ongoing debates of critical theory.

NOTES 1. For an insightful reconstruction along the lines of a clash of these two paradigms of psychoanalysis, see J. R. Greenberg and S. A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 2. These schools all share an aversion to the drive/structure paradigm but somewhat differ in other respects. Ego psychology flourished in the 1930s in the United States and, for its emphasis on interpersonal relations as determinants of psychic development, on anxiety avoidance (Sullivan), on self-deception (Fromm), and experience-near concepts, quickly became the target of the allegation of having enervated the critical bite of psychoanalytic theory. Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Winnicott developed their object relations framework during the subsequent decades, in a British context, in closer dialogue with Freudian metapsychology, and their theoretical efforts were spared from indictment mainly because meanwhile psychoanalysis had temporarily slipped out of the critical theorists’ attention. Kohut’s self psychology constitutes an independent tradition for the radical originality of its developments, the richness of its paradigm centered on narcissism and the self, and its organizational ramifications (with a professional association, the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, and an institutional journal).

Narcissism and Critique Z 101 3. The rich and complex work of Melanie Klein seems somewhat difficult to locate in this narrative. Nevertheless, the internal evolution of her thinking can be understood as the attempt to inject relational implications into the drive vocabulary and to push the drive/structure paradigm to its conceptual limits. As Greenberg and Mitchell aptly point out, for her “drives are no longer directionless, tension-producing stimuli which become secondarily attached to objects serving as the vehicle for their gratification. . . . Drives for her are not discrete quantities of energy arising from specific body tensions but passionate feelings of love and hate directed toward others and utilizing the body as a vehicle of expression. Drives, for Klein, are relationships.” Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, 145–146. 4. In a nutshell, the main transformations undergone by Freud’s paradigms were a) from a basic equation of the “constancy principle” and the “pleasure principle,” both supposedly aimed at lowering the level of psychic stimulation to a minimum, to a sharp distinction of the two (S. Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” [1924], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [London: Hogarth, 1924], 19:160–161); b) from the dynamic point of view (i.e., the psyche as the theater of clashing unconscious forces and energy that, like a fluid in a closed container, create pressure when their flow is blocked, produce a need for release, and can then be released in the right or in a deviant way) to the topographical model (according to which, mental contents circulate between unconscious, preconscious, and conscious layers of the psyche, meeting repression barriers and deviations, and according to which a “secondary process” controls the pleasure-seeking “primary process” located in the unconscious) (S. Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams [1900], SE 4, 5); c) then from said topographical model to the structural tripartite model of psychic organization composed of Id, Ego, and Super-Ego (S. Freud, The Ego and the Id [1923], SE 19:1– 66); and d) to the final rearticulation of the structural model in one of Freud’s late writings (S. Freud, “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense” [1938], SE 23:275– 278). 5. For example, the ego takes on the quality of a “self ” in “Mourning and Melancholia” where melancholia is associated with “an impoverishment of [the] ego on a grand scale” and with the ego/self now becoming “poor and empty.” S. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917),

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. P. Rieff (New York: MacMillan, 1963), 167. Typically, melancholia tends to turn into maniacal forms of “ joy, triumph, exultation” (175). As when an intensive effort is rendered superfluous by the fortuitous attainment of its goal, so when the libido is detached from its object a tremendous quantity of psychic energy is released, and the result is a joyous and light-hearted mood, a boundless self-confidence and a propensity to undertake new endeavors. Here we find a surprising anticipation, within Freud’s work, of Kohut’s basic idea of an oscillation between the actual emptiness and inertia of the self and the activation of compensatory grandiose fantasies accompanied by a narcissistic pseudo vitality. More of these “unofficial” gestures towards the dimension of the self, and the interactional dimension it evokes, can be found in “Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety,” “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense,” and other writings. On this subject, see J. Whitebook, Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 159–170. S. Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), SE 14:76, GM59. H. Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1977), 70– 71. H. Hartmann, “Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego” (1950), in Essays on Ego Psychology (New York: International Universities Press, 1964). See H. Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), xv. Kohut, The Restoration of the Self, 75. Kohut, 75– 76. Kohut, 76. An optimal sequence, instead, is so summed up by Kohut: “mounting anxiety (self); followed by stabilized mild anxiety—a ‘signal’ not panic— (self-object); followed by calmness, absence of anxiety (self-object). Ultimately, the psychological disintegration products that the child had begun to experience disappear (the rudimentary self is re-established), while the mother (as seen in terms of behaviorism and social psychology) readies the food, improves temperature regulation, changes diapers.” Kohut, The Restoration of the Self, 86. Kohut, 81.

Narcissism and Critique Z 103 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

Kohut, 81. Kohut, 78. See Kohut, 185–186. Kohut, 99 (my emphasis). Kohut, 100. Kohut, 96. Kohut, 116. Kohut, 116. Kohut, 122, (my emphasis). H. Kohut, “Remarks About the Formation of the Self,” in The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut, 1950–1978, ed. H. Ornstein (New York: International Universities Press, 1978), 743. The existence of a primary stage of “narcissism” (Freud), of total merger with a caretaker (Winnicott) or with a selfobject (Kohut), or of symbiosis (Mahler) has been questioned by D. Stern. Stern makes striking and bold statements to the effect that “infants begin to experience a sense of an emergent self from birth. They are predesigned to be aware of self-organizing processes. They never experience a period of total self/other undifferentiation.” D. N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (London: Karnac, 1998 [1985]), 10. On closer scrutiny, the impact of his evidence leaves the conceptual substance of the psychological-birth-viadifferentiation argument only partially affected. In fact, the birth of an emerging self can be antedated to as early as the second month of life, but still remains sequentially ordered to an even prior, however short, period of lack of individuation— a “presocial, precognitive, preorganized life phase” during which the sense of an “emergent self,” distinct from the environment, is “coming into being” but “not yet achieved” (37– 38). See A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996 [1992]) and “Postmodern Identity and Object-Relations Theory: On the Seeming Obsolescence of Psychoanalysis,” An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action 2 (1999): 3. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 96. A. Honneth, The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition, trans. J. Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 200. In another passage, Honneth

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29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

rejects the hypothesis of inborn aggression as “empirically too controversial to provide a basis for a serious objection to intersubjectivism” (224– 225). D. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 [1971]), 1– 30. D. Winnicott, “The Capacity to Be Alone,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Karnac, 1990 [1958]), 29– 36. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 96. A similar point is made in Honneth, “Postmodern Identity and Object-Relations Theory,” 230– 231. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 101. Honneth, The I in We, 226. Honneth, 227. See Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 142–143. Winnicott, 145. See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 100. No significant modification of this neglect of the caregiver’s perspective and idealized assumption of a flawless empathic response on her part appears in Honneth’s later work, see Honneth, The I in We, 224– 229. H. Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? ed. A. Goldberg, with the collaboration of P. E. Stepansky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 7. Kohut, The Analysis of the Self, 220. H. Kohut, “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism,” in The Search for the Self, 427. Kohut, 446. Kohut, 447. Kohut, 447. See Kohut, 448–450. See Kohut, 455–456. Kohut, 458. H. Kohut, “On Courage,” in Self Psychology and the Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach, ed. C. B. Strozier (New York: Norton, 1985), 6. Kohut, 21– 22.

Narcissism and Critique Z 105 49. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1987 [1981]), 98– 99; “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures” (1976), in Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1979), 95–129. 50. A. Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, trans. J. Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2014 [2011]), 175. 51. See Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure?, 194–195. 52. Kohut, 192–193. 53. Kohut, 194. 54. Kohut, 197. 55. Kohut, 200. 56. Kohut, 203. 57. See A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayor, trans. G. Lawrence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 503. 58. See E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1967 [1912]), 470–471; E. Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macro-Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 7; J.  Habermas, Nachmetaphysischen Denken II (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 78–80, 94– 95. 59. A. Ferrara, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1998); S. Varga, Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal (New York: Routledge, 2012); A. Ferrara, Justice and Judgment: The Rise and the Prospect of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy (London: Sage, 1999); R. A. Makkreel, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); A. Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); M. Lowrie and S. Lüdemann, eds., Exemplarity and Singularity (New York: Routledge, 2015); A. Condello and A. Ferrara, eds., Exemplarity and Its Normativity, special issue of Law and Literature, 2018: 30, 3.

II H ISTOR ICA L ENCOU N TER S

4

4 PROGRESS AND THE DEATH DRIVE Amy Allen

P

hilosophical anthropology and the philosophy of history are deeply intertwined in post-Kantian European thought, including psychoanalysis. Indeed, the ambivalent philosophical anthropology found in the late Freud and developed more fully in the work of Melanie Klein has distinctive implications for thinking about history and the prospects for social transformation. In particular, the assumption of the death drive—an assumption that emerged in Freud’s late work Beyond the Pleasure Principle,1 but was arguably first fully integrated into psychoanalytic theory through the work of Klein—is often presumed to entail the impossibility of historical progress and thus the futility of all attempts to improve the human condition. As Klein put it: The repeated attempts that have been made to improve humanity— and in particular to make it more peaceable—have failed, because nobody has understood the full depth and vigour of the instincts of aggression innate in each individual. Such efforts do not seek to do more than encourage the positive, wellwishing impulses of the person while denying or suppressing his

110 Y Amy Allen aggressive ones. And so they have been doomed to failure from the beginning.2

Not surprisingly, then, initial skepticism about the prospects for fusing Marxism and psychoanalysis, one of the key aims of the early Frankfurt School, turned precisely on the difficulties of integrating the death drive into the materialist conception of history. Indeed, Freud himself drew on the notion of the death drive in order to heap scorn on the Marxist political project: “Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form.”3 The attempt to eliminate private property in the name of progress and freedom, then, may well lead to new directions for the development of civilization, but, Freud insists laconically, “one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there” (CD 114). The assumption that the death drive, construed as an “indestructible feature of human nature,” undermines the possibility of historical progress is closely connected to the view of the late Freud as a conservative cultural pessimist. For example, Erich Fromm, in a fascinating and unfortunately largely forgotten essay on Freud’s philosophical anthropology, writes: “In the second phase of his work, after the first World War, Freud’s picture of history became truly tragic. Progress, beyond a certain point, is no longer simply bought at great expense, but is in principle impossible. Man is only a battlefield on which the life and death instincts fight against each other. He can never liberate himself decisively from the tragic alternative of destroying others or himself.”4 In his own work, Fromm rejected the death drive because he thought that it was incompatible with

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the political vision of universal peace and harmony that he took from the Hebrew prophets. 5 Thus the presumed incompatibility of the death drive and historical progress is also at the heart of the revisionist critique of Freud that gave rise to the cultural and interpersonal schools of psychoanalysis. Karen Horney put the point succinctly when she noted that the death drive “paralyzes any effort to search in the specific cultural conditions for reasons which make for destructiveness. It must also paralyze efforts to change anything in these conditions. If man is inherently destructive and consequently unhappy, why strive for a better future?”6 But is the death drive in fact incompatible with any and all claims about the possibility of progress?7 In what follows, I will address this question by first considering the most sustained and well worked out attempt within the Frankfurt School tradition to avoid this pessimistic conclusion about the possibility of progress while retaining the concept of the death drive: Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Even if I can’t quite bring myself to share Marcuse’s speculative, utopian vision of progress beyond the performance principle, for reasons that I will discuss, I don’t think that this means we have to be left mired in cultural pessimism or conservatism. I attempt to show why this is the case through a rereading of key passages from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Although my main aim in what follows is to explore whether a Kleinian understanding of the death drive can be reconciled with some conception of progress, a subsidiary goal is to counter the standard reading of the late Freud as a cultural pessimist without resorting to characterizing him as a defender of the Enlightenment. I do this by arguing that the late Freud is better understood as a thinker in the radical enlightenment tradition whose approach to the question of project is in the service of a project of critique. Finally, drawing on the work of

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Klein and Adorno, I briefly sketch a less speculative and utopian conception of progress as a moral-political imperative, one that is, I argue, compatible with the assumption of the death drive.

REGRESSION AS PROGRESS IN MARCUSE As speculative and utopian as Marcuse’s reading of psychoanalysis is, it nevertheless rests on a sophisticated and perceptive understanding of Freud’s work and its philosophical implications. For instance, unlike those readers of Freud who either reject him for his cultural pessimism or declare him a defender of the Enlightenment, Marcuse perceptively highlights the fundamental ambivalence at work in Freud’s philosophical anthropology: “The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization—and at the same time the most unshakeable defense of this civilization.”8 Similarly, like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who noted in a famous passage of the Dialectic of Enlightenment that “humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self . . . was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood,”9 Marcuse takes seriously Freud’s idea that “civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts” (EC 3). In other words, if civilization is based on the subjugation of instinct, then this means that the domination of inner nature is a precondition of progress, which means that increasing progress paradoxically entails increasing unfreedom and domination (EC 4). This link explains why, as Marcuse put the point in a later set of lectures, “domination is the internal logic of the development of civilization.”10

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However, Marcuse famously questions not the connection between progress and domination in civilization but rather its inevitability. Famously historicizing Freud’s analysis of the clash between drives and civilization, Marcuse argues in Eros and Civilization that the interrelation between domination and progress is not the principle of civilization per se, but rather of a “specific historical organization of human existence” (EC 4–5). Reading Freud’s metapsychology, including his late vision of the ambivalent antagonism between life and death drives, as a concrete insight into “the historical structure of civilization” (EC 6), Marcuse sets out to argue, first, that Freud’s own theory is at odds with his explicit denial of the possibility of a nonrepressive civilization, and, second, that historical conditions are such that our repressive civilization has created the necessary preconditions for the abolition of repression (EC 5). With respect to this first argument, Marcuse aims to uncover what he calls “the hidden trend in psychoanalysis” (EC 19). Marcuse argues that the central conflict in Freud’s work and the key to its implications for social theory is the triumph of the reality principle over the pleasure principle and over the drives in general. Although necessary for the functioning of civilization, this triumph is also “the great traumatic event in the development of man” at both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels (EC 15). Freud himself saw the struggle between the pleasure and reality principles as eternally antagonistic; thus, Marcuse claims, “the notion that a non-repressive civilization is impossible is a cornerstone of Freudian theory” (EC 17). However— and this is the hidden trend that Marcuse identifies in psychoanalysis— Freudian theory contains aspects that challenge this pessimistic conclusion. More specifically, Freud’s metapsychology not only uncovers but also implicitly calls into question the necessity of the internal connection between progress and domination.

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With respect to the second argument, Marcuse’s aim is to exploit this hidden trend in psychoanalysis by historicizing Freudian concepts. Echoing critiques of Freud offered by Fromm, Horkheimer, and Adorno, Marcuse admits that Freud’s own theory is insufficiently historical insofar as he generalizes from a specific historical form of the reality principle—the one that holds sway in modern, bourgeois, European cultures—to reality per se. Although Freud offers a valid historical generalization when he claims that up to now “civilization has progressed as organized domination” (EC 34), this does not justify the conclusion that such domination is historically necessary. Thus Marcuse proposes to unfold the historical content of Freud’s concepts through the introduction of two key terms: the performance principle, which refers to the prevailing historical form of the reality principle, the form demanded by capitalism according to which individuals must delay gratification of their libidinal drives in order to engage in productive, alienated labor; and surplus repression, which refers to the amount of repression above and beyond the level required for the basic functioning of civilization and which instead serves to maintain the structures of social domination unique to modern capitalism. Whereas Freud seems to accept the fact that progress proceeds through repression and domination—the triumph of the reality principle, the mastery of the id by the ego, the repression of sensuous drives by reason, the domination and subversion of freedom—Marcuse calls for a transformation of this dynamic, a “reversal of the direction of progress” (EC xiv) by means of which progress becomes regression to the archaic, to imagination, to phantasy—in short, to pleasure. Noting that the pleasure principle “was dethroned not only because it militated against progress in civilization but also because it militated against a civilization whose progress perpetuates domination and toil”

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(EC 40), Marcuse identifies eros— specifically, eros prior to its repressive organization in genital sexuality, understood as the polymorphous perversity of bodies and pleasures—as the source of the explosive force that is in conflict with a repressive civilization. “Against a society which employs sexuality as a means for a useful end,” Marcuse writes, “the perversions uphold sexuality as an end in itself; they thus place themselves outside the dominion of the performance principle and challenge its very foundation” (EC 50). Unlike Freud, then, who thought that the direction of civilization could not be reversed, Marcuse calls for a regressive conception of progress beyond the rule of the performance principle. Ironically, he notes, such a vision of progress has become possible only because of the achievements of the performance principle, which have allowed us to develop the relations of production and the technological capacities for satisfying everyone’s needs. Nevertheless, progress in Marcuse’s new sense also means leaving the performance principle behind. This new sense of progress also contrasts with what Marcuse calls repressive desublimation, the merely apparent liberation of eros that in fact serves to uphold the system by releasing just enough pressure to keep it functioning. By contrast, the genuine liberation of eros “would necessarily operate as a destructive, fatal force—as the total negation of the principle which governs the repressive reality” (EC 95). Under these conditions, Marcuse contends that regression— understood as regression behind the level of civilized rationality, which was formed through the repressive imposition of the reality principle—becomes progressive, it “assumes a progressive function” (EC 19). The regressive liberation of our libidinal, instinctual past aims not at a reconciliation with the present but rather at a radical critique of it; by invoking critical standards

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that are ruled out in the present, with its focus on productivity and self-renunciation, regression orients itself toward the future and becomes utopian (EC 19). Instead of repressive desublimation, we would have nonrepressive sublimation, the channeling of libidinal and erotic energies into all aspects of social life. This nonrepressive sublimation would harness the culture-building, pro-social dimensions of eros—which is transformed through this process from aim-inhibited, repressed, genitally organized sexuality into a polymorphous eroticism—in the service of the free, playful creativity of phantasy, the imagination, and the aesthetic. The result would be what Inara Luisa Marin calls Marcuse’s “libidinal utopia.”11 However, if the conflict that Freud envisioned between civilization and the drives can be ameliorated in the case of libidinal drives via this transformation of sexuality into eros, this still leaves the death drive for Marcuse to contend with. And here the stakes and degree of difficulty are much higher. Indeed, Marcuse notes that “it is mainly the death instinct that seems to defy any hypothesis of a non-repressive civilization: the very existence of such an instinct seems to engender ‘automatically’ the whole network of constraints and controls instituted by civilization; innate destructiveness must beget perpetual repression” (EC 134). Again, Marcuse’s solution is to historicize Freudian concepts. If the death drive “tends toward that state of ‘constant gratification’ where no tension is felt—a state without want”—if, in other words, it is understood in classically Freudian terms as a manifestation of the Nirvana principle—then this means, for Marcuse, that “this trend of the instinct implies that its destructive manifestations would be minimized as it approached such a state” (EC 234). In other words, as we realize the Marcusian utopian society that is totally free from material want, tension will increasingly dissipate and the resulting destructive

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manifestations of the death drive melt away. If the objective of the death drive is the absence of tension, then “paradoxically, in terms of the instinct, the conflict between life and death is the more reduced, the closer life approximates the state of gratification. Pleasure principle and Nirvana principle then converge” (EC 235). From the vantage point of sixty years after the publication of Eros and Civilization, there is much to take issue with in Marcuse’s attempt to reconcile the drives in general, and the death drive in particular, with the possibility of progress.12 As Eva von Redecker points out, “Marcuse’s solution—to present the erotic energy bound by repressed sexuality as a revolutionary force— falters in the light of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1 which refutes any attempts to situate sexuality outside social power dynamics.”13 Although I share von Redecker’s skepticism about Marcuse’s romantic celebration of regression to polymorphously perverse eroticism and his claim that this constitutes progress, the crucial point for our purposes lies elsewhere. As I see it, the crucial point has to do with Marcuse’s assumption that the destructive manifestations of the death drive could be thoroughly disarmed or dissolved through the elimination of material want or scarcity. As Joel Whitebook has argued, this assumption rests on a conflation of the idea of material scarcity with Freud’s notion of Ananke (reality or necessity). The latter is actually much broader in scope than material scarcity. As Whitebook explains, citing some famous lines from Freud’s Future of an Illusion, Ananke for Freud signals the fact that through inevitable loss, physical pain, and death, nature will always rise “up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable” and remind us of our “helplessness and weakness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization.” Whatever level of

118 Y Amy Allen abundance might be achieved— and material well-being is nothing to scoff at—human beings will still be confronted with the “ineluctable,” which will always administer an insult to our self-esteem.14

In other words, even if—and of course this is a big if—the satisfaction of all basic physical and economic needs could be achieved for all, this would not mean the elimination of all tension in human life whatsoever, which means that the death drive as Marcuse envisions it would not, in fact, melt away. Moreover, one could even say, it’s a good thing, too, insofar as the playful, creative, artistic utopian vision of society that Marcuse sketches could scarcely be possible without usefully channeled destructiveness— artistic creativity absent all tension, want, striving, and even iconoclastic destructiveness being difficult if not impossible to imagine. Does this mean, then, that we are stuck with the kind of cultural pessimism and conservatism that are thought to go along with the death drive? Not necessarily. To see why, I’d like to return to some key passages from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

PROBLEMATIZING PROGRESS: FREUD AND THE RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT Civilization and Its Discontents is framed as an answer to the question of the meaning or purpose of life. Freud demurs on this question, suggesting it doesn’t admit of an answer, but he does say that he knows quite well what most people “show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives” (CD 76), namely, happiness or pleasure. In other words, “the purpose of

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life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle” which “dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start” (CD 76). And yet the pleasure principle finds itself opposed by the universe at every turn, which means that it must give way to the more modest reality principle; this transition is the major developmental achievement of psychological maturation for Freud. The three primary sources of unhappiness, and thus the three dimensions of reality to which the pleasure principle must yield, are the frailty of our own bodies, the dangers of the natural world, and our interactions with other people. While the first two are ineliminable because we will never be able to completely master nature, including our own bodies, the third at least seems as if it should be solvable. The fact that it has thus far proven to be intractable and that, instead, our relations with other human beings cause perhaps the most suffering of all, suggests to Freud that “a piece of unconquerable nature may lie behind” this particular type of suffering; that piece being a piece “of our own psychical constitution” (CD 86). This leads Freud to consider the “astonishing contention” that “what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up” (CD 86). Civilization, for Freud, means “the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (CD 89). In other words, civilization, or Kultur, is a human creation that sets us apart from nature by allowing us to control nature—both inner and outer— and each other. As a mechanism of control or mastery, civilization is antithetical to freedom or liberty, where freedom means the freedom to act on one’s basic drives in an unimpeded manner. Because freedom of this sort inevitably leads to conflicts, civilization requires submitting these drives to the control of the

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“higher psychical agencies, which have subjected themselves to the reality principle” (CD 79). But the challenge, as Freud sees it, is that “the feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed” (CD 79), so the allure of unsublimated drive satisfaction remains high. However, not all instincts or drives are alike when it comes to their potential to create conflict and their need to be controlled by civilization. Although Freud starts his discussion with the conflict between the pleasure principle and the demands of civilization, as the discussion goes on it becomes clear that the real problems arise beyond the pleasure principle. For, as Freud argues in chapter 4 of Civilization and Its Discontents, love and necessity (Eros and Ananke) are the twin foundations of human communal life. Necessity creates the compulsion to work, which prompts human beings to master nature, and love binds men to their sexual objects and women to their children, creating families. Love, in other words, is one of the foundations of civilization; its function is to bind people together into unities; eros is pro-civilization, pro-social. It is true, of course, that conflicts arise between sexual or family unions and the needs of the larger civilization—largely due, Freud argues, to the “retarding and restraining influence” of women who aren’t very capable of sublimation and resent men for turning their attention away from the family and toward the project of civilization building and who thus develop a hostile attitude toward civilization (CD 103– 104). It is also true that civilization demands the restriction of  sexual life through mechanisms such as the incest taboo, the restriction of the sexual life of children, or the compulsion toward heterosexual monogamy. Still, at the most basic level and in the  broadest sense, there is no necessary conflict

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between Eros— defined by Freud as the desire for union, the drive to “preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units” (CD 118)—and civilization. If anything, the conflict is between particular manifestations of Eros, different types and levels of unities—lovers versus their families, parents and children versus their communities, and so on. Things look rather different when we get to the pivotal fifth chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents. Here the central challenge and conflict between the drives and the demands of civilization emerges, and it is rooted not in Eros but in the death drive. Civilization requires affective, even erotic, bonds and cooperative relationships between large groups of individuals. However, Freud famously continues, “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness” (CD 111). As evidence for this claim, Freud cites the combination of the basic life experience of the individual and the collective experience recorded by history and asks, reasonably enough, “Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?” (CD 111). And it is this aggressive drive that disrupts our relations with other human beings, forcing civilization to take steps to control it. Indeed, “in consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (CD 112). Although the death drive is often entwined with Eros, and it is in these sadistic forms that it is most visible, Freud also insists in his late work on the independence of the death drive. As he puts it, “even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct [to aggression] is

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accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence” (CD 121). If Eros is prosocial and pro-civilization, and if the aggressive drive is opposed to Eros’s unifying project, then the history of civilization becomes a process of “struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species” (CD 122). To be sure, Freud also argues that civilization has means at its disposal to inhibit or otherwise ameliorate the aggressive instincts. By far the most effective of the means that it employs to this end is the development of the superego, which is formed through the introjection or internalization of aggression. Through this process. aggressiveness takes the form of “conscience,” enacting “the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals” (CD 123). Through the constitution of the superego, civilization “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city” (CD 123–124). Although the superego is formed through the internalization of the authority of the parent, which stands in for the authority of the social and is rooted in the parent’s superior power and the child’s radical dependency and fear, the superego’s aggressiveness does not derive from the aggressiveness or cruelty of parental authority. Rather, “the original severity of the superego does not— or does not so much—represent the severity which one has experienced from it [the object], or which one attributes to it; it represents rather one’s own aggressiveness towards it” (CD 129–130). In other words—and here Freud credits Melanie Klein with this insight (see CD 130, note 1)—the severity of the superego is rooted not in the cruelty or severity of

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parental prohibitions but rather in the severity of the aggression that the child feels toward the parent for having prevented him from attaining his first and most important satisfactions. With the development of the superego comes the sense of guilt, where guilt is rooted not only in the child’s fear of doing something bad but also in his fear or wishing for or phantasizing something bad. Indeed, Freud goes so far as to identify “the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (CD 134). This, he says, is the “final conclusion of our investigation” (CD 134). This conclusion leads Freud not only to be critical of the superego, and to suggest that the point of psychoanalysis is to work therapeutically to loosen its demands, but also to be critical of the “cultural superego” of ethics (CD 142), which issues excessively severe, unfulfillable ethical demands (such as love your neighbor as you love yourself) (CD 143). The problem with ethics, according to Freud, is that, like the superego, “it, too, does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it” (CD 143). One is tempted to say here that the problem that Freud identifies with ethics is that it lacks a realistic conception of the person, that it trades in a dangerous moralistic or rationalistic idealism.15 Interestingly, if we follow the logic of Freud’s argument through, we are led to the conclusion that this dangerous moralistic or rationalistic idealism is itself an expression of the very same aggressive drive whose existence it scrupulously disavows. It is here, at the end of Freud’s text, that the various scattered clues as to Freud’s understanding of progress—his implicit philosophy of history—are gathered together into a coherent

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statement. Freud first notes that he has attempted to be impartial in his analysis of civilization, to be swayed neither by a prejudice in favor of civilization understood as the path to perfection nor by the assumption that civilization creates intolerable forms of constraint and is overall not worth the monumental effort required to hold it in place. “My impartiality,” he notes wryly, “is made all the easier to me by my knowing very little about these things. One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man’s judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness—that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments” (CD 144). To those who would find his analysis of civilization disheartening or devoid of solutions, Freud admits that he “can offer them no consolation” (CD 144). All that he can do is to pose what he calls “the fateful question for the human species,” namely, “whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and selfdestruction” and, we might add, at what cost (CD 144). What Freud sketches here is a nonteleological, nonprogressive reading of history, a reading that remains agnostic on the question of whether all the achievements of civilization are worth the costs and efforts of the repression and domination necessary to achieve them. Thus Freud is clearly not, at least not in this late text, a straightforward defender of the mainstream or progressive Enlightenment, stalwartly defending the achievements of the Enlightenment as an unquestioned advance for human beings.16 He isn’t even prepared to say that the building of civilization constitutes an advance in the first place, much less is he concerned to defend that advance. As I read him, by taking this position on the prospects for reading history as a story of progress, Freud is simply being consistent, since he skeptically questions the very foundation of morality in the aggressiveness

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of the superego, seeing them, as Friedrich Nietzsche would have said, “soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.”17 In so doing, he calls into question the very possibility of a contexttranscendent normative point of view from which something could be identified as a civilizational or moral advance at all. As he says, we have to be “careful not to fall in line with the prejudice that civilization is synonymous with perfecting, that it is the road to perfection preordained for men” (CD 96). We have to be careful, too, of the extent to which our backward-looking historical judgments about what constitutes progress and whether it has been achieved up to now, in the historical process that has led to our own civilization, are simply, as Freud might have said, an attempt to support our harmonistic illusions with arguments. Still, does this mean that the late Freud is mired in cultural pessimism and resignation? Does he conclude that civilization is not worth the effort and that we’d be better off without it? Has he abandoned all hope for ameliorating or mitigating or at least coping with the effects of the death drive? Clearly not. He reiterates several times that even if so-called primitive man was in some sense happier without all of the constraints of civilization, his enjoyment of his pleasures was much less secure and long-lasting. And he suggests that, his critique of civilization notwithstanding, “we may expect gradually to carry through such alteration in our civilization as will better satisfy our needs and will escape our criticisms” even as we must acknowledge that there may be “difficulties attached to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform” (CD 115). So, what then is Freud’s stance toward progress? I would like to suggest that Freud is best understood as a thinker of the radical enlightenment, as a skeptical enlightenment thinker whose tragic, unreconciled vision of the conflicts between civilizational progress and the death drive is offered in the service of

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unsettling our harmonistic illusions by problematizing our own tendency toward complacent and self-congratulatory conceptions of progress. However, contra Fromm’s reading of him, referenced earlier, Freud’s late vision is not tragic in the sense that he thinks moral or political progress is in principle impossible. Rather, it is tragic in a more subtle and complicated sense: it is tragic precisely because of its unreconciled reading of history, that is, its refusal to take sides with either the cheerleaders or the enemies of civilization, with either the defenders or the critics of Enlightenment. Freud’s profession of impartiality on the question of whether civilization is the best thing that ever happened to us or not worth all the effort suggests precisely this: any attempt to read history as having a clear normative direction, whether that direction is construed progressively or regressively, constitutes an attempt to support one’s illusions—be they optimistic or pessimistic illusions—with arguments. As Adorno put it: “the greatness of Freud as that of all radical bourgeois thinkers consists in that he leaves such contradictions unresolved, and he scorns the pretended systematic harmony where things in themselves are torn asunder.”18 In so doing, Adorno continues, Freud reveals “the antagonistic character of social reality,” reflecting “something of its objective unreason.”19 In other words, Freud might productively be read as attempting to problematize or shed critical light on our historical present precisely by refusing either to celebrate or to condemn the historical path that led up to it. A similar tragic sensibility is reflected in Melanie Klein’s comments on progress, in a passage that I quoted part of earlier: The repeated attempts that have been made to improve humanity—and in particular to make it more peaceable—have failed, because nobody has understood the full depth and vigour

Progress and the Death Drive Z 127 of the instincts of aggression innate in each individual. Such efforts do not seek to do more than encourage the positive, wellwishing impulses of the person while denying or suppressing his aggressive ones. And so they have been doomed to failure from the beginning. But psychoanalysis has different means at its disposal for a task of this kind. It cannot, it is true, altogether do away with man’s aggressive instinct as such; but it can, by diminishing the anxiety which accentuates those instincts, break up the mutual reinforcement that is going on all the time between his hatred and his fear.20

Freud’s tragic vision is primarily concerned with what I have elsewhere called progress as a “fact,” that is, with backwardlooking judgments about whether or not history can or should be understood as a progressive of enlightenment, learning, or development. Klein, by contrast, expands on Freud’s view by turning her attention to what I have called progress as an imperative, that is, to progress understood as a forward-looking or future-oriented goal or aspiration that we are striving to achieve, such as the achievement of a more just or less oppressive society. 21 Klein’s suggestion is that heretofore efforts to promote progress as a forward-looking moral or political imperative tend to be predicated upon a kind of wishful thinking, a denial of the aggressive or death drive, and that this wishful thinking dooms them to failure. Psychoanalysis, on Klein’s view, can help to cure us of this wishful thinking by offering a more realistic conception of the person.22 Klein’s conception of the person centers on her distinction between two fundamental positions: the paranoid-schizoid position, in which the death drive is ascendant, the primary object is split into the idealized good and demonized bad breast, and the individual experiences itself as disintegrated, “in bits”;

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and  the depressive position, in which the erotic drive holds sway, and the fundamental ambivalence of the object—its good and bad, loving and destructive features—and of the self is tolerated but neither overcome nor reconciled.23 Although Klein views the depressive position as more psychologically mature than the paranoid-schizoid position, she also tends to eschew the kinds of progressive developmental trajectories that Freud favored. Instead, she speaks of the depressive position as having “come to the fore,” suggesting an oscillating or figure-ground rather than a developmental-stage model of the self.24 For Klein, then, the ambivalence of the drives is psychically fundamental precisely because the death drive is ineliminable. However, this does not mean that she denies the possibility of progress in a forward-looking sense. Rather, by claiming that psychoanalysis can “break up the mutual reinforcement that is going on all the time between . . . hatred and fear,” Klein suggests that we can find better ways of managing the aggressive drives and the damage done by them, even if we must, on her view, acknowledge that they cannot be eliminated entirely. On this account, progress could be understood as the amelioration of the tendencies toward splitting—the mirror image processes of demonization and idealization that are the hallmarks of the paranoid-schizoid position— and toward projection and introjection—the projection of one’s own aggression toward others onto those others, which is then, in turn, introjected back into the self—that are crucial to the dynamics of domination. The key, at both the individual and social levels, lies in developing the ability to tolerate the ambivalence of the drives without resorting to such defense mechanisms. Although more would need to be said in order to show how this might work at the social level, this Kleinian picture at least suggests the possibility of a limited, realistic, and negativistic but nonetheless

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forward-looking conception of progress. This account is limited and realistic insofar as it is based on Klein’s realistic conception of the person, according to which the death drive is ineliminable; it is negativistic insofar as progress, on this view, amounts to ameliorating or mitigating the psychic and social tendencies that are crucial to the dynamics of domination. Moreover, since Klein maintains that the oscillation between these two positions is a persistent feature of even psychologically mature individuals, she also places great emphasis on the willingness to repair the damage and destructiveness that we inevitably do. This, too, is a component of her conception of progress. In closing, I want to suggest that progress in Klein’s sense is quite close to Adorno’s negativistic conception of progress as the avoidance of catastrophe, where catastrophe, for Klein, could be understood as the result of the unfettered expression of the dynamics of splitting, projection, and introjection characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position. Her account of the depressive position as the toleration without reconciliation of the fundamental and irreconcilable ambivalence of the self and its relation to its objects could also be productively compared to Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics, understood as a kind of nonrepressive togetherness of difference. Such a conception provides an interesting alternative to the radical and positive utopian vision forwarded by Marcuse25—indeed, Adorno famously maintained that the very idea of genuine reconciliation prevents it being posited as a positive concept—although, if we accept the idea that the drives are themselves historically shaped and transformed, then we cannot rule out in advance the possibility of more fundamental transformations in the structure of the drives. Still, if we read Freud and Klein through an Adornian lens, we can take from their work the idea that in the current historical context the harmonistic illusions of the defenders of progress

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(understood as a backward-looking claim about history) are actually an impediment to progress (understood as a forwardlooking moral-political imperative) precisely because they blind us to depth of the challenges that we face. As such, they serve the interests of the status quo. As Adorno put it, “that one is to speak from the bright and not from the dark side of individual and society, suits exactly the official and acceptable and respectable ideology.”26 In this way, Freud and Klein, like Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, could be placed among the dark writers of the bourgeoisie who make progress possible precisely through their “unsparing criticism” (CD 115) of its alleged instances. Here we have a different way of understanding what Marcuse once called the explosive content of psychoanalysis, 27 distinct from his understanding of the revolutionary, utopian potential of uninhibited eros. The explosive content, on this reading, consists in the ability to break through respectable ideology, to fracture existing social reality, and in so doing to make room for its radical critique. In this sense, perhaps, as Adorno said, “Freud’s misanthropy is nothing else than hopeless love and the only expression of hope which still remains.”28

NOTES This chapter originally appeared in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 26 (2016): 1–19. Thanks to Benjamin Randolph, Nicole Yokum, and audiences at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy and the University of Essex Philosophy Department for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to Nicole Yokum for valuable research assistance. 1. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 (1920–1922), trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001).

Progress and the Death Drive Z 131 2. Melanie Klein, “The Early Development of Conscience in the Child,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945: The Writings of Melanie Klein (New York: Free Press, 1975), 1:257. 3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition, vol. 21 (1927–1931), 113. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as CD. 4. Erich Fromm, “Freud’s Model of Man and Its Social Determinants,” in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Freud, Marx, and Social Psychology (Boston: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970), 45. 5. On this point, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 100. 6. Karen Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1939), 132. Quoted in Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 272. Although Horkheimer initially shared Fromm’s distaste for the death drive precisely because of the worry that it implied a kind of political resignation, he changed his mind on this after World War II, at which point he came to think that the death drive captured well the depth and ferocity of the destructive urges of modern human beings. In the postwar context, the death drive and the antinomies of Freudian thought to which it gives rise emerged, in Martin Jay’s words, “as a necessary bulwark against the harmonistic illusions of the revisionists [such as Fromm and Horney].” Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 105. 7. For the purposes of this chapter, I’m primarily interested in the death drive in a Kleinian sense, where this refers to primary aggressiveness or destructiveness, rather than in the sense of the speculative biological Nirvana principle, the drive to return to inorganic nature, that Freud hypothesized as the root cause of aggressiveness. This is partly because I find Klein’s conception of the death drive and of the fundamental ambivalence of the drives more convincing and well worked out than Freud’s—though I won’t be arguing that point here— and partly because I think that it is aggression and destructiveness that are viewed by critical theorists as the real stumbling blocks for the idea of progress. Indeed, I suspect, though I won’t argue for this interpretive claim here, that the tragic vision implied by the death drive is a significant factor shaping the relationship between psychoanalysis and

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8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory. If the death drive is presumed to be incompatible with the possibility of historical progress, and if, as I have argued elsewhere, the idea of historical progress plays a crucial role in grounding normativity for both Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, then the death drive must be rejected. For the argument that the idea of historical progress plays a crucial role in grounding the normativity of critical theory in Habermas and Honneth, see Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). For a compelling defense of the relevance of the Freudian conception of the death drive for critical theory, see Benjamin Fong, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 11. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as EC. As Inara Luisa Marin puts it: Marcuse “never renounced the aporias of psychoanalysis.” Inara Luisa Marin, “The Bi-Dimensionality of Marcuse’s Critical Psychoanalytical Model of Emancipation: Between Negativity and Normativity,” Radical Philosophy Review 19, no. 1 (2016): 229–240, at 240. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 26. Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 11. Marin, “The Bi-Dimensionality of Marcuse’s Critical Psychoanalytical Model of Emancipation,” 233– 237. For a defense of Marcuse’s ambivalent reading of psychoanalysis, particularly in relation to Adorno and Horkheimer’s more pessimistic interpretation and Habermas and Honneth’s more optimistic reading, see Marin, “The Bi-Dimensionality of Marcuse’s Critical Psychoanalytical Model of Emancipation.” Eva von Redecker, “Marx’s Concept of Radical Needs in the Guise of Queer Desire,” in Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy, ed. Nikita Dhawan, Antke Engel, Christoph H. E. Holzhey, and Volker Woltersdorff (London: Routledge, 2015), 33. Though von Redecker also notes that there are more similarities between Marcuse’s and Foucault’s analyses than are typically assumed.

Progress and the Death Drive Z 133 14. Joel Whitebook, “The Marriage of Marx and Freud,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 88. Quoting Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition, 21:16. 15. For the argument that psychoanalysis is important for critical theory precisely because it offers a realistic conception of the person that can counter the temptations of moral idealism, see Axel Honneth, “The Work of Negativity: A Recognition-Theoretical Revision of Psychoanalysis,” in The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition, trans. Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 16. For a contrary, pro-Enlightenment, reading of Freud, see Eli Zaretsky, Political Freud: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), chapter 3. 17. As Nietzsche puts it, “the moral conceptual world of ‘guilt,’ ‘conscience,’ ‘duty,’ ‘sacredness of duty’ had its origin: its beginnings were, like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1989), 65. 18. Theodor Adorno, “Revisionist Psychoanalysis,” trans. Nan-Nan Lee, Philosophy and Social Criticism 40, no. 3 (2014): 326– 338, 337. 19. Adorno, 326– 338, 337. 20. Klein, “The Early Development of Conscience in the Child,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, 257. 21. For further discussion of these two dimensions of progress, see Allen, The End of Progress. 22. Indeed, Joel Whitebook goes so far as to claim that psychoanalysis considers utopianism to be “undesirable in principle” because it is an expression of infantile omnipotence, a disavowal of “the incomplete and conflictual nature of human existence” that “raises the specter of totalitarianism” (Whitebook, “The Marriage of Marx and Freud,” 89). I have argued at greater length for the virtues of Klein’s realistic conception of the person, particularly with respect to critical theory, in Allen, “Are We Driven? Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis Reconsidered,” Critical Horizons 16, no. 4 (November 2015): 311– 328. 23. Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963: The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 3 (New York: Free Press, 1975).

134 Y Amy Allen 24. Klein, 14. 25. Inara Marin argues that Marcuse’s conception of emancipation, derived from his reading of psychoanalysis, is a negative one, inasmuch as “his critical model intends to depart from social pathologies and find in their negation paths for emancipation.” Marin, “The Bi-Dimensionality of Marcuse’s Critical Psychoanalytical Model of Emancipation,” 240, note 20. However, even if we grant Marin this point, insofar as Marcuse does give positive content to the conception of libidinal utopia that he derives negatively, his account of emancipation is not negativistic in the Adornian sense. 26. Adorno, “Revisionist Psychoanalysis,” 335. 27. “Theory and Politics: A Discussion with Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Heinz Lubasc, and Telman Spenglar,” Telos, no. 38 (1978– 1979): 127. 28. Adorno, “Revisionist Psychoanalysis,” 336.

5 TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS, GOD, AND MODELING THE COMMODITY FORM Owen Hulatt

I

n volume 1 of Capital, Karl Marx offered an account of the “mystery” of the “commodity fetish.” This was developed through careful unpacking of the extent to which relational properties can show up in our experience and was couched in language that can suggest a yet more ambitious and speculative account of the connection between physical practices and the structure of our experience and cognition. Both these aspects were taken up by Georg Lukács in his seminal account of reification, an account without which the first generation of the Frankfurt School (on which I will focus here, with specific reference to Theodor Adorno) is inconceivable. While Lukács and his descendants expanded on and exploited this more speculative aspect to Marx’s account, it is surprising that they never seriously or thoroughly reconstructed it. The putative effects of the commodity form were analyzed and expanded on by critical theory, and held to range over forms of social structure, exchange, and consciousness. But the precise means by which the commodity form was able to produce these more speculatively robust effects was scarcely considered. It is my position that critical theory extended and revised Marx’s account of the commodity form and that this extension

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did not receive sufficient justification or explanation. I will identify Alfred Sohn-Rethel as the only author who seriously confronted this problem and claim that Adorno implicitly relies on Sohn-Rethel’s account to justify his own extended account of the commodity form. I will also show that Sohn-Rethel’s materialist, “object-side” explanation of this extended account is incoherent. As a consequence I will suggest that a subject-side account is required to underwrite the extended use of the commodity in critical theory. I will suggest that object relations theory provides a clear and compelling way of achieving this. In particular, I will claim that Donald Winnicott’s notion of the “transitional object” should be used.

MARX ’S ANALYSIS OF THE COMMODIT Y FETISH Throughout, I will want to distinguish between Marx’s account of the commodity and commodity form, and the expanded use to which these notions were put in critical theory. When referring to the life of these concepts in critical theory, I will add the prefix extended. To begin with, let us get clear on Marx’s account. Commodities are, Marx asserts, a “social hieroglyphic.” To decipher this hieroglyphic, we are obliged to penetrate its phenomenal appearance. It appears to us as an object that possesses, as a natural property, an “exchange value” which makes it fungible. However, the truth of the matter is quite different. The exchange value that appears as a property of the object is in fact not a property of the object at all; it is a reflection of a collection of social-relational properties. At the same time, what appears as a property of an object really is a property of that object. It is

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correct to claim that objects have exchange value in a capitalist society. Commodities, then, have a tangled and complex status, being both revealed and concealed, both fictive and empirically discoverable.1 What is clear is that the commodity produced for exchange—unlike a surplus offered up for barter—has its own ontological and epistemic quirks specific to it. These are what Marx refers to as the “theological niceties” of the commodity. Marx largely, if not exclusively, developed his account of commodity fetishism in section 4 of chapter 1 of volume 1 of Capital. Here we find that commodity exchange involves a materially enacted equivalence: “Whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.”2 As implied here by the reference to our being “not aware,” the commodity acquires its properties in a way that is not immediately visible to us. Commodities are placed into equivalence and exchanged, and this exchange takes place in such a way that it obscures the genuine facts about this exchange: A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.3

Those subject to commodity exchange are also subject to epistemic constraint. Facts about their own social labor, and its social

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character, vanish into and only immediately show up as facts about the objects they themselves have produced. The object’s “value” is experienced as if it were an objective property instead of a social property. Following from this epistemic error—which the experienced makeup of the commodity invites—the metabolic processes of exchange society seem to be driven by the intrinsic properties of objects rather than the social, relational properties which in fact stand behind them.4 It is possible to interpret Marx’s account as a simple claim about epistemic limitation, rather than an exercise in speculative reasoning. Commodities are produced by a complex family of relational properties. Due to the epistemic limitations introduced by our standpoint (engaged in the immediate business of transaction), these properties appear in an immediate form that does not replicate their true mediacy. Marx can be understood as flagging this up directly here: The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value—this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.5

Marx’s original account can be understood as a local example of a general feature of our epistemic psychology. Science regularly familiarizes us with instances in which immediately perceived properties “conceal” their true mediacy. The perceived atmosphere (experienced as a simple phenomenon, but actually

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comprised of component gases and lower-level atomic facts) seems no more or less a “fetish” than the commodity. The interesting difference lies only in the fact that commodities involve not ignorance about the true constitution of external objects but rather ignorance about the true constitution of our own actions. This failure of self-knowledge is appreciably different, and perhaps more alarming, than in the conventional scientific case. But the basic structure of the problem appears the same. On this reading, the commodity form does not determine the structure of our thought; nor indeed does it limit what can be  thought. The poor epistemic standing which the nature of the commodity pushes us into can be undone by taking up a philosophical or scientific perspective; and there is no constraint in principle on who can take up this perspective. On the other hand, Marx’s very language of “fetishes,” the “mystery thereof,” and his reference to “theological niceties,” also offers space to understand the commodity form as more than a mere source of epistemic limitation. We might instead see licence to understand the commodity form as determining and controlling the contours of our experience and thought. That critical theory has been willing to make use of this licence should not be surprising. The key appeal to the theory of commodity fetishism after Marx is precisely in its legitimating and covering over the peculiar cross-domain inferences and structures which critical theory characteristically makes use of.

LUKÁCS AND THE EXTENDED COMMODIT Y FORM In Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness the nature of the commodity fetish is not enquired into, but rather expanded upon. It is no longer merely the case that commodities obfuscate

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our ability to perceive the social relations embedded in them; it is now the case that they have a leading role in determin ing what we can think. The commodity draws consciousness along after it and determines its limits. The very conceptual structures of thought are imposed and determined by our relationship to physical processes of exchange. Lukács makes this entirely explicit in the introduction to his essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” Here, he states: The problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. . . . Our intention here is to base ourselves on Marx’s economic analyses and to proceed from there to a discussion of the problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also as a subjective stance corresponding to it.6

Indeed, the “subjective stance” necessitated by commodity exchange leads to a constriction of how philosophical enquiry can be conducted. Through this mechanism, the commodity form necessitates certain kinds of thought: The forms of capital are objectively subordinated, it is true, to the real life-process of capitalism, the extraction of surplus value in the course of production. They are, therefore, only to be explained in terms of the nature of industrial capitalism itself. But in the minds of people in bourgeois society they constitute the pure, authentic, unadulterated forms of capital. [. . .] The commodity character of the commodity, the abstract, qualitative mode of calculability shows itself here in its purest form: the reified mind

Tr ansitional Objects, God, and the Commodity Z 141 necessarily sees it as the form in which its own authentic immediacy becomes manifest and—as reified consciousness—does not even attempt to transcend it.7

Lukács’s advance over Marx, and extension of his account, is disclosed above by the key term necessarily. The commodity form’s epistemic effect is now one of necessitation and determination. The hypertrophy of this element of Marx’s account was of great consequence for critical theory, as we will explore in the next section.

ADORNO AND THE COMMODIT Y FORM Adorno takes over the key Lukácsian move without any modifications to its central features. For Adorno, all thought is ultimately determined in its categories and structures by the commodity form: “If the standard structure of society is the exchange form, its rationality constitutes people: what they are for themselves, what they think they are, is secondary. They are deformed at the outset by the mechanism that was then philosophically transfigured into the transcendental.”8 The curious idea, here, that commodity exchange (a physical process) has a “rationality” proper to it will link up with our consideration of Sohn-Rethel shortly. For Adorno, as for Lukács, the domain of material exchange is in fact able to determine the apparently separate domain of pure cognition. On top of this, the idea of the commodity as a “social hieroglyphic” is likewise hypertrophied in the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Adorno sees social phenomena (part of a fully integrated social “totality” dominated by commodity

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exchange) as physiognomies of the structure of society more generally, bearing a superlative level of content that the attentive critical theorist can pull out and subject to critique. Social products, then, are not only “social hieroglyphics” in the limited sense that they attest to the social relations that immediately produced them; facts about the social totality as a whole can be read out of these social products. For Adorno, the social hieroglyph has now been strengthened into a social physiognomy. As O’Connor puts it: “Objects [for Adorno are] a complex of concepts. These concepts are acquired and accumulated in the history of the object’s position in what Adorno terms the social totality; a neo-Marxist version of the phenomenological life-world. Adorno argues that the social totality has a determinative influence on objects.”9 Of course, for Adorno, it is not only the commodity that has this expanded role as a social hieroglyphic; it is everything touched by the commodity form. And, given Adorno’s use of the notion of the “social totality,” everything touched by the commodity form turns out to be— everything. Our prereflective phenomenology is underwritten and determined by the separate domain of social structures of exchange, many of which structures have no immediate contact with or relevance to the object of our experience. Bodies of facts are here again being speculatively placed into explanatory and causal relations. In Adorno, as in Lukács, the extended commodity form exhibits the ability to be a cross-domain actor. The domain of physical acts of exchange, the domain of our general phenomenology, and the domain of abstract philosophical thought are all in principle orthogonal. But the extended account of the commodity form is confident that we can draw an explanatory and causal account that ranges across and unites these apparently disparate domains through speculative reasoning.

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EXTENDING (AND EXPLAINING) COMMODIT Y FETISHISM IN SOHN- RETHEL To make use of cross-domain explanation is to immediately incur a significant burden of interpretive justification.10 The core of this burden is interpretive underdetermination. Cross-domain accounts characteristically fasten onto “symptoms,” which putatively demonstrate that some additional explanatory work is being done outside a given domain. For Adorno, the increasing failure of reason to secure human survival was evidence reason was constituted, and vitiated, by processes outside of pure reason itself.11 For Lukács, the “antinomies” of bourgeois thought were evidence of extratheoretical determination by the structure of commodity exchange.12 Likewise, for critical theory more generally, the failure of capitalism to collapse was evidence (a “symptom”) of the existence of causal interference from outside of the domain of capitalism’s own surface level systems and their (supposed) internal contradictions. In such cases, the interpretation offered is underdetermined because the interpretation of the symptom as a symptom is tendentious (another response to the failure of capitalism to collapse, for example, is to come to see that there are not really any internal contradictions in capitalism at all). Further, even if we agree that cross-domain explanations are desirable— there are “symptoms” that require explanation in this way— speculative reasoning is capable of positing any number of equally explanatory and consistent accounts consistent with those symptoms. And so the ability of a cross-domain account to provide unique explanatory value is low; still lower is its ability to motivate belief in its own speculative account as  the  necessarily correct one. This motivational problem is

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particularly pronounced for a social or political philosophy that seeks to motivate change. I am aware of one writer in the critical theory tradition who took these problems seriously. Sohn-Rethel sought to justify this cross-domain account by claiming that the two domains of exchange and cognition were uniquely isomorphic. The reason why they were able to mutually influence one another is because they share something that all other candidate domains do not— namely, abstraction. He makes this explicit: “Abstraction can be likened to the workshop of conceptual thought and its process must be a materialistic one if the assertion that consciousness is determined by social being is to hold true.”13 Sohn-Rethel’s claim is that abstraction is not solely a cognitive process; commodity exchange is a materially enacted “real abstraction,” structurally homologous to abstraction executed in thought. SohnRethel pursues with interest how various kinds of abstract thought (for example, pure concepts of space and time) have originated from and been determined by the abstraction that takes place, in  various ways and at various levels, in the physical act of exchange.14 This idea has recently been enthusiastically received in some quarters.15 It is not hard to see why. Marxism is above all a species of materialism. Sohn-Rethel finally provides us with a means of explaining and justifying the cross-domain causation between material practices, experience, and thought. Namely, through the category of the real abstraction. There is no other means of explanation that occurs to me which could hope to improve upon this as a materialist means of explaining the peculiar properties of the extended commodity form, and still less the broader uses to which critical theory has hoped to put this notion. However, I believe the notion of real abstraction is highly dubious. Sohn-Rethel defines real-abstraction in this way:

Tr ansitional Objects, God, and the Commodity Z 145 The form in which commodity-value takes on its concrete appearance as money—be it as coinage or bank-notes—is an abstract thing which, strictly speaking, is a contradiction in terms. . . . In order to do justice to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy the commodity or value abstraction revealed in his analysis must be viewed as a real abstraction resulting from spatio-temporal activity. . . . It is in its capacity of a real event in time and space that the abstraction applies to exchange, it is in its precise meaning a real abstraction and the “use” from which the abstraction is made encompasses the entire range of sense reality.16

Sohn-Rethel’s conception of real abstraction was not without influence. In particular, it lived on in surprising and concealed ways in Adorno’s own philosophy. I have mustered evidence for this elsewhere,17 but suffice it to say that where Adorno considers the nature of the commodity form and its effects it has been most often been on Sohn-Rethel’s model. In order for Sohn-Rethel’s account to be successful, it needs to convince us that an apparently exclusive intellectual quality (one of abstraction) can be meaningfully instantiated in physical objects or processes. Sohn-Rethel appears to hold that a failure of a process to respond to the full particularity of the objects it manipulates is a sufficient condition for its being a “real abstraction.” But this proves too much. One can conceive of a machine whose sole function is to sort objects by their shape. All other properties are irrelevant to the functioning of this machine. It is difficult to see this process as abstract, despite its failure to exhibit responsivity to the full particularity of the objects. It is merely a purely physical, specific process with tightly defined operating conditions that derive from its particular properties. Exchange is no more or less abstract than this; it is likewise a merely specific kind of physical process, with limited means of responding

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to the properties of the objects with which it deals. We can describe the physical process fully without resorting to the notion of a physical abstraction. It might be objected—and Sohn-Rethel seems to implicitly make use of this point—that it is the nature of property responded to which makes the difference. Commodity value is putatively an “abstract property,”18 due to its making the commensurability of incommensurable goods possible. Supposing we accept this, it follows that exchange is itself abstract, as it is solely responsive to this abstract property. But this, again, proves too much. Consider the practice of counting; I enter a room determined to identify all of the objects that come in twos. Here I apply an abstract criteria (searching for and only responding to instantiations of the number two). But such a procedure is entangled with and responsive to the exhibited properties of particular objects (namely, their coming in couples). The fact that this process responds to an abstract property does not make it itself abstract; indeed the process of “finding pairs” or “responding to twoness” will have a great degree of qualitative variation (there are many ways to execute this process) and will be instantiated in a collection of particular facts (my doing this will differ from your doing it). It proves difficult to give an account of just what the existence of “real abstraction” would amount to, or where a full description of a process could not be reduced to purely particular facts. What we can draw from this is that an object-side account, which seeks to explain the cross-domain causation characteristic of the use of the commodity form in critical theory in terms of peculiar features of the material domain, seems to be unworkable. This leaves open the possibility that we might be able to explain the cross-domain interaction from the subject’s side. I will consider object relations theory as means of firming

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up an account of this type, with reference to Winnicott’s concept of the “Transitional Object.”

TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS AND THE COMMODIT Y FORM The problems for the extended commodity form are as follows; 1. it must provide a motivating and, as far as possible, complete explanation and justification of the cross-domain causation it argues for and 2. it must provide a motivating and, as far as possible, complete explanation and justification of the commodity’s ability to be a physiognomy of society as a whole. We will now see if an object relations’ concept of the transitional object can be of assistance here. Winnicott posited transitional objects as first occurring during the infant’s “graduated de-adaption” from its mother. The infant begins in a state of solipsistic idealism, believing it has omnipotent control over its environment.19 The end goal is to achieve differentiation, but this process of disentanglement from the mother and the environment is painful and complex. The transitional object aids with this process, representing a tentative space between the pure subjectivity of the infant’s inward-looking experience of the world as omnipotently controlled by itself and the pure objectivity of coming to see the world as comprised of objects that resist its attempts at control. These transitional objects are partly substitutes for the parent, from which the infant is gradually being disentangled. They are also a means by which to engage in the practice of testing and accepting the existence of a reality separate and not reducible to the structure of the infant’s own desires and satisfactions.20 Transitional objects are jointly constituted by the

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infant’s own subjectively projected content, and fully real objective facts.21 Transitional objects—and the task of navigating between our inner subjectivity and the objectivity of the outside world—are not limited to infancy: It is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.). This intermediate area is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is “lost” in play.22

What is crucial, however, is that the shared phenomena are never held up for reality testing as if they were objective. Should an adult make claims on us for our acceptance of the objectivity of his subjective phenomena we discern or diagnose madness. If, however, the adult can manage to enjoy the personal intermediate area without making claims, then we can acknowledge our own corresponding intermediate areas and are pleased to find overlapping, that is to say, common experience between members of a group in art or religion or philosophy.23 In these spheres of adult transitional phenomena, we can share and draw attention to experiences and facts that press themselves upon us, but we refrain from applying the status of full reality to them. This idea of a sphere of objects jointly composed of subjective and objective content sounds promising in terms of understanding commodities. We can see this further here: I have claimed that when we witness an infant’s employment of a transitional object, the first non-me possession, we are witnessing both the child’s first use of a symbol and the first experience of play. An essential part of my formulation of transitional phenomena is

Tr ansitional Objects, God, and the Commodity Z 149 that we agree never to make the challenge to the baby: did you create this object, or did you find it conveniently lying around? That is to say, an essential feature of transitional phenomena and objects is a quality in our attitude when we observe them.24

The means by which we advance claims about exchange value are importantly in conformity with Winnicott’s claim. A prereflective claim that an object “is worth” a given amount can pass without trouble. It would be far more difficult to win assent for the claim that a diamond (say) objectively possesses an ahistorical, cross-cultural kind of property that compels exchange at a certain rate, a property as fully real as weight or mass. In this sense, our experience of commodity exchange shares the same “not in and not out” structure of transitional phenomena— neither entirely fictive (objects really do have exchange value) nor fully real (if pressed reflectively, we do not think of this value as an intrinsic property), neither wholly created (subjective) nor found (objective). For these reasons, commodities seem eligible to be considered as transitional phenomena, as constitutively located in between the realms of the subjective and objective, not answering fully to either category. Broadly put, the project of understanding commodities as transitional phenomena seems legitimate. To start to see how this could provide a compelling answer to problems 1 and 2 requires that we look at Winnicott’s account of a unique transitional object—namely, God.

TRANSITIONAL PHENOMENA, GOD, AND COMMODITIES Winnicott posited religion, alongside art, as one of the adult spheres of transitional phenomena. In religion we find the same

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curious interplay between being found and being created; the transitional object is experienced not as a projection but rather an object of experience that can make demands and have a profound influence on one’s (moral and epistemic) psychology. Meissner, building on Winnicott’s folding of religion into the sphere of the transitional phenomena, claims that man needs to create, to shape and transform his environment, find vehicles for expressing his inner life, or rather the constant commerce between the ongoing worlds of his external experience and  his inner psychic reality. Winnicott’s standard of psychic health is not the separation of the real and the wishful, as Freud might have had it, but rather their constant intermingling and exchange.

(Meissner 1984:17 7)

What is of interest here is the fact that the transitional object as experienced is jointly constituted by both projective mechanisms and external relational properties that are introjected into and determine the nature of the discovered transitional object. God as an experienced object is a congeries of real facts—drawn from the “constant commerce [with . . .] external experience”—that are bundled together and represented. What this shows is that mature transitional phenomena have their immediacy determined by mediated relational properties and that those mediated relational properties show up in this immediacy. Let us call this “experiential bundling.” This suggests a means of solving problem 2. There is a second feature not present in this account, but which we can derive from it. Transitional objects can have a significant effect on the structure of our thought. The very fact of God’s being experienced has a significant effect on our theoretical commitments. If one believes in the existence of God, the means by

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which we interact with a number of moral and metaphysical questions is changed, so too are the complement of categorical structures that we can consistently hold. For example, for someone with a robust relationship with God it is difficult, if not impossible, to take up reductive physicalism as a philosophical position. Call this “the categorial effect.” This promises to be of use in solving problem 1. We should also note a further problem has appeared. Just as, in Winnicott’s more general account, children may select from a blanket, their thumb, their mother, and so on, as their transitional object, so too for adults their specific transitional phenomena come in many varieties. In other words, the transitional phenomena that are present for us are contingent—different people experience different transitional objects. This contingency means that transitional phenomena cannot account for the supposedly inescapable effect of the extended commodity form on our experience and thought. The extended commodity form has a necessary epistemic effect—it is not escapable. Call this problem 3.

GOD AND COMMODITIES God is a “special transitional object.”25 There is nothing to say there might not be other special transitional objects, which have their own unique properties. Let us consider whether we might not take commodities to be just such a kind. We will work through problems 1— 3 and see if viewing the commodity as a transitional object solves them. 1. Explaining and motivating cross-domain causation between physical processes and the categories of thought. Just as the experience of the transitional phenomenon of God has a categorial effect on one’s metaphysics, the experience of

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commodities as objects bearing an apparently intrinsic property of exchange value that makes them fungible also has a categorial effect. It leads to a view of capitalist structures of exchange as natural and necessary, as they seem to be tracking not social facts but apparently natural facts. It likewise, as Lukács claims, leads to us seeing ourselves as governed by objects relating to each other (being structured by their “natural” exchange value) rather than being governed by contingent social structures of our own creation. This categorial effect seems to secure much of what Lukács and Adorno desire; commodities turn out to compel certain kinds of conceptual structures. However, it is less clear how this kind of categorial effect could lead to a total control of the structure of our cognition in the manner in which Adorno apparently believes. This is a genuine problem. Lukács’s account of the way in which commodities compel a certain kind of instrumentalized “contemplation” could perhaps be reintroduced on this basis; 26 the local categorial effect of commodities (which seem to compel an instrumentalized, abstract form of engagement with commodities) could be held to have wider derivative effects. Alternatively, we can exploit the fact that commodities are now psychological phenomena, rather than merely external objects that are subject to judgment. If commodities are not merely immediate, experienced in a misleading way, but are in fact psychological phenomena that compel us to think about them in certain ways, which involve and shape our internal lives, the more extended categorial effect of the commodity could in principle be accounted for. There is more work to be done here; but we have provided a basis from which to proceed. 2. Explaining and motivating the commodity as a “social hieroglyphic” or physiognomy of society as a whole. Here we can make use of the “experiential bundling” feature of transitional phenomena. Transitional phenomena are filled

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with properties gleaned from our “commerce between the ongoing worlds of [our] external experience and [our] inner psychic reality.” Commodity exchange is an enacted physical practice. This enacted physical practice is constitutive of our social sphere, and our commerce with the external world is accordingly conditioned by such a practice. As a consequence, the commodity form, and the commodity as a transitional object, is constituted by the friction between our inner lives and our confrontation with this external physical practice. And so the commodity form as a transitional phenomenon can be a “social hieroglyph” just because it has social-relational properties that help make up the nature of the commodity as experienced; it is a bundling of our experiences of the act of exchange that produces the experienced commodity, with its possession of putatively natural properties (as in Marx), together with its physiognomic reflection of social content more generally (as in Adorno). As the commodity form, for Adorno, determines and interacts with everything, so too is our commerce with the external world conducted through relations that stretch across society as a whole. The commodity can further become a physiognomy, then, as the external practices with which we are confronted have a genuine social universality, which is re-presented in the transitional object itself. In this way, this second aspect of critical theory’s extension of the notion of the commodity form receives explanation. 3. The necessity of the transitional phenomenon of the commodity. All other transitional phenomena are to an extent contingent; we can ignore art, disavow belief in God, and so on, but for Adorno and Lukács, at least, we are compelled to be subject to and struggle with the delusive effect of commodity exchange in both our experience and in the categories of our thought. What could account for this necessity, given that transitional phenomena in all other cases are contingent? This brings us back to

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Adorno’s totalism. God is produced because of a certain kind of commerce with the external world, which sets up certain kinds of psychological needs, which God as a transitional object is well placed to fulfill. However, there is a contingency to indulging in commerce with the external world in such a way (just as a child might come into its transitional object—whether a blanket, thumb, or the mother itself—dependent on its way of interacting with the world). In the case of commodities, however, such contingency is impossible. The peculiar structure of our commerce with the external world is enforced by the totalizing structure of the money form and commodity exchange. To fail to engage with them is almost impossible. One could certainly retreat from an immediate relationship (one could live on alms, for example), but this would preserve and exacerbate the mediate relationship (being dependent on the goods of others produced through their own interactions with the commodity form). In this way, Adorno’s totalism allows the theory to carry; if the structure of our commerce with the external world is imposed and controlled in a fine-grained way, then so too are our transitional phenomena. We can explain the inescapability of this form of transitional object, then, by referring back to the inescapability of the real relations of commodity exchange that it illusorily collects and experientially bundles together. In this chapter I have considered whether, and to what extent, the extended use of the commodity form in critical theory can be justified. I identified some problems with its speculative structure and moved to show that object-side explanations of this speculative effect were unsuccessful. However, object relations theory provides a means of explaining and legitimating this speculative effect from the subject side. Indeed, we have arrived at a  novel theory of the commodity as a unique form of forced

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transitional object, which, in common with other transitional objects, can exhibit a status as a “social hieroglyph” through the mechanism of experiential bundling and, in common with God, can have categorial effects of the kind Adorno and Lukács were interested in through the very status and nature of the experienced commodity itself. In closing, we might point out that this suggests a markedly different means of making the interrelation between psychology and critical theory fruitful. Traditionally, psychoanalysis and cognate kinds of psychological inquiry have been brought to bear by first-generation critical theorists as a means of ameliorating macrolevel problems. The most notorious of these macrolevel problems was the stubborn refusal of capitalism to capitulate to its putative internal contradictions. Marxism—at least as grasped by members of the Frankfurt School—left one in little doubt that capitalism could be expected to shortly succumb to internally generated crises. Despite the severity of the interwar depression, it yielded few firm signs of the collapse of European and American capitalism, and postwar economic expansion, which did not end in Adorno’s lifetime, did still less to throw capitalism’s future into doubt. In light of these problems, the core thesis was not discarded but elaborated; capitalism was able to resist and compensate for its internal contradictions (which still assuredly existed) in part through various means of psychological standardization and compensation. Likewise, the emergence of fascism presented deep explanatory and moral questions that psychoanalysis was able to help in answering. The Frankfurt School had never been committed to a crude base-superstructure model; its deep proximity to post-Kantian critical philosophy ensured it was in the habit of explaining phenomena as underwritten by broad collections of enabling conditions, drawn from a wide variety of domains. As a consequence, critical theory was

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readily capable of incorporating certain modes of psychoanalytic description to shore up its position and to broaden the phenomena it was able to put into conversation. However, first generation critical theory’s deepest problems are found at the microlevel, in working through exactly how its various claims can be justified and how the various mechanisms of determination (whether via “reification,” “identity thinking,” or some other means) are intended to work. In the first generation, these problems were not reliably confronted or exhaustively worked through. (Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the second and third generations of the Frankfurt School have given this difficulty central emphasis and thorough attention). In working through these justificatory problems, we are tasked with answering the central question raised in this chapter—how to justify the speculative connection of apparently disconnected domains of phenomena. Object relations theory, like psychology more generally, has a great deal to offer in answer to this question, just because it constitutively— as a disciplinary commitment—relies on the notion that diverse phenomena can be connected and have causal effects in surprising ways that surface readings would not reveal. For this reason, any critical theorist working on Adorno’s broad model has a great deal to benefit from object relations theory, as I have here attempted to show in relation to one of critical theory’s central problems.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1961), 72. Marx, 74. Marx, 72. Marx, 73. Marx, 74.

Tr ansitional Objects, God, and the Commodity Z 157 6. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1968), 83–84. 7. Lukács, 93. 8. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 248. 9. Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 59. 10. I have written about cross-domain interpretive and its problems at greater length elsewhere: Owen Hulatt, “Interpretation and Circularity— Justificatory Issues in Adorno’s Epistemology and Social Criticism, and a Gadamerian Response,” Constellations 22, no. 3 (2015): 369–380. 11. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xvi. 12. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 110–149. 13. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (London: MacMillan, 1978), 72. 14. See section 6 in Sohn-Rethel, 35–58. 15. Cf. Alberto Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society 20, no.  2 (2008): 273–287; and “The Culture of Abstraction,” Theory, Culture, and Society 25, no. 4 (2008): 57– 75. 16. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, 19, 20, 28. 17. Owen Hulatt, “Modal and Epistemic Immodesty: An Incoherence in Adorno’s Social Philosophy,” Constellations 23, no. 4 (2016): 482–493. 18. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, 19. 19. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1971), 9. 20. Winnicott, 11. 21. Winnicott, 4–5. 22. Winnicott, 13. 23. Winnicott, 14. 24. Winnicott, 96. 25. Marilyn S. Saur and William G. Saur, “Transitional Phenomena as Evidenced in Prayer,” Journal of Religion and Health 32, no. 1 (1993): 56. 26. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 122.

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REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. 1998. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hulatt, Owen. 2015. “Interpretation and Circularity—Justificatory Issues in Adorno’s Epistemology and Social Criticism, and a Gadamerian Response.” Constellations 22, no. 3: 369– 380. Hulatt, Owen. 2016. “Modal and Epistemic Immodesty: An Incoherence in Adorno’s Social Philosophy.” Constellations 23, no. 4: 482–493. Lukács, Georg. 1968. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin. Marx, Karl. 1961. Capital: Volume 1. Moscow: Foreign Languages. Meissner, William W. 1984. Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press. O’Connor, Brian. 2004. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Saur, Marilyn S., and William G. Saur. 1993. “Transitional Phenomena as Evidenced in Prayer.” Journal of Religion and Health 32, no. 1: 55– 65. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1978. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. London: MacMillan. Toscano, Alberto. 2008a. “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society 20, no.  2: 273– 287. Toscano, Alberto. 2008b. “The Culture of Abstraction.” Theory, Culture, and Society 25, no. 4: 57– 75. Winnicott, Donald W. 1971. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge.

6 A “ TRUE- ENOUGH SELF ” Winnicott, Object Relations Theory, and the Bases of Identity James Martel

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uch of leftist theory has long been oriented toward a denial of any kind of true self. This tendency can be traced back to Nietzsche who famously writes in his Genealogy of Morals that “it is only the snare of language (of the arch-fallacies of reason petrified in language), presenting all activity as conditioned by an agent—the ‘subject’—that blinds us to [our lack of agency]. But no such agent exists; there is no ‘being’ behind the doing, acting becoming; the “doer” has simply been added to the deed by the imagination—the doing is everything.”1 The idea of a lack of a doer behind the deed has been taken up by thinkers ranging from Jacques Derrida to Michel Foucault to (more recently) Judith Butler. Of these later thinkers, Louis Althusser is one of the paramount critics who complicates the idea of subjectivity via his notion of interpellation, a claim that our identity is a material production of ideology. In a well-known passage, Althusser writes that interpellation “can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around. By this mere onehundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a

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subject.”2 For Althusser, it is not necessary that this event actually occurs, nor does he insist that the individual was not a subject before the moment of being hailed (he writes that “you and I are always already subjects”).3 Instead Althusser’s theory suggests the kinds of material operations by which the state or its representatives instill in each of us a sense of who we “really” are. Althusser doesn’t suggest that there is a “true self ” below the surface of the interpellated subject that we are/become. Nor does his work offer that we can simply walk away from this false form of agency and embrace some other authentic (or even inauthentic) self. Although not real in any ontological way, the false selves that operations of interpellation instill in us are very insistently “us.” Furthermore, Althusser doesn’t really give any sense of recourse to these false stand-ins for ourselves except to expose them for what they are. Many critics have blamed him for depicting such a bleak state of affairs; we are saddled with a self that we are not but we are stuck with it nonetheless, an operation of ideology that is illicit and groundless but absolutely effective. Even so, Althusser’s work stands as a strong critique of the liberal-Enlightenment sense of the individual who is manifestly in charge of her own self. If the self is not true, if she does not command herself but is a product of external forms of interpellation, then the entire notion of liberal individuality and the rights that accrue from that form of subjectivity is threatened and upended. The stakes for this issue are thus quite high, and for this reason debates about subjectivity are often bitter and divisive. In this chapter I wish to complicate the question a bit by recourse to a reading of Donald W. Winnicott, the British psychoanalytic theorist and writer who wrote extensively about object relations theory and the kinds of selves that objects produce (or, in some cases, fail to produce) in relation to them.

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At first glance, Winnicott’s work might seem to refute left/ Althusserian models of subjectivity. Winnicott readily acknowledges that there is a false self, a self that we create through the psychological processes we use to negotiate a hostile and volatile world. But he contrasts this false self with a true self that is  very much based in our real experience, in our bodies, our breathing, the pumping of blood and the way that the material world around us persists and anchors us via its own stubborn tangibility. Yet, for all this, rather than argue that, via Winnicott, we have discovered the “true” self after all (which would be a boon to liberals), I would make a different claim. I will argue that Winnicott offers a “true-enough” self, a self that, like Althusser’s interpellated subject, resists any easy shedding of itself, and that perseveres despite its lack of ontological certainty. This self is not so true that it is actually determinant; it does not make us “who we are” so much as serve to anchor whomever we become (an endless and nonteleological process). More critically, I will argue that the true-enough self is “unreal” enough to resist the absolute sense of identity that comes from liberal thought, even as it is “real” enough to avoid collapsing the subject into absurdity and nothingness. A bit like Goldilocks and the golden mean she discovers, this self is just true-enough to offer human agents a mix of ontological and nonontological elements to permit the subversion of liberal identities while retaining the coherence and agency that liberalism itself promises but never delivers. As such, I offer a Winnicottian true-enough self as a theoretical concept that works in tandem with the Nietzschean/ Althusserian school of thought (a school that I very much belong to) and also offer how and why it might not serve other more liberal or quasi-liberal schools of thought, making it work mainly for leftist and radical purposes. In particular, toward the

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end of the chapter, I will focus on how the true-enough self is less helpful for the post-Habermasian school by looking at Axel Honneth’s own engagement with Winnicott. To make these arguments, let me now explain how and why this is so.

WINNICOT T ’S SUBJECT AND THE GOOD- ENOUGH MOTHER For Winnicott, there are essentially two modes by which an infant comes to experience herself and her relationship with the world. The first is her own body: her blood pumping, her breathing, etc. The second is the external and especially material world, the way it persists despite the infant’s efforts to destroy and control it. And, in a sense, there is a common ground for these two modalities insofar as the infant’s own body is an object as well; hands and fingers that somehow remain persistently in the field of vision and are initially not (yet) obviously part of the infant herself. For Winnicott, external material objects are particularly critical for the infant to understand the difference between herself and her mother. He writes: The object is a symbol of the union of the baby and the mother (or part of the mother). This symbol can be located. It is at the place in space and time where and when the mother is in transition from being (in the baby’s mind) merged in with the infant and alternatively being experienced as an object to be perceived rather than conceived of. The use of an object [via play] symbolizes the union of two now separate things, baby and mother, at  the point in time and space of the initiation of their state of separation.4

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Winnicott speaks of “the separation that is not a separation but a form of union” between the baby and the mother, one that is  dynamic over time.5 Each time the mother goes out of the baby’s sight, the baby risks being traumatized, and each time she returns the baby is healed anew. Accordingly, “this mending of the ego structure reestablishes the baby’s capacity to use a symbol of union: the baby then comes once more to allow and even to benefit from separation.”6 And, even when the mother is not physically present (although she is always psychically present for Winnicott), objects too, in the way they can disappear from view only to reassert their existence, can reassure the baby both of the mother’s ongoing existence (for she too becomes an object of sorts for the baby) as well as the ongoing existence and hence boundaries of the baby herself. Yet Winnicott is careful to argue that the baby’s sense of self cannot be said to come purely out of these experiences of anxiety at loss and joy at reconnection. He writes: We now see that it is not instinctual satisfaction that makes a baby begin to be, to feel that life is real, to find life worth living. In fact, instinctual gratifications start off as part-functions and they become seductions unless based on a well-established capacity in the individual person for total experience, and for experience in the area of transitional phenomena. It is the self that must precede the self ’s use of instinct; the rider must ride the horse, not be run away with.7

Here we come to the crux of the matter; Winnicott insists that there must be a self to experience the formulation of the self, otherwise “the rider” (i.e., the self) will be “run away with.” The instinctual performances the baby engages in with the mother

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risk becoming “seductions” toward a false performance of subjectivity if the baby’s identity is not firmly established. To understand how this works, we must go a bit deeper into Winnocott’s theorization, especially in terms of his concepts of the “true” and “false” self. Winnicott speaks of the ego as the “true self,” something achieved when the infant realizes that instinct satisfaction is not environmental (i.e., “out there”) but internal to her self. The experience of boundaries as such are part of what produces an ego in the first place. The notion of the false self comes into play as something that either protects or even replaces the true self. Its origin is always protective; a would-be true self that is unsure of its boundaries or is ill-formed develops a false sense of self that effectively runs the psyche in ways that range from relatively healthy (getting a subject to go to therapy and caretaking for her when she does not) to destructive (committing suicide, paradoxically to protect the true self from any further possible harm). The question of whether a false self develops depends, Winnicott writes, on the baby’s relationship with her mother. In a spirit of extreme mother blaming (and, on the other hand, somewhat faint praising), Winnicott speaks of a “not goodenough” mother as well as a “good-enough” mother:8 “The good-enough mother meets the omnipotence of the infant and to some extent makes sense of it. She does this repeatedly. A True Self begins to have life, through the strength given to the infant’s weak ego by the mother’s implementation of the infant’s omnipotent expressions.”9 The good-enough mother’s role is to reinforce the child’s own sense of power (“omnipotence”). When the child makes a gesture, one that is initially purely spontaneous, the good-enough mother reinforces the child’s sense that this gesture was proof of the baby’s power over the world, strengthening her ego. The not good-enough

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mother on the other hand: “substitutes her own gesture which is to be given sense by the compliance of the infant. This compliance on the part of the  infant is the earliest stage of the False Self, and belongs to the mother’s inability to sense her infant’s needs.”10 Here the not good-enough mother, perhaps anxious about her own ego boundaries and also determined by (what must necessarily be) a false self of her own, reduces the baby’s sense of omnipotence instead of reinforcing it. In this way, the not good-enough mother’s own false self can be said to serve as the formative basis for the baby’s false self, a self that is not authentic to (or at least not authentic enough for) the individual in question. As Winnicott puts it further: In the first case the mother’s adaptation is good enough and in consequence the infant begins to believe in external reality which appears and behaves as by magic (because of the mother’s relatively successful adaptation to the infant’s gestures and needs), and which acts in a way that does not clash with the infant’s omnipotence. On this basis the infant can gradually abrogate omnipotence. The True Self has a spontaneity, and this has been joined up with the world’s events. The infant can now begin to enjoy the illusion of omnipotent creating and controlling, and then can gradually come to recognize the illusory element, the fact of playing and imagining. Here is the basis for the symbol which at first is both the infant’s spontaneity or hallucination, and also the external object created and ultimately cathected.11

In this way the “good-enough” mother manages to make what is impossible (the child’s omnipotence) appear to be in synch with the external world. The “hallucination” of her power becomes reinforced by regular and repeated acts by the good-enough

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mother. Ultimately, the illusion of omnipotence is meant to be overridden by a sense of play and safety, and this is when the true self really comes into its own. With the not good-enough mother on the other hand, the result is catastrophic for the ego. For Winnicott, what is ultimately at stake is a symbolic economy where symbols can either be understood for what they are— suggestive, even playful elements— or they can be taken too literally. The latter leads to a confusion of the self and her boundaries, creating a false self in the process.

HOW TRUE IS THE TRUE SELF? At this point, we can begin to see how the self for Winnicott is not true per se but more of a product of various operations of identity formation. Interestingly, Winnicott distinguishes between a “body-ego” and an ego (or true self). He writes: “It will be seen that if this area is to be thought of as part of the ego organization, here is a part of the ego that is not a body-ego, that is not founded on the pattern of body functioning but is founded on body experiences. These experiences belong to object-relating of a nonorgiastic kind, or to what can be called ego-relatedness, at the place where it can said the continuity is giving place to contiguity.”12 Here we see that the basis of “trueness” for the true self is not the physical body, not the blood pumping and all the rest (which, even if not truly true, is fairly consistent and has at least a whiff of the ontological about it). Rather, in his view truth stems from the experiences and relationships that the baby finds herself immersed in, and, in particular, her relationship with her mother.

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There are numerous indications that Winnicott does not think of the true self as ontologically true. We already saw, for instance, his concern that the true self must be present to avoid the possibility of a subject without subjectivity (or a “riderless” horse, as he puts it). Winnicott presupposes a true self because without one, we’d risk an abyss of nonsubjectivity. If the true self were fully ontological, no such danger would be present; we would simply “be” what we are. Another indication of the lack of ontological status for the true self is Winnicott’s notion that the false self is required to “hide” the true self, even though the very existence of the false self is testament to the ephemeral nature of the true self in the first place. Thus the very thing that conceals the true self is itself a marker of how the true self is not all that true (not given, not solid, not really real). It seems that for Winnicott, the concept of being “true” has less to do with eternal principles or authentic experiences and more with object permanence or at least the illusion of it. Since the notion of the child’s control over the universe is a “hallucination,” one that is nevertheless reconfirmed by the mother’s own pretense, we see that the “truth” of the true self is based on quite a bit of similar forms of deception. The “not good-enough” mother is, in a way, simply a worse liar than the good-enough mother. She fails to produce the illusion of mastery over the world and so her baby suffers because in fact it is more attuned to the real situation that each of us in. We could even say that the true self is much less true than the false self; the false self, quite consistently in Winnicott’s analysis, is much more aware of the threats to and the ephemeral nature of the ego. The true self must be protected from all of that knowledge. Of course a healthier true self doesn’t need the false self to do this, but that

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is because it has completely bought into the hallucination of  safety and mastery in a way that the damaged self simply cannot do. For this reason, and leaning on Winnicott’s own usage of the term good- enough, I would argue that with Winnicott we don’t get a true self so much as a “true-enough” self. Like the goodenough mother, the true-enough self does the job even if its roots are not based in hard and fast reality. Winnicott is fond of speaking of symbolism and games and play, recognizing, as he does, that selfhood itself is a moving target, an illusion, if you will, but a most powerful and necessary one (required to keep the “rider” on her “horse.”) Winnicott’s own reluctance to proclaim the good-enough mother as being good full stop suggests his own acknowledgment, however implicit, that perfect goodness is not possible or available in the game of symbols that leads to selfhood and the sense of ego permanence. By the same token, the true-enough self may similarly acknowledge a certain lack of ontological permanence and settle for something far more immediately tangible, namely object permanence. Objects serve first to establish our (hallucinatory) sense of omnipotence and then to delimit and even defy that sense (because we can’t will objects to vanish before our eyes or not still be there when we open our eyes after we shut them). The mother ‘s role in this is to be an emissary between the material and the baby’s subjective world. She determines the degree to which the ongoing presence of object permanence is accessible or not. The good-enough mother knows to first produce a sense of magic or enchantment where the material world obeys the baby and then, just at the right time, reverse course and let objects demonstrate the way they are independent of the human will—at least in terms of whether they exist or not—allowing the baby to get her mental health and ego boundaries “just right.”

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THE TRUE- ENOUGH SELF AND NIETZSCHEAN PHILOSOPHY How well does this “true-enough self ” fit in with Nietzschean philosophy and, by extension, the rest of critical theory? At first glance, it might seem that it fits very badly. After all, Nietzsche’s work is devoted to a deep suspicion of concepts like truth and selves and so the notion of a true self seems to be problematic from the outset. But Nietzsche is not entirely averse to enlisting the language of truth, only in his hands it becomes a quite different concept from the way it is normally used. For example, in the Genealogy Nietzsche speaks of “ homespun, severe, ugly, obnoxious, un-Christian, unmoral truths.”13 He further tells us that “such truths do exist.”14 In Nietzsche’s hands, the concept of truth works to undermine the functions it normally performs for Western philosophy. Whereas usually the notion of truth serves as a basis for ontology and teleology, for Nietzsche it challenges and subverts such categories. Rather than being universal, it is “homespun,” rather than being perfect and eternal it is “ugly” and “obnoxious.” Rather than being part of the eschatology of Christian doctrine (including its modern, secular forms), it is “un-Christian” and “unmoral.” Yet, Nietzsche tells us, such truth exists, which is to say it has a kind of persistent and undeniable (or maybe just insistent) basis of its own. The existence of truths of this kind, I would argue, fits in well with Winnicott’s understanding of the true self, especially when it is rechristened as the true-enough self. The truth of this self is, as already shown, contingent, without guarantees as well as being connected more to external than internal forces (more about the ego per se than the body ego, in other words). This tracks well with Nietzsche’s perspective where the self is never

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as autonomous— as sui generis— as liberal and enlightenment thought would suggest. Nietzschean philosophy seems compatible not only with the idea of a true self (if we understand these terms in their Nietzschean sense) but with the false self as well. The latter corresponds to Nietzsche’s notion that even the lies and denials we subscribe to help to delineate and even to preserve the self that is hidden— but also produced—underneath it. In Ecce Homo, after speaking of “how one becomes what one is” (which is also the subtitle of the book), Nietzsche writes: That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life—the temporary sidepaths and wrong turnings, the  delays, the “modesties,” the seriousness squandered on tasks which lie outside the task—have their own meaning and value. They are an expression of a great sagacity, even the supreme sagacity: where nosce te ipsum [i.e. “know thyself ”] would be the recipe for destruction, self-forgetfulness, self-misunderstanding, self-diminution,—narrowing,—mediocratizing becomes reason itself. Expressed morally: love of one’s neighbour, living for others and other things can be the defensive measure for the preservation of the sternest selfishness.15

Here we see that all the forms of self-hatred and self-denial, which could be roughly said to correspond to Winnicott’s notion of the false self, serve, as the false self does as well, to outline (if only by negation) the self hidden within. In this way, as with Winnicott (although Nietzsche is perhaps more enthusiastic about this role), the false self has a function and a utility of its own despite being wholly pathological. We also get a sense of the way that the false self delineates the true in Nietzsche’s discussion, especially in the Genealogy,

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of so-called bad conscience. He writes: “In its earliest phase bad conscience is nothing other than the instinct of freedom forced to become latent, driven underground, and forced to vent its energy upon itself.”16 Nietzsche cautions that we should not take too “dim a view” of bad conscience just because it is “both ugly and painful.”17 He goes on to write that we require pain and ugliness to recognize “strange beauty and affirmation” in ourselves and so here, as with the false self, there is a positive role to play.18

BECOMING “ WHO WE ARE” If there is a rough correspondence between Winnicott’s true and false selves and some equivalent in Nietzsche, what does this  suggest about the quality or “realness” of the true self for  Nietzsche? To answer this question, we must go deeper into Nietzschean philosophy— or at least deeper into the way that Nietzsche practices philosophy. To begin with, we must remember once again that Nietzsche uses words like truth and self in particular and subversive ways. The true self is not the self that we wish to be. It is not what liberal and Enlightenment philosophy tells us that we are: a higher, better self (the wish for which is nihilistic according to Nietzsche since we are not and can never be such a self). “Becoming what we are” for Nietzsche means coming to terms with the fallen, lowly self that we have always been— and are continually becoming—but generally refuse to recognize. What we get with Nietzsche then is not a solid and changeless self but its opposite. Nietzsche expends a great deal of textual effort to ensure that we do not settle on the easy and much more desirable form of self identity that liberalism and much of Western philosophy promises us. Often, Nietzsche resorts to a bombastic and messianic language to draw out our desire for redemption, for being

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delivered to that higher self (or saved from the lower self that we actually are) only to bitterly disappoint us. This action makes it more difficult for us to remain convinced that we are that self that we earnestly wish to be. To give one example (but a superlative one) of this technique from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the section called—very paradoxically—“On Redemption” Zarathustra comes upon a group of ill and disabled people standing on a bridge. Seeing him arrive, these people beg the prophet to cure them, to save them from being themselves. Zarathustra, however, refuses to heal them. He says, “When one takes away the hump from the hunchback one takes away his spirit—thus teach the people. And when one restores his eyes to the blind man he sees too many wicked things on earth, and he will curse whoever healed him. But whoever makes the lame walk does him the greatest harm: for when he can walk his vices run away with him—thus teach the people about cripples.”19 In other words, Zarathustra is saying that were he to heal these subjects he would be denying who they really are. He would be confirming that they were horrible as themselves and did in fact require a messianic form of salvation. Indeed, not only does he refuse to heal them, but Zarathustra identifies with these people; “I should not know how to live if I were not also a seer of that which must come. A seer, a willer, a creator, a future himself and a bridge to the future—and alas, also, as it were, a cripple at this bridge: all this is Zarathustra.”20 Here we see Nietzsche acknowledging the lure that we all feel toward being something that we are not. The future in this passage stands for our wish to be saved, to be other than the failed mortal beings we are. Yet even as he is identifying with the promise of redemption (“a seer, a willer, a creator, a future himself and a bridge to the future”) he adds that he is—just like the people begging him for

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salvation—“a cripple at this bridge.” As such, he is acknowledging that he cannot get to the shining and teleological future that he is drawn to as well. By extension, Zarathustra is denying that future to his supplicants. This not only because he won’t heal them, but even more critically because he has usurped the messianic role for himself and then failed to do anything with it, ruining it for everyone else in the process. Having the messiah show up and not save them leaves the supplicants with no further hope for salvation. In this way they can discover their “true” self, that is, the self that they have been running away from all this time. It requires an act of textual betrayal on Nietzsche’s part, raising our hopes and then dashing them to get the reader to see (at least potentially) the same in herself. The self we discover as a result of this torturous process is not miraculous or perfect (for Winnicott, too, it will be recalled, the best we can hope for is a good-enough mother and, by extension a true-enough self). Like Winnicott’s true self, the self that we are for Nietzsche defies notions of teleology and determinism. For both thinkers, the self is a work in progress, a recognition of all the things we have been all along. It is our task to accept (even love) this porous, contingent, and shifting sense of self, to cease to project solidity, futurity, and perfection onto it and to learn to playfully navigate its restrictions and bases. As I see it, Winnicott offers a useful rendition of the Nietzschean subject (that is, the subject that we are) in terms of this idea of a true-enough self. Although it is not the self we want to be, it functions. It persists for all of its ephemeralness. Even if not “true,” it is “true-enough.” In terms of the liberal subject, I think the true-enough self would be poisonous for someone like Locke, or even Kant, because its truthfulness is not of the kind that they require. It is true that both thinkers have their own doubts and complications

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about the subject: Locke because his subjects actually overlap quite a bit (between God and human beings, between servant and master, between men and women, etc.) and Kant because of his idea of the “as if,” which leaves open the question of what is actually true in favor of what we must assume to be true. Even so, the true-enough self is not useful for these thinkers because they require a workable believability in the solidity of the self, even despite great skepticism and philosophical agnosticism. The true-enough self points not to its own constancy and permanence but to its episodic and ephemeral character. In this way it doesn’t offer an “as if ” so much as an ongoing indication that the self is constantly failing to be what liberal thinkers require it to be. This has implications for liberalism more generally. By undermining (but not entirely breaking with) the coherent and selfevident self, the true-enough self does damage to the way that liberalism relies on a stable understanding of the self to anchor its entire panoply of rights and obligations. Liberalism sweeps so much hierarchy under the rug that it requires the facade of a coherent self (the “rug” itself) in order to plausibly claim its status as a working and desirable form of political and social philosophy. For all the way that thinkers like Locke and Kant admit to cracks in the edifice of the liberal subject, these cannot be too glaring lest the self cease to function as intended. The beauty of Winnicott’s understanding of the self is that its functioning is never in question. It functions, coherent or not, but it is not similarly burdened by having to carry an entire political philosophy devoted to market and other principles that are at odds with—and often extremely detrimental to—the very self that it seeks to promote. For these reasons, I think that the true-enough self is “true” in a more Nietzschean than liberal way, offering a more unstable,

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shifting form of subjectivity that works against teleological and hierarchical forms of subjectivity. But this self is also not “not true” in the sense that it prevents a collapse of subjectivity altogether. Its trueness is just enough to prevent both determinism and utter failure.

THE TRUE- ENOUGH SELF AND POST- HABERMASIAN THOUGHT Given this understanding of what Winnicott’s theory does for radical theory, what relationship does it have for theories from other ideological camps? In my view it’s pretty easy to see how Winnicott’s notion of a true-enough self poses great difficulties for liberal thinkers. As already noted, it exposes both the fragility and even the nonexistence (from an ontological/empirical perspective) of the self, rendering it really not that true a self at all, thus not adequately serving the needs of liberal political thought. Far more complicated to assess is the relevance of the true (or true-enough) self for the Habermasian and post Habermasian tradition that exists on the left fringes of liberalism, shading, depending on whom one is talking about, into more radical categories. Beginning with Habermas himself, this camp has been formed in response to the threats to liberalism posed by thinkers like Habermas’s fellow Frankfurt School thinkers like Adorno and Benjamin. Habermas and those who come after him are quite a bit more comfortable with contingent identities and thus not so easily disturbed by the revelation of the self ’s lack of concrete existence. Axel Honneth may pose an especially critical test for the match or mismatch between Winnicott and (post-)Habermasian theory insofar as Honneth draws directly on Winnicott in his

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well-known book The Struggle for Recognition. In that text Honneth seeks to recuperate from early Hegel a theory of the struggle for recognition that Hegel himself moved on from. In so doing, Honneth seeks to make recognition cease to be teleological and becomes itself contingent and uncertain, rendering recognition a central political concept in the process. In this sense he is, to some extent, in line with Nietzsche’s own project, but they diverge in that Honneth seeks to make this discovery the basis for understanding how legal and human rights can be extended and universalized, whereas for Nietzsche the point is quite the opposite: to expose such rights as completely empty and without any ontological or universal basis. Honneth turns to Winnicott to give psychological evidence for his contention that recognition is not predetermined but must emerge out of a dynamic of boundary setting and dissolving that has its origins in the early experience of a mother and child. In this way recognition, and the subject’s identity that it produces, occurs in real time. This is critical because it suggests that, depending on the way this process takes place, it can either succeed or fail. Honneth writes: We can then proceed from the hypothesis that all love relationships are driven by the unconscious recollection of the original experience of merging that characterized the first months of life for “mother” and child. The inner state of symbiotic oneness so radically shapes the experiential scheme of complete satisfaction that it keeps alive, behind the back of the subject and throughout the subject’s life, the desire to be merged with another person. Of course, this desire for merging can only become a feeling of love once, in the unavoidable experience of separation, it has been disappointed in such a way that it henceforth includes the recognition of the other as an independent person.21

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Thus love— and all political relationships by analogy and extension—involves both the desire to merge with another, along with the realization that this merger presupposes a prior separation and boundedness. Love is based on hard-won reciprocity, a sense that the other is a separate subject who can and will care even as—precisely because she is separate—the other always has the potential to disappoint or betray the subject. Contingency and risk in this sense cannot be ruled out of interpersonal relationships but are instead central features of how they work. Honneth follows the discussion of Winnicott and object relations theory by talking about the emergence of the modern subject of legal rights. For Honneth, modern forms of recognition are different than traditional modes; while the older model is based on rank and hierarchy, the modern form is based on a principle of equality. This is where things get complicated because the presupposition of rationality and equivalence inherent in modern rights comes up against the fact that social and other forms of disparity produce subjects who are not consistent in terms of their ability to participate in public life. For Honneth, the rise of universal free education and the modern European welfare state are attempts to realize the universal equality and rights-based forms of membership that are the hallmark of modernity. In this way, for Honneth, there is a perfect parallel between the child’s relationship to the mother and the citizen’s relationship to the larger political community. Honneth writes of this: Just as, in the case of love, children acquire, via the continuous experience of “maternal” care, the basic self-confidence to assert their needs in an unforced manner, adult subjects acquire, via the  experience of legal recognition, the possibility of seeing their actions as the universally respected expression of their own

178 Y James Martel autonomy. The idea that self-respect is for legal relations what basic self-confidence was for the love relationship is already suggested by the conceptual appropriateness of viewing rights as depersonalized symbols of social respect in just the way that love can be conceived as the affectional expression of care retained over distance. Whereas the latter gives rise to the form of consciousness in which one is able to respect oneself, because one deserves the respect of everyone else. It is, of course, only with the establishment of universal human rights that this form of self-respect can assume the character associated with talk of moral responsibility as the respect-worthy core of a person.22

The upshot of this is that Honneth seeks to base universal values and human rights not on abstract eternal principles but rather out of the contentions of both psychological development and human history. In this way, he avoids the teleological determinism that haunt a lot of liberal thinkers. For him, the universal is only realized in time and not beyond it. Yet I would argue that rooting this endeavor in Winnicott does not provide the foundation (however shaky and contingent) for universal rights that Honneth requires. Winnicott’s “goodenough” mother and “true-enough self ” (admittedly my words, not his, in the latter case) is not true enough for the job Honneth requires of it. The problem, as I see it, is that for all his resistance to teleology, Honneth smuggles it back in by the way he thinks about rights and the universal. Starting with the same premise as liberals (but not sharing their full-bore acceptance of the universal as such), he reverse-engineers the concept, building back toward the ultimate goal via the device of object relations theory. This has some advantages; for one thing, Honneth has a better explanation than liberals for why the universal isn’t always

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applied. The liberal’s answer is that the failure to act in the name of the universal (by being racist, for example) is the remnant of preliberal prejudices that obstruct the application of liberal values. Honneth’s answer is that the failure of the universal reflects the failure of proper object relations, whether in terms of love or in terms of rights and citizenship, leading to bad outcomes. He also allows for a great deal more diversity in the way that rights are actually applied. Thus progressive social-democratic welfare states in northern Europe can, by his argument, be expected to have more rational citizens who act in ways that comport better with their civil rights than people from other countries on the continent which don’t address social inequality as directly (a position that doesn’t wear well in the face of the struggle between northern and southern Europe over austerity and migration in our own time). Honneth thus offers a much more flexible and nuanced understanding of the true self. At the end of the day, Honneth’s devotion to contingency is far less than Nietzsche’s. Contingency may work to complicate the universal, but it still serves rather than subverts it in Honneth’s case. Honneth is not as comfortable as Nietzsche in acknowledging— even celebrating—the fictional aspects of selfhood that Winnicott describes as well. Nietzsche’s self is not a rational subject that can be actualized by adequate resources and free public education. His is not a universal subject that has been built from the ground up. The “true-enough” self functions; it walks and it talks but it has not achieved universality. Indeed, the very contingency that makes it what it is militates against the very idea of the universal, offering us in its diversity and multifacetedness a self that is anything but. It’s true that in some of his later work Honneth comes a bit closer to a Nietzschean position. In the essay collection The I in We, Honneth explores the way in which boundaries between

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subjects and groups are porous and interactive, turning again to Winnicott as a key source. Here he more readily acknowledges the fictional nature of the self, as when he states that for Winnicott “empirical accuracy” is not really the point.23 Yet even in this book he does not drop his fundamental interest in discovering what is universal about subjects. Indeed, Honneth’s turn to psychoanalytic theory appears to be motivated by a desire to anchor Hegelian thought in some empirical and scientific forms that are common to all human beings. Therefore, for all that he is willing to admit the subject as neither autarkic nor purely ontological, such concessions are grounded in an assurance that the subject fits into larger patterns of mutual recognition premised on— or serving to resolve into—some kind of universal principle. And this, I claim, is something that neither Nietzsche nor Winnicott’s work supports. For these reasons, I would argue that Winnicott’s notion of a “true-enough self ” is quite a bit more radical than it initially appears. Because it places contingency deep into the most intimate aspects of personhood and identity, Winnicott’s understanding of the development of the self suggests not the certainty of the self as such but its opposite. For a self to be produced through this process, it has to endure the fact of its own partial or nonexistence. The mother pretends that the baby exists and has agency, and the baby picks up on this pretense and plays along. At some point the illusion has to be broken, and the mother has to show that she can survive the baby’s will for her destruction. This is not so much an introduction of the reality principle as it is the exposition of the weakness of our wills and our identities: what we once played along with is played along with no more. Perhaps more accurately, we abandon one game and one set of deceptions and pick up another

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instead. The old game was about our limitlessness; the new one is about our limits. These games don’t tell us who we “are” in a liberal ontological sense but rather in a Nietzschean sense. Instead of producing a true self, they produce the selves that we are, the contingent beings that are made by engaging in such games. As previously noted, in my view the struggle for recognition doesn’t point us to the universal but toward its nonexistence. There is nothing determinant about the drama of the baby’s coming to personhood. There is the baby and there is her mother. Each instance is not a reliving of a timeless and eternal narrative, playing itself out again and again, but a unique moment with no preset destiny, no particular future. Winnicott shows us the immense variety of outcomes that come from babyhood and up. Surely his typologies are only the tip of the iceberg; there are as many selves as there are persons, and each is as different as the contingent and vulnerable processes that brought her into “true-enough” existence. In the end, we can derive from this a notion of individuality as a sense of selves that, if they aren’t truly ontological, are at least ontological enough; they function, they talk, they live, and they die. That is probably as much as we could rightfully expect from a theory of subject development, and for Nietzsche and his ilk it is enough.

NOTES 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Random House, 1956), 178–179. 2. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the State,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 118. 3. Althusser, 117.

182 Y James Martel 4. D. W. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience,” in Peter Rudynytsky, ed., Transitional Objects and Potential Space: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 3–12, at 5. 5. Winnicott, 6. 6. Winnicott. 7. Winnicott. 8. Winnicottt, Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self (1960), in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, International Psycho-Analytical Library 64:1–276 (London: Hogarth and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1965), 145. For Winnicott, the father—if recognized as all—is just another mother until the baby is quite a bit older. In this way, fathers seem to get off relatively scot-free until the superego develops, which could be called the “too true self,” perhaps. 9. Winnicott, 145. 10. Winnicott. 11. Winnicott, 146. 12. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience,” 9. 13. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 159. 14. Nietzsche. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (New York: Penguin, 1979), 64– 65. 16. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 220. 17. Nietzsche. 18. Nietzsche, 221. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 137. 20. Nietzsche, 139. 21. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 105. 22. Honneth, 118–119. 23. Axel Honneth, The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 12.

III POLIT ICA L I M PLICAT IONS

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7 INTERSUBJECTIVITY ON THE COUCH Recognition and Destruction in the Work of Jessica Benjamin Johanna Meehan

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he work of Jessica Benjamin complicates the notion of intersubjectivity found at the heart of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative theory of ethics and creates space for a feminist understanding of relationships in the personal and political sphere. While Habermas famously emphasizes the significance of language and rationality in the dynamics of intersubjectivity, Benjamin describes the extralinguistic forces that propel the psychic self.1 Not denying the importance of language and rationality, Benjamin offers a way to understand the origins of language in extralinguistic forms of intersubjective experience and explains how the irrational, the unconscious, and the negative influence the way we relate to and communicate with others. In her work, Benjamin contrasts two kinds of interactive experience. In a fully interactive experience, mutual recognition characterizes the experience and enables intersubjectivity. In what Benjamin calls “destruction,” the intrapsychic process fails to attain true intersubjective relatedness. Both experiences are inevitable dimensions of subjectivity and relationships with

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others.2 In her theory of the moral third, Benjamin recasts communicative interaction to include an appreciation for the dynamics of psychic interaction and the role these dynamics play in achieving fuller experiences of intersubjectivity. Benjamin writes, “We might speak of thirdness as a quality of mental space, of intersubjective relatedness.”3 The achievement of recognition and thirdness are marked by struggles between selves and social groups. Domination is always a possibility, and Benjamin’s account of destruction illuminates its psychic temptations and dynamics. The resources we find in Benjamin’s work deepen and extend Habermasian conceptions of discursively mediated intersubjectivity. Her theories allow us to understand the extradiscursive elements of domination that so frequently mark gender, racial, ethnic, and national distinctions and the role these play in violent and exploitative human interactions.

BENJAMIN’S THEORY OF RECOGNITION Habermas rehabilitated the aims of the Enlightenment and elaborated an alternative model of reason, one that distinguishes communicative from instrumental rationality. It locates a normative core in communicative interaction and in the reasongiving practices developed in social and political institutions that allow the “unforced force of the better argument” to structure personal, local, national, and international interaction.4 Benjamin asserts that despite the insight Habermas offers, with its focus on language and its confidence in rational argumentation, he fails to theorize the psychic and affective dimensions of our interactions with others, including violently destructive ones.

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Thus, she claims, Habermas does not account for the negative aspects of an intersubjective relationship that also constitute a sense of self and other. Benjamin argues that linguistic rationality, no matter how important, is not the sole dimension of intersubjective relating. Linguistic rationality is not the only, or even the most significant, axis constituting self/other identities.5 We experience a sense of self and other by engaging not only through linguistically mediated rational engagement but also through feelings and fantasy, love and identification, repudiation and projection, and introjection and splitting. Understanding this is crucially important in conceiving how we might engage ethically with others as well as in the diagnosis of domination. Thus an account of intersubjectivity that offers real insight into human domination and its possible alternatives must include an analysis of the psychological aspects of our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world. Benjamin argues that only when we acknowledge and understand the irrational, extralinguistic dimension of intersubjectivity can we begin to grasp the mechanics of domination and attempts to dominate disguised as rational acts, bending language and desires to their ends.6 Without an understanding of the bonds of love, the capacity for hate, omnipotence, and submission, the potential for misrecognition and destruction, and the ordinary versus the extraordinary, positive and negative aspects of human interactions remain outside the purview of our theorizing and beyond the ken of our emancipatory aims. With such an account in hand, we can begin to think about what responsible and moral psychic intersubjectivity might be like and understand why a moral psychic intersubjectivity requires a reflective responsibility for reciprocal interactions with others. Affective understanding can be reached only by what Benjamin describes as the position of the third, a psychic position that

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recognizes not only the desires of the self or the desires of another to whom we submit, but a position that also manages to sustain the tension of affectively holding both at once. Benjamin’s notion of the third is an interesting rethinking of normative intersubjectivity, one that includes linguistic as well as psychic dimensions.

BENJAMIN’S ACCOUNT OF SELF/OTHER RELATIONSHIP S In The Bonds of Love, a landmark study in gender domination, Benjamin describes a critically important analysis of how infants become human beings—gendered human beings—through relationships characterized by psychically mediated, culturally organized, and power-imbued interactions with a primary caregiver who is commonly a woman.7 In three subsequent volumes and dozens of articles, Benjamin continues this analysis in ever more insightful ways, describing the dynamics of power, gender, and subjectivity; dynamics that are integral to the intersubjective relations that give rise to a sense of self. Benjamin follows the tradition of object relations theory when she argues that an intensely affective, caring engagement with another person is among the most elemental of human needs; the recognition of the importance of such relationships is fundamental to Benjamin’s description of human infant development. Like Anna Freud, John Bowlby, and Donald W. Winnicott, Benjamin turns to the preoedipal relationships with caregivers to locate the founding of the subject. Like them too, she understands the need for attachment to be not a secondary drive, linked as Freud thought to orality, but as primary as the need for food. Bowlby, Benjamin points out, “drew on extensive

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research which showed that separation from parents and deprivations of contact with other adults catastrophically undermined infant emotional and social development.”8 Without at  least one secure attachment relationship, an infant cannot thrive and is unable to develop a secure sense of self or of others. Unlike American ego psychology, and the claims of Margaret Mahler, the attachment theory that Benjamin turns to proposes that an infant is poised for relationship from birth onward. There is no period of fusion with another from which an infant self must “hatch.” An emergent subject is present from the start. The problem, Benjamin argues, with this formulation is the “idea of separation from oneness: it contains the implicit assumption that we grow out of relationships rather than becoming more active and sovereign within them, that we start in a stage of dual oneness and wind up in a state of singular oneness.”9 Benjamin points to the work of Daniel Stern, which emphasizes the active presence of an infant who is engaged in relating (in limited ways, but relating nonetheless) from birth onward.10 Benjamin traces the idea of intersubjectivity to its relatively recent lineage in the contributions of object relations and self psychology, to Daniel Stern and Colwyn Trevarthen’s work on infant development, and, from there, to Habermas’s description of “the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding.”11 Both Stern and Trevarthen view the infant as a partner in relation to the mother from the start. While the parent does a lot more of the emotional work of relating, infants are aware and attuned to their caregiver from birth, and it is in interaction with the caregiver that a child’s sense of self emerges over time. Stern distinguishes between intersubjective relatedness and core relatedness. Intersubjective relatedness builds on the core relatedness of the earliest months of life; it is then that the earliest experiences of the

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self are organized and begin to establish themselves. Where Mahler’s theory would have described the self as separating from the mother, Stern describes real intersubjective experience, the experience of being experienced by the other, as just beginning. It is with this leap into intersubjectivity—the joining of two subjective experiences—that Stern locates fully social relationships. Trevarthen makes a distinction between the primary and secondary intersubjectivity that distinguishes very early forms of relating between infants and caregivers, calling them primary form of intersubjectivity, and later ascribes to infant-parent pairs more fully developed forms of intersubjectivity; what for Stern is intersubjectivity, Trevarthen calls secondary intersubjectivity.12 For Benjamin, the ultimate test of intersubjective recognition is whether a relationship not only allows recognition but “is dependent upon the self ’s agency and responsiveness to create a working pattern of co-created action.”13 The cocreation of action is the realization of intersubjectivity because cocreation not only requires recognition, it enacts it. The capacity for creating and sustaining relationships in which a sense of self can be founded is what Benjamin calls recognition; it stretches to include the early shared rhythmic movement of the parent and child to the shared understandings that speech makes possible. “Recognition,” she writes “is so central to human existence as to often escape notice or rather it appears to us in so many guises that it is seldom grasped as one overarching concept.”14 Recognition for Benjamin includes “the ideas of attunement, mutual influence, affective mutuality and sharing states of mind.”15 She argues that only in relationships of mutual recognition can affectively charged psychic representations and felt experiences of self and other emerge. Benjamin stakes this psychoanalytic position on the importance of recognizing the difference between real relationships (with a fully externalized

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other) and those that are merely fantasized (relating from the intrapsychic space of the unconscious and its operations of fantasy). Benjamin and other similarly committed contemporary psychoanalysts emphasize the significance of understanding the nature of relationships between people as an antidote to past monadological tendencies in the field. This does not exclude a recognition that both intrapsychic and intersubjective understandings are crucial to understanding the relational formation of selves. Benjamin further clarifies, “To recognize the intersubjective self is not to deny the importance of the intrapsychic; the inner world of fantasy, wish, anxiety, and defense; of bodily symbols and images whose connections defy the ordinary rules of ordinary rules of logic and language. In the inner world, the subject incorporates and expels, identifies with and repudiates the other, not as a real being, but as a mental object.”16 Indeed, the intrapsychic dimension gives the self its interiority, its depth, its unique associations and meanings. It forms the background against which “the real other stands out in relief.”17 The interaction of the intersubjective and the intrapsychic relational perspectives, and the ability to sustain both perspectives while maintaining their distinctness—in theory and in practice—will prove to be the critical and normative center of Benjamin’s theory. Like intersubjective theorists of all persuasions, Benjamin maintains that nature, individual will, and activity do not fully determine the self. In a self-consciously neo-Hegelian move, Benjamin locates the self ’s genesis in someone’s response to it.18 While the human infant might survive without the attachment experience so connected to another’s recognition of it, its selfhood depends upon a certain kind of social engagement. We become present to ourselves when someone becomes aware of

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us, responds to our presence, and we become aware of that response. It is through the felt experience of a caregiver’s gaze, voice, and affective engagement that an infant first experiences itself as a self. Benjamin writes, “A person comes to feel that ‘I am the doer who does, I am the author of my acts,’ by being with another person who recognizes her acts, her feelings, her intentions, her existence, her independence.”19 Experiencing one’s self through another’s experience of us is a crucial first step toward personhood and a crucial aspect of relational engagement. Yet it is an incomplete experience. As long as only one person recognizes the other, the relationship—as Hegel showed us long ago—remains incomplete. Because it is incomplete, the reflection of self is also incomplete. Only when recognition is mutual, when being recognized accompanies recognizing the one who recognizes, can full intersubjectivity, and with it a full sense of self and other, be achieved. Mutual recognition is required for a full sense of self and other because the dynamics of incomplete recognition obscure the extent to which it is a relationship. A relationship requires at least two people, and recognizing that a relationship exists makes it possible for a self to know itself as a separate self. Mutual recognition is not easily accomplished. It requires the ability to retain a psychic grasp of the separateness of each partner in the relationship. At the same time, it requires accepting dependence upon the relationship and each other. Further, it requires the ability to assert oneself while recognizing another. Hegel chose the master and the slave relationship to exemplify the obstacles to mutual recognition. Marx, too, used this model, but it is not helpful for an account of the genesis of intersubjectivity. Benjamin turned to a developmental account of intersubjectivity to provide a more useful model that traces capacities for recognition to the relational negotiations of a

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parent and child. In order for a child and parent to establish a mutual relationship, both must recognize the other as distinct yet emotionally related beings. The intrapsychic fantasy of the other must exist with a psychically felt recognition of the other as an externally present self with an intrapsychic interiority, will, and desires. To establish mutual relationship, this means a parent must relinquish a fantasy-only relation to the infant and come to recognize the child as a real existing other with a mind, will, and desires of its own. These real children, as all parents learn at one time or another, are often annoyingly unlike the ones of their fantasies. Children, too, must come to experience their parents as fully separate beings, externally real, annoyingly unlike their fantasies, and outside of their control. This requires accepting difference, dependence, and limits; it means not defensively warding off the threat that accepting difference and thus the limits of the self can provoke—not once again assimilating the parent intrapsychically, fantasizing them, for example, to be the all-powerful, will-destroying monsters so common to fairy tales. The felt experience of the other as a real person that exists independent of the self is both threatening and satisfying. It is threatening because it means the self is not all there is. The self cannot expand to fill the universe. The self has weaknesses and needs. The will, needs, and demands of the other create limits on the self. This experience of other can also be satisfying because it means that the self is not alone; it can feel and enjoy the presence and company of another. If the self asserts its will and the other does not resist, completely capitulating to the self ’s bid for omnipotence, the asserting or dominating self may feel abandoned and alone, even while feeling triumphant, because the other did not resist; it didn’t survive the attack. The other did not persist in its being as a person, external yet related to the

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asserting or attacking self. For example, a child who insists on having her own way and views her reasonable mother as a hateful witch is succumbing to fantasy. This fantasy is more likely if a child experiences an absolute struggle of wills taking place. In a more benign situation, a child might discover that the mother asserts limits firmly but kindly, and, while the limit is real and unwanted, mom is not a witch after all. This struggle to recognize both wills in the process of conflict resolution makes clear to the child that the parent is in charge but able to engage and suggests that recognition of will and desire is a two-way street. Therefore, when a child’s bid for omnipotence is resisted by the parent, who makes clear that the child cannot have and be everything, and does this without retaliating or acting like the fantasized will-destroying monster, the child is able to come away from the experience feeling herself and the parent to be distinct, real beings that can coexist.

GENDER AND THE INFANT The experience and understanding of two distinct selves affectively connected to one another is the experience of relationship. It is the only route, as Donald Winnicott pointed out, to love.20 Having survived the temptations of omnipotence, always negotiating the dynamic of assertion and recognition, child and parent take pleasure and comfort in the felt experience of intersubjectivity. Some theorists view negation, breakdown, and relational repair as obstacles to mutual recognition. It is crucial to understand that this is not Benjamin’s view. Benjamin, in fact, considers these difficulties essential for the achievement of mutual recognition. They are necessary because our way of being in

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relation to others is both to use the other intrapsychically and to relate to the other outside of self. According to Benjamin, “From the intersubjective standpoint, all fantasy is the negation of the real other, whether its content is negative or succumbing to fantasy—just as is the child who persists in viewing the mother as good fairy does.”21 Indeed, from the intrapsychic view, all external reality is simply internalized in fantasy. Since our relationships are always intrapsychic as well as potentially intersubjective, they necessarily involve a struggle between our recognition of an unassimilated other and the omnipotent assimilation of that other to the self ’s fantasy of it. A narcissistic tendency to expand in the direction of omnipotence drives assimilating fantasy, while the need for a real external other with whom we can experience relationship drives recognition. Meanwhile, the other’s tendency to omnipotence leads to resisting the self ’s attempt to assimilate the other to its fantasy and provokes opposition, resistance, and struggle. The dynamic of negation and recognition inherent to the achievement of intersubjectivity means that it is impossible, even in the most harmonious relationships, to “take the sting from the encounter with otherness.”22 Recognizing this dynamic directs our attention to how difficult it is for human beings to respond to difference without negating it entirely or at least limiting its reality by assimilating it to ourselves through complex denials of difference. Benjamin argues that the struggle for recognition is at the heart of human identity and that gender, an early universal feature of human identity that requires culturally negotiating highly significant differences between one’s self and others, is one of the first and most powerful axes around which self/other formation turns. The gendering of others and claiming one’s self to be gendered happens relatively early in life. By about age two, most

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children tend to identify themselves and others as male or female. This psychic/social, power-saturated, symbolically mediated fantasy of gender is one of the most enduring and fundamental of fantasies. Of course, the content of these identities varies because no psychic relationship occurs outside culture and thus no one is exempt from the social inscriptions of specific social relations. Benjamin considers gender a dimension of the intersubjectively and intrapsychically negotiated self. As children move through early infancy to childhood, a historically laden fantasy of maleness and femaleness plays out in their lives, creating and recreating a familiar system of gender complementarity and normative heterosexuality in the dynamics of the struggle for recognition through processes of identification and repudiation. As infants become toddlers, their desires and abilities for autonomy and increasing independence from those on whom they most passionately depend, as Nancy Chodorow argued in the late seventies, coincide with entry into language, heightened gender awareness, and, eventually, a psychic sense of gender.23 Fully exploring the sophistication and complexity of Benjamin’s tracings of the way love for the mother, repudiation of dependence upon her, and identification with her, as well as love for and identification with the father, and how these are tied to cultural fantasies of gender is beyond the scope of this essay. However, we can note that such forces play themselves out internally and with others, as children consolidate gendered identities that are at the same time multiple and unstable, unique and tediously rigid, and that produce recognizably gendered patterns of desire. While acknowledging the remarkable complexity of the identities and desires of actual men and women, Benjamin also notes that, “like bacteria, gender categories often seem to be able to mutate just enough to produce resistant strains.”24

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GENDERED SUBJECTIVIT Y AND BENJAMIN’S CONCEP T OF “ THE THIRD” Central to the development of gendered subjectivity is the process in which a toddler begins to seek independence from the primary caregiver and looks for an ally to support the toddler’s bid for separation, turning oftentimes to the father—felt to be an exciting outside other with whom they can identify. Psychically, the toddler uses this identification to escape the egodifficult experience of sameness with and dependence upon the primary caregiver, who is typically the mother. The position of that outside other, whether in actuality or merely in cultural fantasy, is understood to be male. The degree to which gender awareness requires identifying with the mother, or denying one’s likeness to her, or being like the father, or not like him, has an impact on how difficult it is for us to recognize sameness across gender difference and to not repudiate difference as threatening. Associating femaleness with passivity, dependence, and emotionality, and maleness with activity, independence, and reason, splits these complementary aspects of the self along the fault lines of fantasized gender. Heterosexual relationships become spaces for enacting the dynamics and repudiation of these split-off identifications. Although these gendered dynamics are an important part of individuation, and they help make sense of the politics as well as the erotics of male domination and female submission, they are not the whole story. When individuation is held to be the result of the paternal disruption of the maternal dyad (the story told by most psychoanalysts), the moments created by mother and child since early infancy are diminished. These earlier experiences, in which what is experienced is not just the self and the other as either merged or distinct, are experiences of something that Benjamin calls

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“thirdness.”25 The earliest form of the experience of a “third” are patterns of interaction that arise in the context of mother /infant negotiations of sleeping and eating, gazing and babbling. Microanalyses of these interactions reveal both partners adjusting to the other, responding to each other’s responses, attuning movements, sound, and gaze so that a pattern of mutual response evolves. As Benjamin describes it, “it is the place where selfregulation and mutual regulation meet.”26 Because it is a space where we cocreate patterns that accommodate not just self and other but the self/other interaction, this accommodation and creation of patterns indicates our earliest experiences are not just of being a self or even of being two selves together. These shared patterns are evidence of being a part of a “third” that two selves create by responding to the other’s response to them. Benjamin argues that this early unconscious experience of an affective space of shared feelings is the root of the ability to occupy the position of the third. It is the ability to distinguish one’s own affects from another’s while maintaining an awareness of both. This awareness is not necessarily a self-conscious one, especially on the part of the baby, but it creates patterns of interaction that accommodate two interacting affective beings. This happens, for example, when a mother responds to her baby’s fear with an expression that both acknowledges and responds to those feelings. In other words, she signals an interpretation of the child’s fears while also making clear that she is not confusing her own feelings with those of her child. The mother’s affective engagement proceeds from the distinction she experiences between herself and her child. Projective identification does not collapse the distinction between their feelings; one might describe her response as one that takes up the affective position of the other without becoming the other.

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Benjamin argues that representing feelings, not simply having feelings, initiates recognition. Because the differentiation of self and other while sharing an emotion fosters the experience of both distinctness and mutuality, these shared emotions lay the psychic groundwork for the child’s developing sense of self as a locus of shareable affective agency. Eventually, the child becomes aware of the experience of both distinctness and mutuality and ultimately becomes responsible. Of course, children are at first limited in their ability to be self-consciously aware of their own feelings as well as other’s, let alone capable of symbolically representing them. These capacities, which Benjamin views to be at the heart of moral enterprise, are prefigured in prelinguistic rhythmicity, responsive adaptation, and in early linguistic interactions. Contrary to the typical account, which views the encounter with otherness as taking place through a disruption to an undifferentiated maternal/infant unity through an experience of maternal lack or phallic power, the first encounter with otherness that Benjamin describes is one that is part and parcel of relational subjectivity and the relationship between an attuned mother and her child. However, the experience of being with and responding to another person characteristic of a successful child-parent interaction is far easier to accomplish than developing a capacity to apply and maintain the position of “the moral symbolic third” required for repairing breakdowns inherent in the dynamics of mutual recognition in the political and moral sphere.27

THIRDNESS IN P SYCHIATRY AND POLITICS In Benjamin’s account of the psychoanalytic relationship, the idea of the moral third is equally important and achieved through

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a specific kind of relationship between patient and analyst. An analyst delivering theoretical insights to a patient who, when not resisting, discovers authenticity, transparency, and autonomy does not indicate the arrival of a moral third. A true third is a relationship based on a collaborative encounter and the construction of truth as it emerges through a shared intersubjective process of negotiating meaning through an affectively engaging form of speech. 28 Thus negotiations take place not just on the level of dialogue but through shifts enabled by a process of recognition that allows for the affective renegotiation of subjectivity. This is not Habermas’s ideal of the unforced force of the better argument at work; these are intersubjectively developed affective abilities that allow analysts to “connect to the other’s mind while accepting her separateness and difference.”29 Benjamin notes, “Thus, the position of the moral Third, however abstract it sounds, is not a function of mere “reason” but founded in the embodied connection of two minds.” 30 The engagement that is required exceeds the rational and the linguistic and  requires a negotiation with an other who is an affective and an embodied being at the same time. This is, of course, Benjamin’s description of mutual recognition. It is as critical for achieving thirdness in the analytic relationship as it is in the relationship between parent and child. Indeed, the earlier experience of thirdness between parent and child, what Benjamin calls the “primordial third,” is the foundation for the eventual thirdness achieved through linguistic and other forms of engagement.31 Benjamin argues that in politics, as in parenting or in analysis, it is also crucial for us to develop “true thirdness”: affective responses that do not confuse the erasure of self or other with reconciliation, self-abnegation with making amends, or love with submission. She recently identified the idea of the moral third

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as an explicitly political position in an article in Tikkun magazine that describes her work with the Acknowledgment Project.32 Benjamin and the Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El-Sarraj initiated a series of dialogues between Palestinian and Israeli psychiatrists. The purpose of the dialogues was to enable Palestinians and Israelis “to acknowledge having caused harm and injury and to recognize each other’s suffering, while being aware of the power asymmetry and the need to come together in opposition to the Occupation, rather than be separated by it.”33 In this work, as well as in her work for the Moving Beyond Violence project, Benjamin shifts her perspective from thirdness as a potential space of interaction between men and women, caregivers and infants, and analyst and patients to thirdness as an explicitly moral or political position.34 Thirdness as a political or ethical perspective “transcends the oppositions of us/them (doer or done-to). It is the position from which violations of lawful behavior and dehumanization can be witnessed or repaired.”35 From the psychically grounded position of the moral third, Benjamin argues, we are able to recognize others not as our projections but as actual others that, like us, have multiple identities and occupy ambiguous and complex political positions. Fantasies allow us to split off what is found disgusting in the self by projecting it onto the other. Instead of labeling the weak and disgusting parts of ourselves as “other” and justifying the construction of whomever becomes “other” to us as vile or dangerous, and thus an appropriate object of our destructive wrath, taking up the position of the moral third requires that we transcend our own fantasies and reject “the binary between weak and strong, vulnerable and protected, helpless and powerful, and especially discarded and dignified.” 36 This refusal to view the other as a split off and abjected aspect of the self opens a space

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in which we can experience others as being like us—good and bad, weak and strong, perpetrators and victim—but, most important, worthy of dignity and deserving of life. Only from the perspective of the third, with its entailed relationship of recognition and respect, can we begin to imagine that both “we and the other can share at a level that makes safety and compromise possible.”37 “Holding the third in mind,” argues Benjamin, “makes it possible to move beyond self-interest to identification with the other. The capacity for the moral third is the capacity to see the subjectivity of the other, a capacity that liberates agency.”38 Only in the context of the moral third can meaning be actively negotiated between subjects rather than constituted by defensive projection. The space of the third makes ethical communication possible: “The experience of surviving breakdown into complementarity, or twoness, and subsequently of communicating and restoring dialogue is crucial to a more advanced from of thirdness, what we might call the symbolic Third.”39 Benjamin’s model of the third recognizes the psychic and affective demands imposed on those who aspire to normative discourse. Benjamin claims that even being a witness to the violation of others, recognizing their lives, and communicating the injustice of what victims have suffered is a way of including others in the moral space of the third. While taking up the position of the moral third is no substitute for other kinds of change, whether political or juridical, Benjamin argues, “witnessing and acknowledging injuries and injustice—especially ones we have perpetrated—creates the possibility of lawful social behavior and responsibility for fellow human beings.”40 Thus it is the moral third that allows for the establishment or reestablishment of communicative interactions and the institutions in which it is achieved. Human vulnerabilities compete with the equally vital need for recognition that acknowledgment and witnessing make

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possible. We see these vulnerabilities in the fragility of the human psyche and its consequent defenses, the passing on of traumainduced self/other psychic deformations, and the assorted cultural fantasies, identities, and histories that reflect destructive and politically powerful relations of complementarity (i.e., insider/ outsider, male/female, gay/straight, white/black, worthy/unworthy, victim/perpetrator). All of these thwart our ability to find and share a genuine moral third from which justice can emerge. Benjamin does not believe such vulnerability or its attendant suffering will disappear or even that recognition can be fully accomplished. She does not think that achieving the space of the moral third can be permanent; but she does think that conceptualizing its possibility and taking it as our aim are important projects. It is the moral third that allows for love, forgiveness, the shouldering of responsibility, political witnessing, and the real, even if brief, moments of truly shared experience that rescue us from dangerous destructiveness and solitudes too lonely to bear. Benjamin’s accounts of the relational self and its imbrication with power, the dynamics of recognition and repudiation at work in and between the self and others, the rethinking of the parentchild relationship and the consequent reconceptualization of psychoanalytic and political relationships are extremely compelling descriptions of the relational demands of moral interaction. They offer us a normative ideal of human relating clearly seen at work in the Moving Beyond Violence and Acknowledgment projects that Benjamin supports.

BENJAMIN AND HABERMAS Habermas repeatedly claims that, if human emancipation is ever to be achieved, the lifeworld and the project of discourse ethics

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must meet each other halfway. Benjamin makes clear what must be included in that half way and just why achieving it is the hardest half, by far. While Habermas tends to focus on the linguistic dimensions of intersubjectivity and the role that language plays in constituting our relationships with others, his original insight is about the fundamentally intersubjective nature of human development and social experience. It is first intersubjectivity and then the language that it enables and develops that is at the core of human experience. This central insight suggests that despite his focus on the role that language and the rationality it enables plays in intersubjective experience, a communicative account of ethics should also include a recognition of the pre- and extralinguistic dimensions of intersubjective relating as well as the role that affects and irrational and unconscious forces play in our relationships with others. Benjamin’s descriptions of the psychic dimensions of intersubjectivity, including the role gender plays in that experience, as well as her description of the complex forms of relating demanded by the moral third suggest ways to extend and complicate Habermas’s analysis. Benjamin offers insight into dimensions of identity that Habermas does not explore and challenges his account of the level at which our efforts at egalitarian intersubjectivity fail. Habermas does not explore the impact of gender or sexuality, and he ascribes our moral and political failures to institutional failures or cognitive disruptions. Benjamin describes the intricate dynamics of social subjectivity and attributes the obstacles facing just and human interactions to the outcome of deep psychic struggles between the possibility of recognition and the threat of destruction. Appreciating the pull of these two psychic poles of interaction is critical for understanding relationships

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between women and men, between parents and children, or psychoanalysts and clients. Benjamin argues that in the context of political and military struggles it is equally critical to political groups with fraught identities and histories. Seyla Benhabib suggests that we recast Habermas’s discourse ethics and make rational agreement less central to its aims than the articulation of the practices of moral conversation that make reasoned agreement as a way of life more attainable. With this different emphasis, Benjamin’s accounts of the dynamics of intersubjective identity formation, the possibility of recognition, and the need to limit the processes of destruction that undermine it offer us critical insights into how such a life might be possible.41 Benjamin’s work also offers important insight for an emancipatory political theory. While holding that breakdowns in recognition are inevitable because negation is a critical aspect of any relationship, Benjamin remains committed to the normative potential of human relationships. Insisting that relationships marked by mutual recognition are possible, Benjamin believes that taking up the position of the moral or symbolic third, which allows for the possibility of such relationships, is critical for establishing humane and just social interactions. Benjamin expands our understanding of communicative interaction to include intersubjective psychodynamics and thus offers a corrective to Habermas’s tendency to operate solely at the cognitive and linguistic level. That mutual recognition is a temporary achievement— always threatened by internal and external psychic and social dynamics— also underscores the inevitability of the impact of power on human interactions. Between the lines of Habermas’s interpretation of the emancipation of reason and desire, penned long ago, one can read a call for communicative openness between reason and desire, the “I” and the “me,” the self and the other. Benjamin figures this

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openness not as rational transparency but as a relationally negotiated recognition that could make possible, if not justice, then a more exact fantasy of the conditions of its temporary possibility.

NOTES 1. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol 1. (Boston: Beacon, 1989). 2. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xix. 3. Jessica Benjamin, “Two-Way Streets: Recognition of Difference and the Intersubjective Third,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2006): 119. 4. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. 5. Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of Love, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 185–186. 6. Benjamin, 185–186. 7. Benjamin, 19. 8. Benjamin, 17. 9. Benjamin, 18. 10. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York City: Basic Books, 1985). 11. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action. 12. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 134. 13. Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity, and the Third (New York: Routledge, 2018) 2. 14. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 15. 15. Benjamin, 17. 16. Benjamin, 21. 17. Benjamin, 21. 18. See G.  W.  F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.  V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977). 19. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 21. 20. Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

Intersubjectivity on the Couch Z 207 21. Benjamin, Like Subjects, 45. 22. Benjamin, 9. 23. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 24. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 51. 25. Benjamin, “Two-Way Streets,” 26. 26. Benjamin, 26. 27. Jessica Benjamin, “Intersubjectivity, Thirdness, and Mutual Recognition,” 16, a presentation for the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, California, 2007, http://icpla.edu /wp-content /uploads /2013 /03 /Benjamin -J .- 2007 -ICP-Presentation -Thirdness -present-send.pdf. 28. Benjamin, 16. 29. Benjamin, 16. 30. Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To, 89. 31. Benjamin, 89. 32. Jessica Benjamin, “Acknowledging the Other’s Suffering: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Trauma in Israel/Palestine,” Tikkun 30, no. 3 (2015): 15. 33. Benjamin, 15. 34. http://www.movingbeyondviolence.org/. 35. Benjamin, “Acknowledging the Other’s Suffering,” 16. 36. Benjamin, 16. 37. Benjamin, 17. 38. Benjamin, 17. 39. Benjamin, “Intersubjectivity, Thirdness, and Mutual Recognition,” 16. 40. Benjamin, 16. 41. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 38.

8 POLITICS AND THE FEAR OF BREAKDOWN Noëlle McAfee

T

he phrase “fear of breakdown” in this chapter’s title alludes to the posthumously published essay by the groundbreaking pediatrician-turned-analyst Donald W. Winnicott, in which he pointed to the kind of agony that can lead to serious regression for individuals and, as I will argue here, for collectivities too. The fear is of something to come that is really an agony over what has already transpired. Those words capture a phenomenon that seems to lurk on the periphery of many of the world’s current political troubles, depending on one’s point of view: an anxiety of impending disaster, whether from suicide bombers bent on destruction, immigrants overwhelming borders, temperatures reaching catastrophic levels, and reactionary and fearful citizens shredding safety nets and imposing draconian policies on those who would threaten their ways of life. Even with (or perhaps despite or even to spite) four decades of normative political philosophies calling for more deliberative democracy and sounder principles of justice, actual political practices seem to be more reactionary than ever. A central contention of this chapter is that political practices will not be improved with better forms of reasoning alone; getting on a better course calls for working through, affectively and not just

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cognitively, the demons that make democracy seem like a fool’s errand.

INFANTILE EXPERIENCE: PLENUM OR SOCIALIT Y? Drawing on Winnicott’s fear-of-breakdown paper brings a central debate in psychoanalytic theory to the fore: whether there is an early “fusion” or plenum stage of infantile experience. Most recent work in contemporary relational theory, to which one of the leading critical theorists of our time partially adheres, holds that human beings are relational, social creatures from the start and that there is no originary state of plenum from which anyone breaks down.1 The relational view offers an account of human subjectivity that lends itself to more democratic practices and institutions. An alternative account, which I will follow here, is more sober and skeptical about human sociality. While it is true that we are social creatures raised in webs of kith and kin, it is not at all obvious that we are born recognizing our own sociality. At the start of our lives, this view claims, there is no differentiation between ourselves and others and hence no way to appreciate or even cognize a self-other relationship. The passage to reflexive sociality is contingent and fraught, easily derailed. Some don’t make it, and such failures can lead to political catastrophe. Much is at stake in this debate. Not only are there clinical ramifications, there are political and theoretical ones. Is early infantile experience (1) undifferentiated plenum and omnipotence or (2) early ego sense of self and relationality? The first view hews to a version of Freud’s notion of primary narcissism— though I will use the word plenum—and the second follows the

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new relational theorists’ claim that babies have proto-egos from the start and so are umproblematically disposed to see others as distinct beings and value recognition.2 The more psychoanalytic view, though, presages utter incapacity in the event of the lost or dead mother and a future as a false self, never someone really living his or her own life. The first view of an undifferentiated early state is developed by Winnicott, along with Ronald Fairbairn, André Green, and Julia Kristeva, to show the fragile development of the self following loss of plenum. This approach offers a glimpse into what might be a tragic feature of human development: an early era of undifferentiated plenum that is subsequently sundered by the caregiver’s normally inevitable need to draw back and carry on her own life. The second view is buttressed by later infant researchers, or so-called baby watchers, who tracked the eye movements of infants in relation to their caregivers and began to speculate that previous theories of a primary undifferentiated state were false. As Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann write, by studying “mother-infant face-to-face” interactions, both are “active participants in the co-creation of many patterns of relatedness.”3 On the basis of their observations, the researchers claimed that the infant is as active a participant as the mother. Still, the actual mother, if depressed or terribly narcissistic, can fail the infant in her lack of response. Since then, as Joel Whitebook notes, the relational view that there is no such thing as primary narcissism, as well as no such thing as an early symbiotic state, has become dogma. I will return to this. Green brilliantly refutes the baby watchers’ thesis that the infant observations confirm their refutations of Freud’s notions of an undifferentiated phase, infantile narcissism, omnipotence, and hallucinatory wish fulfillment: “observation cannot tell us

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anything about intrapsychic processes that truly characterize the subject’s experience.”4 Trying to fathom the psychic life of a baby by watching it, Green writes, is like constructing “the contents of a book by observing the expressions of someone reading it.”5 While the baby watchers take as their data empirical observations, the analytic view is committed to exploring the analysand’s psychic life. These are radically incommensurable perspectives. Winnicott has been claimed by some relational theorists because of his dyadic view that “there is no such thing as a baby,” meaning that a baby exists only in relation to a mother. But I think Winnicott is being misappropriated, for he also explains that to develop well an infant needs an early stage of plenum and holding that makes possible a sense of self and confidence in one’s senses. The infant’s early relationship with the mother is not symbiotic but rather, at best, unimpinged, allowing it to “go on being.” If the holding environment fails, and the infant is impinged too much and too early, it may experience a “threat of annihilation.”6 In other words, it needs something like a cocoon, where all needs are met, in order for its sense of self to develop. This plenum is made possible by what normally befalls the mother at the very end of pregnancy and the first few week’s of the infant’s life: “maternal preoccupation.” Gradually the plenum is impinged by reality and lack, and the infant develops the ability to live without needs always being constantly met. But as Green and Kristeva (and also Fairbairn) argue, this transition involves an originary breakdown of plenum that can later lead to a fear of breakdown, which, as Winnicott argues, is a fear of what has already happened.

FEAR OF BREAKDOWN Winnicott’s position can be clarified by reading backward through the prism of his final essay, “Fear of Breakdown.”

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Moreover doing so opens a door to moving from the agonies of the individual psyche to those of body politics. Where Winnicott’s tale focuses on the construction of the fantasy of an I and its agonies, my development of it will trace the construction of collective stories of origin, national stories of disavowal, and the ways archaic histories intrude upon the present. So here I will walk the reader first through his story of individual development and then follow it again by another route that runs in a more political direction.

Winnicott’s Tale Winnicott observes that more disturbed patients will sometimes express deep anxieties of a coming breakdown, which is at bottom a fear of “a breakdown of the establishment of the unit self.”7 While psychotic patients are particularly susceptible to this anxiety, anyone should be able to recognize it, Winnicott writes, for it taps into universal agony over the possible loss of all ego organization, which, after all, was at one time in the history of every individual utterly absent and only contingently created. We are not born with distinct egos; these come about, sometimes well and sometimes not, in the drama of every person’s early development. But the curious thing is that while the patient may experience the fear as anticipatory of something to come, “fear of breakdown is related to the individual’s past experience.”8 It is really a fear of a breakdown that has already happened, along with all the agonies associated with an early breakdown that occurred so early the mind was incapable of experiencing it. “There are moments, according to my experience, when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, a fear of which destroys his or her life, has already been. It is a fact that is carried round hidden away in the unconscious.”

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Winnicott’s notion of a fear of breakdown arises from his theory of development, garnered through his own pediatric infant research. He argues that in normal conditions the infant, lacking any integration, begins in a state of absolute dependence and, absent disaster, is ensconced in a facilitating (maternal) environment that holds together its unintegrated self. Gradually the holding environment loosens as, for example, the exhausted mother succumbs to the need for a shower and a nap. If the process moves at a just-right space, the good-enough mother provides the infant enough care as well as enough titrated frustration to learn to be alone, perhaps as it clutches a favorite frayed blanket (or “transitional object”) on its path toward forming an integrated self. The facilitating environment begins as holding, moves to handling, and then becomes object presenting, helping the initially unintegrated being develop a more integrated sense of self. At its best, the process of development from absolute dependence to independence (and, I’d add, interdependence) keeps pace with the neurobiological capacity of the infant’s mental apparatus. For the mother, usually but not always, during the first few weeks of the infant’s life she is thoroughly preoccupied with the infant’s every need. This maternal preoccupation, as Winnicott calls it, nearly an illness, complements the infant’s initial state of unintegration and absolute dependency, creating in the infant an illusion of omnipotence and completeness or, perhaps, what Freud meant at times by primary narcissism. From the infant’s perspective this is not at all an experience of fusion or symbiosis, despite what Margaret Mahler and others have argued, for there are not yet two who could become one. It was not so much that the infant invests all its drives in itself but that there is no experience yet of self and other. Cornelius Castoriadis describes this phenomenon this way:

Politics and the Fear of Breakdown Z 215 To the extent that we can speak in this context of a “world” of the “subject,” this world is at one and the same time self, protosubject and proto-world, as they mutually and fully overlap. Here, there is no way of separating representation and “perception” or “sensation.” The maternal breast or what takes its place, is a part without being a distinct part, of what will later become the “own body” and which is, obviously, not yet a “body.” The libido circulating between the infans and the breast is a libido of auto-cathexis. It is preferable not to speak of “narcissism” in this regard, itself to the exclusion of all the rest, whereas what is in question here is a totalitarian inclusion.9

Thanks to the facilitating environment, the infant’s experience is of plenum, all-encompassing inclusion. Or as Winnicott himself puts it, “At the time of absolute dependence, with the mother supplying an auxiliary ego-function, it has to be remembered that the infant has not yet separated out the ‘not-me’ from the ‘me’—this cannot happen apart from the establishment of ‘me.’” As the mother’s preoccupation diminishes, as she gradually turns her attention back to the world, and as the infant matures enough to tolerate impingement and to use transitional objects, the infant becomes able to distinguish “me” from “notme” without falling apart. But sometimes the holding environment fractures before the infant is capable of tolerating it, that is, before it has become integrated enough to tolerate impingement. Environments can fail. War might wrench families apart; depression or schizophrenia might fell a parent; illness might quarantine an infant; a sibling’s death might destroy the facilitating environment. Maybe even the most optimally good-enough mothering is never good enough; perhaps following Fairbairn, any infant’s sense of loss of the mother is terrifying and psychically explodes what

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constitutes itself.10 (Throughout, Winnicott is pointing more to the maternal function rather than actual mothers.) Or, following Kristeva, “everywhere there is the same impossible mourning for the maternal object” because the moment of loss is one and the same as the moment of primary repression—the schism that creates the ego and the unconscious all in one fell swoop.11 The link between Winnicott and Kristeva can be found through the work of Kristeva’s mentor, André Green, whose essay “The Dead Mother” showed that no matter how good enough a mother is, at some point, early on, the child will experience object-loss, which is “a fundamental moment in the structuring of the human psyche, at which time a new relation to reality is introduced.”12 (I worry that the term object-loss is itself misleading because at this early stage the infant has no sense of self and other, i.e., there is not felt object to lose.) For Kristeva, this is also the moment of primal repression and the inauguration of the unconscious. Thanks to the mother’s erotic and yet ambivalent eros toward a third, the father, the mother ferries the child over the abyss from plenitude to reality, from echolalias to language. But, for Winnicott and Ogden, and likely Kristeva too, because this transition never goes perfectly, the experience itself can become split off and unlived. Interpreting Winnicott, Thomas Ogden argues that this originary loss is akin to one of the primitive agonies that Winnicott lists, primarily the agonizing worry of a return to an unintegrated state. “Feeling states that are tolerable in the context of the mother-infant bond are primitive agonies when the infant must experience them on his own.”13 Because they are intolerable the infant splits them off; the split occurs but it is not experienced, much less remembered. (This is the very phenomenon that Freud attempted to unpack in his essay, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,”

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that is, the difficulty in working through something that is repeatedly reenacted but not remembered.)14 Recall Winnicott’s point that the breakdown “is a fact that is carried round hidden away in the unconscious.” Some past breakdown in fact may have inaugurated the unconscious. The conscious ego arises in the wake of the mother’s “not-me.” The cost of becoming an I is repression of what had been before and the ability to split off, thereafter, whatever does not accord with the new (fictively constructed) sense of a boundaried self. After all, “what is primal repression,” Kristeva asks, but the “ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject, repeat”?15 Infant splits off mother; she becomes abject. Infant is left with emptiness, and naricissism arises in defense against emptiness. Winnicott too notes that emptiness can be looked at through the same lens as the fear of breakdown: “In some patients emptiness needs to be experienced, and this emptiness belongs to the past, to the time before the degree of maturity had made it possible for emptiness to be experienced.”16 It is easier to recall trauma than it is to recall emptiness, for how is one to know that nothing is happening when one does not know yet to expect anything to happen? “Emptiness is a prerequisite for eagerness to gather in,” Winnicott writes. “Primary emptiness simply means: before starting to fill up. . . . In practice, the difficulty is that the patient fears the awfulness of emptiness.”17 For Kristeva, narcissism is a means of exorcising this emptiness.18 The best way over the abyss of emptiness is identification with a Third Party (the father, the law . . .). For Freud, “identification with the father in [one’s] own personal prehistory” is a “direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object-cathexis.”19 For Kristeva, primary identification allows one to enter into the realm of representations, signs, symbols,

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language.20 Emptiness goes underground. Sociality arises. Those who fail to make such an identification with a third risk becoming false selves, living in borderline states and psychosomatic conditions. “Whatever their differences,” Kristeva writes, “all these symptomatologies share a common denominator—the inability to represent.”21 So let me return to Winnicott’s story. If the fragile process of moving from unintegration to a more integrated sense of self, thanks to a facilitating holding environment, is fractured, then what is the infant to experience? Or if the foothold into integration and sociality is so precarious, such that there is always a fear of falling, what is the person to do? Any number of primitive agonies might ensue, along with their attendant defenses. Winnicott lists these: 1.

A return to an unintegrated state. (Defence: disintegration.)

2.

Falling forever. (Defence: self-holding.)

3.

Loss of psychosomatic collusion, failure of indwelling. (Defence: depersonalization.)

4.

Loss of sense of real. (Defence: exploitation of primary narcissism, etc.)

5.

Loss of capacity to relate to objects. (Defence: autistic states, relating only to self-phenomena.)

Winnicott says all too little about these primitive agonies. I would say that they are affective remainders “carried round in the unconscious” of the moment of primary repression, the schism that creates an I at the same time as “not-I,” the origins of emptiness that give rise to defense structures. The agony is literally of falling back into an unintegrated state, a boundariless being without a body to own, an inability to engage with the world in any meaningful way. To ward off primitive agonies

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such as fear of breakdown, defenses arise: not just the very primitive ones that Winnicott lists, but other primitive defenses that Melanie Klein notes: splitting, projection, denial.22 But these defenses can fail, and sometimes the patient will succumb to the agonies, as Winnicott experienced with a patient’s suicide. Take in-dwelling, meaning the experience of being a mind in a body (a psychosomatic collusion). If this process fails, the subject then thrown into a world that demands individuation, but short-circuited from experiencing there being a mind in a body (a sense of subjective reality walking through the world), becomes a false self, play-acting emotions, going through the motions of relations with the world, never sure of who she really is or whether her feelings and sensations track reality. She lives life as a false self, at best, or on the border or psychotic at worst. The goal of analysis then is to help the patient experience the breakdown that already occurred. “In other words, the patient must go on looking for the past detail which is not yet experienced. This search takes the form of a looking for this detail in the future.” The clue to tracking down the experience can be traced backward by noticing the defenses at work against any of the primitive agonies: “the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience and into omnipotent control now (assuming the auxiliary ego-supporting function of the mother [analyst]).” On the other hand, if the patient is ready for some kind of acceptance of this queer kind of truth, that what is not yet experienced did nevertheless happen in the past, then the way is open for the agony to be experienced in the transference, in reaction to the analyst’s failures and mistakes. These latter can be dealt with by the patient in doses that are not excessive, and the patient can

220 Y Noëlle McAfee account for each technical failure of the analyst as countertransference. In other words, gradually the patient gathers the original failure of the facilitating environment into the area of his or her omnipotence and the experience of omnipotence which belongs to the state of dependence (transference fact).23

So this is a story of how the ego can regain the mastery of wholeness that had been experienced as omnipotence, before a fateful and premature event of primal repression, a splitting that occurred too soon. Thus far this has been a story of the vicissitudes of self-mastery.

Between the Psyche and the Social Winnicott’s tale traces the rise and agonies of an ego that has undergone breakdown on its path toward individuation, taking readers through the tribulations of the ego. But along the way in Winnicott’s tale the old question of what is (the) unconscious has been set aside.24 So too have been the social forces that make up, more broadly, the facilitating environment. Absent from Winnicott’s tale is how the unconscious repositories of the holding environment shape the emerging self, including how collective losses become incorporated rather than introjected (to use Abraham and Torok’s distinction between unmourned incorporations versus metabolized introjections).25 The facilitating environment is hardly neutral; it is laden with myriad deposits of previous and collective secrets, crypts, and stories. In a previous book I referred to this as the political unconscious, “an effect of processes: failures to sublimate well, desires unarticulated, voices kept silent, repressions reenacted without acknowledgment of their origins . . . a contingent effect of power relations

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and harms that have not been tended to.”26 I also argued there that the individual is “always born in a social context, constituted through that context’s prescriptions, shaped in the to and fro of human connection.”27 But I did not make what strikes me now as the next obvious connection: we are not just born in a social realm; we are also shaped by the political unconscious of the social realms into which we are born. So here the story of the unconscious and of subjectivation converge. Perhaps there are two aspects of the unconscious, two kinds of foreign territories: first the one described in the last section as an effect of the process of primary repression and second the political unconscious of our cultures. Here a Foucauldian tale of subjectivation enters in. Michel Foucault, a quasi Freudian, saw how the psyche is shaped and subjected by external forces.28 But unlike Foucault, who seems to be silent on whether disciplinary power is conscious or not, the political unconscious shapes us unwittingly. The kinds of beings we are emerge through the foreign territories at the kernel of our own psyches and beyond the peripheries of our selves.29 But perhaps this is already too fine a distinction. As soon as I point to the “own-ness” of the individual’s unconscious, the question of property arises, especially insofar as whether what is repressed in primary repression is “one’s own” sociality, undifferentiation. Infant splits off plenitude in the face of the mother’s “not-me” and, in the terror that leads the infant to leap over the abyss of emptiness and meaningless in order to identify with a third party, “I” emerges, “I” arises, at the moment of forced renunciation of plenitude, in the need to differentiate a self by identification with the mother’s other love, with the father of individual prehistory, as Freud puts it, or, in other words, with the social realm. Whatever one thinks of one’s own desires, they can never really be only one’s own. They are shaped by holding environments,

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which have in turn been shaped by previous forces. The mother may hold the infant, but she too has been held and shaped by larger environs. The facilitating environment is already throroughly social and historical. History makes us, deposits in us, unconscious desires, stories, and purposes. So who am I really? What desires are really my own versus those that have been inculcated in me? And when I enter into political crucibles of decision making, when are the desires I am advocating for my own or those to which I have already been cultivated to hold? How can I possibly be an advocate for myself when I am a stranger to myself and to even my own desire? This is the place where democracy and psychoanalysis begin to converge. If democracy means ruling ourselves, we surely need to know ourselves. And the prospects for this are slim. Freud showed more than anything else that a great majority of our own psyche is inaccessible, remote, and often a trickster, leading us to think one thing of ourselves when something entirely otherwise is the case. Moreover, political environs often shape our selves; so we are already confabulated in political situations where what we are to decide has already been decided in advance of our own willing. Hence this is also the place where any neat dichotomy between the individual and the social fails, along with any supposed parallel between individual subjects and macrosubjects, that is, people and peoples. “Peoples” are always imaginary extensions of individuals’ social identifications. There is no separate social psyche: we are always in the social and the social is in us. Not only are we all born into social networks (even if we are not first aware of this), we are also born of them. For example, according to dual inheritance theory, we each carry in us the inheritance of all our predecessors and the larger cultural world. As Robert Paul puts it, “a human being comes

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into existence on the basis of information and instructions carried along two separate channels, one of which is the genetic channel and the other the cultural channel. The latter consists of all those cultural features and symbolic systems that exist not in the genome, but in the external public arena that is the object of shared perceptual awareness on the part of group members.”30 We are each then repositories as well as channels for the social: “we might say that the capacity to learn a human language is an evolved ability passed on to each new human genetically; but,” Paul adds, culture still has a public existence; “each language exists only in the public space, through immersion in which it can be learned by any competent human. As cultural anthropologists believe, a great part of a complete human comes from the symbolic (and other) systems in this cultural arena, and there is no such thing as a human without them.”31 And of course there would be no such thing as culture were it not for the myriad sublimations that people have poured into a collective space. Individuation emerges through social identifications. As we transition from plenum and omnipotence and later, if lucky, to interdependence, we make identifications: first, as Kristeva says, through identification with the father of individual prehistory— that is, with whatever it is distracting mother from her obsession with us: whether work, love, or the law (of the father, of the incest taboo, of the symbolic); second with our identifications with what the law is doing to us, how it is making us (subjectivation); third with our “ethnic tents,”32 the groups we find solace in being a part of, which give us shelter, safety, meaning, which allow us to split off what we imagine are not the clean and proper parts of our selves. Collective identities are extensions of individual ones, in fact there is hardly such a thing as an individual identity, for “identification,” whether external or internal, is always a social

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relation, a relation with another. Moreover, failures to integrate social identities lead to their own maladies of the soul.

Collectives and Their Primitive Agonies No doubt the phenomenon of fear of breakdown links to politics. Politically trouble lies in this phenomenon: fear of breakdown can lead to maladied nostalgia for an imagined plenum and a paranoid schizoid insistence that perfection can be had. This phenomenon can easily lead to nativism and the lure of authoritarian regimes’ promise to solve all problems. These are primitive agonies not unlike those of the individual with a fear of breakdown, or rather they are extensions and intersections of individual ones. Just as individuals agonize, so too do their collective formations. And with them come collective defenses. It would take an entire book to document all the political symptoms of these defenses, including the psychotic ones when peoples regress to terribly primitive attempts to ward off falling or losing themselves. Some proper names may suffice to remind the reader of where regression to primitive states can lead: the battles of Kosovo, Berlin, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Manila, Verdun, Kiev, and Wuhan; the sieges of Adrianople, Baghdad, Budapest, Changchun, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Leningrad, Odessa, and Sarajevo; the invasions of Manchuria, Iraq, North Korea, and Poland; and of course all the world wars, civil wars, genocidal rapes, and suicide bombings too numerous to name. But these proper names gloss over the multiplicity and specificity of each symptom of political regression. The siege of Sarajevo was born of an entirely different history, political imaginaries, and forces than the invasion of Iraq. The list simply points to the ubiquity of political psychotic defenses and their effects.

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Primitive agonies affect collectivities, but instead of showing up as a fear of loss of the unit self, there is a fear of loss of the unit collective. A common response (or defense) is a construction of “the national ‘people-as-one’” and the concomitant minoritization of those who threaten a “consensual commonality amidst subjects of difference.” 33 As Claude Lefort writes, attempts to maintain order by invoking “Property, Family, the State, Authority, the Nation, Culture” testify “to a certain vertigo in the face of the void created by an indeterminate society.”34 The primitive agony of returning to an unintegrated state is collective when there is a fear of losing one’s social identifications or when a collective identification itself is threatened. Volkan refers to this as the fraying of an ethnic tent, which gives rise to anxiety. The collective regresses and literally engages in defenses, often offensively. The collective primitive agony of loss of a sense of the real connects with an operating fantasy that the “we” names a truth rather than a fiction. That meaning is real, not imagined. The names of the defenses that arise against these collective primitive agonies are familiar: anarchism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, nationalism, nativism, fundamentalism, even neoliberalism, along with sexism, ableism, and racism. I suggest that these are all in one way or another levied against collective primitive agonies of a fear of breakdown that already occurred but was not experienced. These defenses operate to suture a body politic together, to create a “we” out of people who are not really integrated as a we but born into a hallucinatory oneness that is quickly sundered and emptied when reality intrudes upon our omnipotent fantasies of plenty. Like the infant who has to leap over the abyss of meaninglessness and into the arms of arbitrary structures (sign/signified) and the imaginary father of prehistory, peoples are at risk of breakdown when they adamantly deny any contingency to their

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own collectivity, when they insist that their group really is singular and unique rather than a happenstance of history. The feared breakdown of unity is a fear of what has already occurred: that early move from unintegration into an integrated we was a making of meaning without foundations. In other words, the unexperienced originary loss may be the source of the fear of breakdown, but it is the defenses against these primitive agonies that are the source of political trouble. A defense against loss and disintegration can be an extreme “self-holding” that reifies what are really contingent social identifications. It is crucial to understand the temporality of the fear of breakdown: a fear experienced here and now about something to come, but at the same time a fear of what has already happened but was not experienced. In the context of ethnic conflicts, Volkan refers to this as a time collapse, 35 when here and now some archaic dread wells up that threatens an established unity and creates an urgency to react and settle ancient scores. To try to unpack this, let me posit these four moments: 1.

an archaic past, like the holding environment of early infancy, the sense of plenum, prior to any differentiation between self and other, which comes to an end with something that triggers loss of plenum;

2.

a constructed past, constructed in immediate response to the loss of plenum, the experience of differentiation and the need to create identifications to suture the self together as one self and to suture it to a common community of identifications;

3.

the here and now, which might be haunted by a fear of breakdown (perhaps triggered by a current event), the residue of the splitting apart of the archaic past and entrance into a very contingent and unstable constructed identity; the here and now is oriented toward

Politics and the Fear of Breakdown Z 227 4.

a future, which might loop back by reifying the constructed past to ward off breakdown or, alternatively, might become open to making new and more open constructions and identifications.

The infant’s passage from plenum to loss to identifications with the social realm is a move from an archaic past, prior to any self-other differentiation, to a moment of both splitting up of the plenum and a leap toward identification with others in the social realm, as well as the other of language, signs, and symbols. That space in between, of being split and utterly alone and bereft is literally not thinkable. That is the desolate and empty place of breakdown. Leaping into the social is the only way to avoid it. The new constructions of identity allow us to disavow that terrible space. What I am calling the constructed past, Homi Bhabha calls the “national past,” which, in his words, “disavows the differentiae of culture, community, and identity,” activating “the ambivalent and indeterminate structure of Western modernity itself.”36 Citing Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt, Bhabha is describing the very same phenomenon: fear of breakdown operating in collectivities. The “backward glance” in the construction of nationness is ambivalent and anxious. 37 A psychoanalytic genealogy of anxiety, Bhabha writes, shows that amor patriae is a “‘sign’ of a danger implicit in/on the threshold of identity, in between its claims to coherence and its fear of dissolution.”38 Anxiety’s indeterminacy signals a trauma at the core of “the cathexes that stabilize the I”; in fact, fear of breakdown is an anxiety of the antecedent.39 When fear of breakdown loops back to reify the construction of a nation or people, to signal them as the real origin, the true founding reality, it disavows the contingency of these

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identifications. It also shuts off possibilities for collective deliberations that might lead to new designations and more open communities. The handmaidens of disavowal are defenses such as nationalism, fundamentalism, racism, patriarchy, and the like. Like any other primitive defenses, they often operate unconsciously, they rise up unbidden, they repeat without memory; they are in dire need of a process of working through.

CRITICAL THEORY AND THE POLITICAL WORK OF MOURNING The goal of a political process of working through, much like the goal of analysis I mentioned earlier, would be to help “the patient,” here the community, experience the breakdown that already occurred. But the primitive defenses that keep the borders of national identity shored up operate precisely to avoid such work. Freud’s exploration of how psychoanalysis can break through resistant defenses that stall the analytic process led him from his 1914 essay “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” to his 1926 “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety.”40 Through these investigations, Freud came to see the most intransigent defenses as those issuing from the id, the source of the most primitive defenses, which Klein identified as splitting, denial, and projection. Likewise, the defenses that Winnicott links to the primitive agonies are also quite primitive, especially given that these agonies are guarding against extreme loss of self, that is, psychosis. Because these psychic troubles become political ones, it is crucial that we create public forms of mourning loss, just as the ancient Athenians did.41 As David McIvor puts it, we need to take up the work of mourning in a “variety of civic spaces and practices through which citizens establish, contest, and revise the

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frames by which public losses are memorialized.” Here, “speaking about loss [is] in the name of establishing crosscutting relationships amidst social plurality and diversity.”42 Rather than clinging to a fantasy of a perfect and unassailable “we” and demonic “others,” there needs to be political processes for mourning loss and working through such syndromes of ideality, for deliberation that gets to the central issues of identity and belonging and squarely addresses the fragility of having any kind of “we.” This is where contemporary critical theory could step in—not to identify normative footholds for doing critique at all but identifying how to recognize the ghosts in the forum and then how to proceed. This may well include returning to insights of the first generation of critical theorists, for example in trying to understand the roots of the authoritarian personality. But it will also mean drawing on insights of the past half century, which have mostly bubbled up in cultural theory, not critical theory. Divisions that have kept these two fields of inquiry separate are wearing thin. Cultural theory has been bent more on diagnosis than remedy. Critical theory has been attuned more toward finding transcendent criteria, namely rational ones for critique. It is time we start learning from each other and move toward thinking about how communities can actually get past, that is, work through, their fears of breakdown. A critical social theory that is informed by psychoanalysis, including the negativity that Freud identified, can focus “on the dynamic reworking of affect,” as Allen suggests, which could make “social transformation possible.”43

NOTES 1. That critical theorist is Axel Honneth, who occupies an intermediary space between relational theory and more properly Freudian theory,

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

for he does lean on a notion of an early stage of maternal holding, à la Winnicott. But Honneth departs from Winnicott’s view in significant ways, namely in seeing fusion as a moment that comes and goes and in seeing the possibility for the infant to recognize the independence of the mother out of this experience. I follow the distinction that Joel Whitebook lays out in Axel Honneth and Joel Whitebook, “Omnipotence or Fusion: A Conversation Between Axel Honneth and Joel Whitebook,” Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 170–179, which could be summarized as, on the one side, those who think there is some early presocial self, and those on the other, the contemporary relationalists (to be distinguished from early object relationalists such as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott), who think the self is social all the way down. The relationalists base their views largely on infant observations in which it appears that infants are relational and social from the start. André Green, discussed later in the chapter, identifies the fallacy of this conclusion. B. Beebe and F. Lachmann, “The Relational Turn in Psychoanalysis: A Dyadic Systems View from Infant Research,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 39, no. 3 (2003): 379–409. André Green, “Science and Science Fiction in Infant Research,” in The Psychoanalytic Monograph Series. Clinical and Observational Psychoanalytic Research: Roots of a Controversy—André Green and Daniel Stern, ed. Rosemary Davies (London: Karnac, 2000), 60. Green, 52. Donald W. Winnicott, “Primary Maternal Preoccupation,” in Donald  W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers (London: Routledge, 1992), 303. Donald W. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1 (1974):103–107, at 103. Winnicott, 103 (emphasis added). Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 294. See Thomas Ogden, “Why Read Fairbairn?” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 91:101–118, for his discussion of the trauma Fairbairn points to: “every infant or child accurately perceives the limits of the mother’s ability to love him; and, at the same time, every infant or child misinterprets inevitable privations as the mother’s lack of love for him” (103). Quoting Fairbairn: “At a still deeper level (or at a still earlier

Politics and the Fear of Breakdown Z 231

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

stage) the child’s experience is one of, so to speak, exploding ineffectively and being completely emptied of libido. It is thus an experience of disintegration and of imminent psychical death . . . [he is threatened by the loss of what] constitutes himself ” (113). Julia Kristeva, Black Sun (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 9. André Green, “The Dead Mother,” in On Private Madness (London: Karnac, 1996), 143. Thomas H. Ogden, “Fear of Breakdown and the Unlived Life,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 95 (2014): 205– 223, at 210. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II),” in SE 12:145–156. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 12. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” 106. Winnicott, 106. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 42. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in SE 19:31. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 42. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 9. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963, International Psycho-Analytic Library, 104:1– 346 (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975), 2. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” 105. I am indebted to Elissa Marder for this crucial observation. See chapter 5 of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Noëlle McAfee, Democracy and the Political Unconscious (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 12. McAfee, 12. For a rich discussion of this, see Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). I am drawing on both Abraham’s “The Shell and the Kernel” in The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, as well as Jacques Derrida’s commentary on

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30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1:137. Robert A. Paul, “Civilization and Its Discontents in Anthropological Perspective, Eight Decades On,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 32, no. 6 (2012): 582–595, at 591. Paul, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 591. See chapter 1 of Vamik Volkan’s Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Boulder: Westview, 1997). Homi K. Bhabha, “Anxious Nations, Nervous States,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 202. Bhabha, 202. Volkan, Bloodlines, chapter 4. Bhabha, “Anxious Nations, Nervous States,” 203. Bhabha, 205. Bhabha, 207. Bhabha, 207. Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,” in SE 20:75–176. David W. McIvor, Mourning in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). David W. McIvor, “Bringing Ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning,” Political Theory 40, no. 4 (2012): 409–436, 428. Amy Allen, “Psychoanalysis and the Methodology of Critique,” Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 244– 254.

REFERENCES Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Allen, Amy. The Politics of Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Allen, Amy. “Psychoanalysis and the Methodology of Critique.” Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 244– 254. Beebe, B., and F. Lachmann. “The Relational Turn in Psychoanalysis: A Dyadic Systems View from Infant Research.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 39, no. 3 (2003): 379–409.

Politics and the Fear of Breakdown Z 233 Bhabha, Homi K. “Anxious Nations, Nervous States.” In Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec, 201– 217. London: Verso, 1994. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998 [1987]. Derrida, Jacques. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey. Vols. 1– 24. London: Hogarth, 1966–1974. Green, André. “The Dead Mother.” In On Private Madness, London: Karnac, 1996. Green, André. “Science and Science Fiction in Infant Research.” In The Psychoanalytic Monograph Series. Clinical and Observational Psychoanalytic Research: Roots of a Controversy—André Green and Daniel Stern, ed. Rosemary Davies. London: Karnac, 2000. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Honneth, Axel, and Joel Whitebook. “Omnipotence or Fusion: A Conversation Between Axel Honneth and Joel Whitebook.” Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 170–179. Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. International Psycho-Analytic Library, 104:1– 346. London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. The New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. “Reliance, or Maternal Eroticism.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 62, no. 1 (2014): 69–85. Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Laplanche, J., and J-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth, 1973. McAfee, Noëlle. Democracy and the Political Unconscious. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

234 Y Noëlle McAfee McIvor, David W. “Bringing Ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning.” Political Theory 40, no. 4 (2012): 409–436. McIvor, David W. Mourning in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Mitchell, Stephen A., and Margaret J. Black. Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Ogden, Thomas H. “Fear of Breakdown and the Unlived Life.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 95 (2014): 205– 223. Ogden, Thomas H. “Why Read Fairbairn?” International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 91 (2010): 101–118. Paul, Robert A. “Civilization and Its Discontents in Anthropological Perspective, Eight Decades On.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 32, no.  6 (2012): 582–595. Volkan, Vamik. Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Boulder: Westview, 1997. Winnicott, Donald W. “Fear of Breakdown.” International Review of PsychoAnalysis 1 (1974): 103–107. Winnicottt, Donald  W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. London: Routledge, 1992.

9 WHO IS THE PERPETRATOR? The Missing Affect in Torture’s Violation of Human Dignity Sara Beardsworth

I

n recent years critical theory has reconnected the concept of human dignity with negative experiences in processes of social recognition. Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and J. M. Bernstein have each developed Theodor Adorno’s thought that “injustice is the real medium of justice.” The concept of human dignity—the understanding of what dignity means— arises from people’s experiences of failing to be treated as they feel they deserve. This perspective substitutes a victim-oriented ethics for moral theory that articulates a priori rules and principles for moral agency. Its scope extends to the range of violations of human subjects. Here I focus on the violation of dignity in torture. I seek to contribute to the moral injury perspective by responding to a perplexing feature of the literature on torture. On the one hand, critical theory affirms the entry of “dignity” into political and legal texts, approving the moral premises of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), especially the fifth article’s prohibition of torture. On the other hand, several authors attest that perpetrators of torture do not generally see themselves as torturers and certainly not as criminals.1 This brings us to ask why perpetrators are unable existentially to recapitulate, later, their having been the cause of the violation of

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human dignity. Quite apart from any fostering of invisibility or management of secrecy, there is a notable disappearance of torturers in the aftermath of torture. This raises the question of this essay: “Who is the perpetrator?” One answer, the “ordinary man” argument, appeared in response to National Socialism’s ability to turn groups of citizens into torturers and murderers. Hannah Arendt’s and Christopher Browning’s analyses were followed by the Milgram report and by situational psychology on the state-sanctioned torture of citizens.2 Both the argument and its critics face new challenges in conditions where interrogational torture is deemed by some to be rational and even morally justified in Western countries typically appealed to for asylum by those under threat at home. This is the context of this essay. Whether or not the ordinaryman argument is accepted, the question remains: what makes torturers unable reflectively to grasp, later, the significance of their acts as acts of extreme moral injury that destroy human dignity? There is no immediately evident way of making this intelligible. We approach a clarification of the issue through the oft-noted emotional detachment of torturers, whose meaning seems to be unknown to them, and which has received scant if any normative consideration. Indifference toward the victim and the act of torture might be explained away by reference to external factors on the assumption that information gathering imposes the need to assume this attitude. However, this leaves unexplained why the perpetrators do not generally see themselves as torturers. This essay begins a reflection on the normative significance of the emotional situation of torture. It argues that “unknown” sources accessible through a psychoanalytic approach contribute to the emotional detachment of torturers: structural elements that make up a “missed moment” in the relation of the torturer and

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the  tortured. I find that the missing affect underlies the emotional detachment of torturers and contributes to their inability existentially to recapitulate the ethical significance of their acts afterward. This explains why the relation of the torturer and the tortured defines the experience of torture, yet this experience clings solely to the victim in the aftermath of torture. The explanation both contributes to a theory of the perpetrator and remains within the moral injury perspective that only the experience of victims gives rise to our moral obligations and principles. I first consider critical theory’s development of the moral injury perspective, constructing a path from Habermas to Honneth to Bernstein in which victim-oriented ethics becomes victim centered. I then introduce a configuration of the psychoanalytic object relation that enables me to reconstruct the “missing affect” in torture. This illuminates the inability of the perpetrators to see themselves as torturers or criminals who have destroyed the dignity of their victims. It thereby provides a response to the question “who is the perpetrator?”

H UMAN DIGNIT Y, H UMAN RIGHTS, AND DISRESPECT In “The Concept of Human Dignity” Habermas declares that no one can utter the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “without hearing the echo of the outcry of countless tortured and murdered human creatures that resonates in them.” For him, “the appeal to human rights feeds off the outrage of the humiliated at the violation of their human dignity.” This links the meaning and possibility of the appeal to “human rights” to the echo of the suffering of injury to the dignity of the person. When the concept of dignity enters into the texts of

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national and international institutions that articulate the legal and political protections of basic rights, “dignity” is not, Habermas asserts, “a mere placeholder or conglomeration of different phenomena.” It is, rather, “the moral ‘source’ from which all the basic rights derive their meaning.”3 Human rights only spell out the normative substance of the equal dignity of every human being. This moral injury perspective relates the concept of dignity to the moral principle of equal treatment after Kant: “The respect for the dignity of every person forbids the state to dispose of any individual merely as a means to another end.”4 However, in asserting an “inventive function” that the violation of human dignity has performed, Habermas avoids the risk of formalism in the universalist moral standpoint. It is in light of specific challenges that “different aspects of the meaning of human dignity emerge from the plethora of experiences of what it means to be humiliated and deeply hurt.” Features of human dignity specified and actualized in this way reveal a process in which the background intuition of humiliation forces its way into the consciousness of suffering individuals and then into the legal texts that conceptually articulate and elaborate it. Thus, while upholding the concept of dignity within the modern universalist perspective on equal treatment—it is “one and the same everywhere and for everyone”—Habermas also finds that the realization of human dignity comes about only in “a more complete exhaustion of existing civil rights” and “the discovery and construction of new ones” rooted in the historical specificities of the intuition of moral injury.5 Although Habermas sees civil rights as moving from the vertical relation between individuals and the state into the horizontal relations among individuals and groups,6 his essay has the moral injury perspective rest on the “background intuition” of suffering on the part of victims and a relation to past suffering

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in the communicative context of discourse ethics. He does not consider the victim’s experience of the violation of dignity as such. There is a spatial and temporal distance from the site and event of suffering. His essay does not take up the challenge Honneth makes in Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory that discourse ethics must acknowledge the singularity of the suffering other. Honneth’s book explores the tension between two moral attitudes: the modern moral point of view, taking the universalist standpoint on equal treatment, and the nonreciprocal ethics of care, defending the unique and particular against the general. For him, twentieth-century versions of care ethics may differ in their theoretical core, but all underline asymmetrical obligations: “those moral attitudes in which we attend to the concrete other and provide help or support of our own free will—without considering reciprocal obligations.” The tension between these attitudes reflects different kinds of responsibility with asymmetrical features: loving concern in interpersonal relations and generalized responsibility for all others in society.7 Honneth founds the moral injury perspective in the experiences of human subjects being denied the social recognition they feel they deserve. In his view, social philosophy needs to define the social pathologies that deny others the recognition of their humanity without harboring normative components that lead into ethical relativism.8 A significant resource for this comes from Helmuth Plessner, who regarded personal identity as “so little predetermined” that human beings searching out the form of individual life appropriate to them must constantly engage in a free act of self-exploration.9 This free act is made possible by “excentric positionality,” understood as a human capacity for selfrelationship and for the individual’s relationship to his or her activities. Excentric positionality requires a social public sphere

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for its exercise.10 Thus social pathologies can be defined by the denial of this exercise to others. For Honneth, this means that the “unrepresentable” individual must be acknowledged not only in the sense that every “one” is “included in a practical discourse where the presuppositions of symmetry obtain” but also in the sense of the uniqueness of the single individual.11 The insistence on singularity draws discourse ethics closer to the site and event of suffering. What remains a background intuition of moral injury in Habermas becomes a matter of how the possible suffering of others can be perceived. First, this strengthens the orientation to the victim’s experience. Second, it draws elements into social philosophy that endorse the view that freedom and self-realization require a social public sphere, but surpasses the standpoint that these are purely institutionally situated possibilities. In taking the moral complexity of actions beyond the limits of institutional roles, critical theory reveals the need of a theory of the perpetrator. Honneth’s view opens the door to a psychoanalytic approach once he relates the capacity for perceiving the suffering of others to the human being’s “constitutive need of help.” Moral obligations include the requirement of the singular presence of the other as the helper with affective capabilities for having the uniqueness of the sufferer in view.12 This brings a particular developmental perspective into the ethics of care: only having received “unlimited” care at some time allows for the personal development of these affective capabilities. We develop this in the psychoanalytic approach later in this chapter. To Honneth, loving concern for other persons leads into a kind of responsibility: the capacity for perceiving the possible suffering of all other human beings.13 Affective capabilities for the perception of suffering develop into equal treatment “in the unrestricted sense.”14 This introduces a “moral sensorium” into

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social interactions that also brings the two moral attitudes into a common framework. Furthermore, it implies that the moral complexity of torturers’ actions outreaches their recognized institutional roles in organized forms of life (such as the police or military). Finally, Plessner’s “excentric positionality” requires the individual bridging of the two sides of embodiment that he distinguishes as Leib and Körper, “being a body” and “having a body.” The ethical significance of this requirement for freedom and self-realization is strongly developed by Bernstein and will be central to our contribution to a theory of the perpetrator.

H UMAN DIGNIT Y AND THE SOVEREIGNT Y STRUCTURE OF TORTURE With Bernstein, modern morality is about the breaking of persons, not the breaking of rules. The meaning of dignity is revealed in moral injuries that violate bodily integrity, where the personal sense of intrinsic value is upheld.15 The experiences of victims of rape and torture show us that the social recognition of “dignity” is the recognition of the “inviolability” of bodily boundaries. On this view, extreme forms of moral injury destroy the value conception of the self. This is not a transitory experience. Rather, torture is a paradigm of the violation that destroys normative expectations that others will have appropriate regard for “my” inviolable bodily boundaries. On this view, the modern moral status of the self is lodged in the physically bounded body viewed as a kind of “moral whole.”16 Bernstein’s view rests on the value self-conception, which is  first instilled in asymmetrical relations of “first love,”

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engendering in the child a mode of trust that assumes, without thematizing it, others will treat “me” in a way that confirms “my” sense of intrinsic value. Trust in the world then forms the largely invisible background of human interactions, making it possible to forget “existential helplessness”—our ineradicable vulnerability before and dependence on others. Trust relations are the existential condition for the social recognition of dignity in everyday life. Background trust, not the moral sensorium, brings acknowledgment of the singular other and equal treatment into a common framework. The ethical substance of equal treatment is the reciprocity of trust relations. The assumption that others will treat “me” in accordance with my sense of intrinsic value must therefore be held on the condition that such treatment is reciprocated. This raises the question of how reciprocity is built into the individual acquisition of a sense of self-worth. Bernstein calls this reciprocity condition “slightly more difficult to instill.”17 We return to this further on. For Bernstein, torture replaces trust relations with the attempt at absolute sovereignty through the violation of the victim’s bodily boundaries. The structural features of this violation lie in the dissociation of Plessner’s two sides of embodiment. Bodily integrity involves the lifelong struggle to integrate the involuntary “body I am” (laughing, crying, stinging, blushing) and the voluntary “body I have,” which is intentional, agential, and instrumental. If the modern moral status of the self requires social recognition of the bodily integrity of the other, bodily integrity is nonetheless for the individual a challenge rather than a given. The fundamental self-relation in social interactions lies in the task of coordinating Körper and Leib. It is essential to dignity because world and self-engagement are impossible without it. The social recognition of dignity must uphold the self-relation of bodily integrity in others. It is not enough, then, for the social

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public sphere to acknowledge others’ free acts in searching out an appropriate form of life, for the intentional agential body cannot stand alone. Certainly, the lived body is transcended toward and disappears into its intentional objects through its bodily instrumentality, this being the fundamental form of access to the world.18 However, instrumentality requires the coordination of the voluntary “body I have” and the involuntary “body I am.” Others are not simply bystanders in the individual bodily life of another, not least because “existential helplessness” is most emphatic in involuntary sentience. Others are, more or less explicitly, mediators in the self ’s coordination of the voluntary body and the involuntary body. The social recognition of dignity therefore requires that the individual capacity to integrate the two sides of embodiment not suffer a ruinous encroachment upon it. Given the necessity of mediators, actions are possible that destroy the bodily integrity and thereby the dignity of another. Bernstein links the view that, for moderns, the physically bounded body is a “normatively saturated physical totality” to the historical emergence of the concept of dignity in the second half of eighteenth-century Europe.19 The sense that human beings “are possessed of an unconditional dignity” arises with a historical change in the perception of tormentable bodies in the context of the sovereign law of torture.20 The modern moral status of the self appears in the negation of torture once the perception develops of the “mineness” of the pains of the tormentable body. The negation falls on the penal spectacle of torture: the bodily pains of the condemned person come from having a communal significance in the public spectacle to being seen as “properly suffered solely by the bodily being in which they take place.”21 “The scenes of community-restoring jubilance and exhilaration of the kind reported by Pepys” turn into “scenes of communal horror

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and disgust at these public violations of bodily integrity.”22 Once the pains inflicted properly belong to the one tortured, a harm to the very person of the victim is conceivable. There is a dignitary harm in the violation of bodily boundaries.23 This new understanding of the status, standing, or worth of human beings inhabits the rise of the rule of law, as Bernstein discovers in Cesare Beccaria’s concept of justice, where “procedural rule of law considerations have a substantive basis in equal respect for, and thus the equal standing of, each citizen.”24 Thus, with Bernstein, the modern moral status of the self is inscribed in “inviolable” bodily boundaries once moral injury is identified with the exploitation of pain. The “mineness of pain” roots the concept of the individual’s moral status not in a historical episode that could be treated positivistically but in the very experience of the violation of bodily boundaries. The negation of torture, as such, yields the conception of dignity: the dignity status of the self is the dignity of tormentable bodies. If the appropriate regard for the inviolability of bodily boundaries holds in place the value conception of the self, a contrario the destruction of bodily integrity just is the destruction of the victim’s dignity. As we have seen, bodily integrity is a self-relation in coordinating the involuntary body and involuntariness. Torture’s deliberate infliction of pain destroys the victim’s capacity for bodily integration because it not only causes pain but fully exploits pain’s “power of self-negation.” Torturers reduce victims to the extreme limit in pain of bodily involuntariness, dispossessing the other of her or his voluntary body. This is essential to the “sovereignty structure” of torture. In our view, torture’s disabling of the dual axes of the body has implications for the bodily integrity of the perpetrator as well. What the victim experiences, the unconstrained expansion of the torturer’s instrumentality, requires torturers to abandon the struggle to integrate their

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instrumentality with their own involuntary sentience. The torturer appropriates all intentionality and agency, yet, as we have said, the voluntary body cannot stand alone. The victim reduced to the extremity of involuntariness becomes a surrogate for the involuntary body of the perpetrator. At the same time, the attempt at absolute sovereignty is a denial of dependence on the victim who experiences only the undoing of the self. Bernstein rediscovers this experience in At the Mind ’s Limits, where Jean Améry gives a phenomenological description of his treatment on being captured as a member of the Belgian resistance movement by the Gestapo.25 The immediate discovery for the victim is the eradication of the spontaneous human expectation of aid. With the first blow, the implicit expectation of help is eliminated, and trust in the world “forever lost.” The crux of this loss is that “the boundaries of my body are the boundaries of my self. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel.”26 To Améry, the central experience of torture is the discovery that the presence of one’s fellow man is banished, to be replaced not with his absence but rather with the counterman or antiman: he who “is on me and thereby destroys me.” Améry’s words—“you yourself suffer on your body the counter-man that your fellow man became”—reveal the intimate connection between the perpetrator’s bodily instrumentality and the reduction of the victim to involuntariness. The victim discovers that there can be in the world someone “perfectly against him through being in possession of his body, and therefore in systematic and purposeful nonrecognition of the sufferer’s humanity.”27 In suffering the antiman “on your body,” trust in the world is forever lost. “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured,” writes Améry.28 With Bernstein, the sovereignty structure adheres to the victim after torture as loss of trust in the world.

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THE AFFECTIVE VALUE CONSTELLATION In our view, something like Honneth’s “moral sensorium” nonetheless has a role in acquiring and holding normative expectations of the inviolability of bodily boundaries. It is therefore necessary to the social recognition of dignity. We return here to the question of reciprocity in the “inviolability” of bodily boundaries. Psychoanalysis can illuminate the reciprocity condition where it substantiates Honneth’s notion of the human being’s constitutive need of help. The “link” with the other as helper is a particular configuration of the object relation in which we discern both the acquisition of the sense of self-worth and the instilling of an affective condition for reciprocity. An affective value constellation forms a stratum of human dignity. This enables us to reveal the “missing affect” in torture, which is not its cause but rather the explanation for the sovereignty structure not outliving the torture setting for the perpetrator. The “missing affect” is responsible for torturers being unable existentially to recapitulate, later, the ethical significance of their acts—for their “not knowing” that they have been the cause of the destruction of human dignity. The missing affect is constructed here out of Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic practice and its refocusing in Julia Kristeva’s interpretation. Its meaning emerges from the “link” with the other as helper that we find in Klein’s analysis of the child Dick.29 This case study reveals to us an affect constellation instilled in the child’s accession to bodily boundaries. Klein, of course, does not put things in this way. She focuses on the technique of analyzing play, while clearly articulating its stakes in a later work: “A precondition for the psychoanalysis of a child is to understand and to interpret the phantasies, feelings, anxieties,

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and experiences expressed by play or, if play activities are inhibited, the causes of the inhibition.”30 In the case study she notes in passing the background positive transference on to the analyst, which supports the child’s transition to play in her presence. Her later theory links the positive transference closely to trust,31 suggesting that the transformation in Dick has an ethical dimension in Bernstein’s sense. For us, trust is assumed by the child given his acquisition of both the sense of self-worth and a reciprocity condition for the recognition of bodily integrity. These lie, first, in an affective stratum in the child’s accession to the bodily ego, which will build into an “ethical sensorium” that supports trust relations. The vanishing of the ethical sensorium inhabits the replacement of trust relations by the sovereignty structure in torture. This is what we mean by the “missing affect.” Our first objective is to illuminate the configuration of the object relation in the link with the other as “helper,” which brings the missing affect to light. Kristeva’s reception of Klein is significant because Kristeva emphasizes the practice of child analysis and especially Klein’s attention to the emotional situation of the “phantasy” that composes the early internal and external object relation. Dick initially presents an inability to elaborate the object relation, a situation that Kristeva calls the “stultified fantasy.”32 This is where we find the link with the other as “helper.” It needs to be said that Kristeva’s appreciation of Klein does not extend to the whole of her theory since, for Kristeva, the object relation is not there from the start. It is preceded by an original somatism that marks the exposure to otherness and externality prior to psychic representation of the connection with it. Psychoanalytic theory must account for the differentiation between “inside” and “outside” that establishes psychic space as the space for representation—initially for phantasy, in Klein—rather than

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presuppose it. If we follow Freud in the way Kristeva does, the distinction between what is within and what is without lies in the accession to bodily boundaries. “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego—the projection of a surface.”33 The sense of self arises with the accession to bodily boundaries, and psychic space is, first, the space for the representation of sensations. Somatism becomes bodily experience. Since, for Klein, the object relation is there from the beginning—dominated by the defenses against persecutory anxiety in the splitting of drives, object, and ego—there is no original somatism as background to the emergence of bodily experience. We find the structural counterpart to Kristeva’s theory in Klein’s attention to the inhibition of phantasy where persecutory anxiety and destructive impulses prevent its elaboration. In our terms, sensations, anxiety, and other affects lack “mineness.” In Klein’s terms, they are inexpressible. Dick lacks the sense of his bodily boundaries and so the capacity for bodily integrity required to give him access to himself and the world. These come about in and through the analytic relation to the inhibition of emotional life. At the outset, the four-year-old Dick is manifesting as fifteen to eighteen months. He displays no emotional life and no engagement with self or world. He is indifferent to his surroundings, calls out to no one, and does not play.34 That is to say, the child does not imaginarily inhabit his body. He does not experience the differentiation between what is within and what is without. The voluntary body, the animate body “I am,” and the struggle to integrate them are lacking. Jacques Lacan has provided a fitting epithet for this: “he moves through the air, as if he were an invisible being or everything were invisible to him.”35 With Klein, what underlies the lack of bodily experience is an emotional situation of nameless dread and ineffable violence. The child wards off his destructive impulses, preventing the

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awareness and expression of affects.36 In Klein’s terms, there is no elaboration of the object relation in phantasy. In Kristeva’s terms, Dick is submerged in the stultified fantasy of the dark void, which obstructs the psychic space for representation in the imaginary register. On Kristeva’s reading, Klein’s practice enters right into the emotional situation with the child, coordinating with his nameless dreads. Dick emerges from the stultified fantasy once the dark void takes on, in its own materiality, the metaphor offered by the analyst: “Dick is inside dark mummy.” To both Lacan and Kristeva, grafting a myth on the stultified fantasy bestows a “container” on the impalpable void. This establishes the insideoutside differentiation that was lacking—the psychic space for representation— and a burgeoning of psychic contents ensues. Dick begins to run in and out of dark spaces, to move on, from there, to objects in play that substitute for the darkness, going on, through these resemblances, to accede to “richer and richer contents”—“to articulate his entire world” (Lacan).37 What we notice in this transformation is the presence of the other as helper in the situation of corporeal and affective fragmentation. Dick accedes to the bodily ego in the presence of the analyst as the “stranger-helper.” We find in this the “mineness” not only of sensations but also of affects. For bodily experience to have a value dimension in the required way—for it to come with normative expectations lodged in “my” bodily boundaries— requires “mineness” of affect. Without it, there can be no insistence on feeling on “my” skin surface only what “I” want to feel (Améry). Thus, in our view, the sense of self-worth emerges in a primordial affective self-perception. Let us call it primordial self-love, which has nothing to do with narcissistic selfenclosure just because it is instilled in the link with the other, in which the affective self-perception is entwined with an

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affective registering of the presence as such of the helper. This is what Klein called gratitude on the deepest level.38 The object relation we have in view therefore includes a constellation of affect within the engendering of the bodily ego as a value self-conception. Gratitude holds open a place for the “other” in the affective sense of self-worth. Klein developed the notion of gratitude as a primary affect after her theories of splitting in the mechanisms of defense (the “paranoid-schizoid position”) and the “depressive position” that supports ego integration and the reparative object relation. The depressive position opposes the fragmentation in the early ego with the sense of a whole object and the “parting” sadness that registers its loss. What is notable in Klein’s later introduction of the conception of gratitude is that a primary affect counters fragmentation under the sway of destructive impulses and the pain of persecutory anxiety. That is to say, from the beginning gratitude gives strength to the relation to the “good” object that corresponds to drive, affect, and ego integration and so to bodily integrity. Given the originality of the object relation in Klein, gratitude arises, for her, on the basis of gratification in orality: “it is enjoyment and the gratitude to which it gives rise that mitigate destructive impulses, envy, and greed.”39 She introduces another viewpoint when she makes gratitude both a major derivative of and the definitive support for the capacity for love, which appears to her to be innate.40 We relate this capacity to what, in a more logical fashion, following Hannah Segal, Kristeva calls the “objectseeking drive.”41 Klein’s presence as “helper” in the analysis of Dick connects with the object-seeking drive. To Kristeva, Klein intervenes in the child’s emotional situation by reaching into her own unconscious. The analyst’s spoken interventions—“Daddy train” and “Dick train,” “Dick is inside dark mummy”—are laden

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with drive and affect. They give the stultified fantasy “a sort of name—in a mythical way.”42 That is to say, Klein grafts the symbolic onto a very restricted imaginary that was undistinguished, for Dick, from the real of the mother’s body, which he identified with the darkness between two doors. The child begins to utter and to question. This is not the Lacanian entrance into the system of language, however, which Dick already has since he understands it. It is, rather, the emerging of expression/speech in the child on account of “the discourse of the Other.” The mythic utterance grafts a mythical (“oedipal”) container on the stultified fantasy.43 We have located this graft in the link with the other as helper. The drive- and affect-laden utterance is, in our view, an affective resonance with both the destructive impulses and the objectseeking drive, the capacity for love. Affective resonance is central to the object relation that inscribes a value constellation in the child’s accession to bodily experience. It engenders the selfperception in sensation and affect that was too weak in Dick. On the one hand, resonance with the destructive drives and affects—with the emotional situation of “inhibition”—makes the expression of anxiety possible. This is Klein’s focus. For us, the container structure falls first on affect in the sense that it introduces the minimal distance from it needed to perceive it— “mineness.” On the other hand, affective resonance with the object-seeking drive shapes the capacity for love into primordial self-love and gratitude. It is the link with the other as helper in the condition of corporeal and affective fragmentation that transforms the emotional situation. The source of the object relation that instills the affective value constellation of self-love and gratitude is, let us say, the kindness of strangers. We are following Klein’s placement of gratitude at the deepest level of the life of affects and its direct correlation with the

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helpful object.44 For us, this primary affect provides a place for the “other” within the sense of self-worth. It is fundamental in the Kleinian universe of “good” and “bad” objects. “Gratitude is essential in building up the relation to the good object and underlies also the appreciation of goodness in others and in oneself.”45 For her, it leads to a feeling of inner wealth and strength as well as being able to share these gifts with others. It consolidates the gains in psychic reality and strongly affects character, which deteriorates with its weakening. It is closely linked with trust in others and in the sincerity of later relations. Furthermore, the inability to maintain gratitude brings with it the loss of persons and values.46 Klein repeatedly presents the value status of the primary affect, gratitude, which, for us, lies in a value constellation. Its entwinement with self-love upholds the primordial sense of self-worth in which an implicit assumption of the inviolability of “my” bodily boundaries is bound up with a place for the “other” that will support reciprocal treatment in recognition of this inviolability. Above all, just as self-love inscribes the sense of self-worth in bodily integrity, so gratitude inscribes in it a sense of self-limit. That is to say, gratitude is the affective boundary to and for the bodily ego: the affective placeholder for the “other” in individual bodily life. The configuration of the object relation that we have discerned therefore draws in the condition that Bernstein called “slightly more difficult to instill” in individual development. In our view, the value constellation of self-love and gratitude is the affective stratum of human dignity since an “ethical sensorium” develops on its basis within the widening field of individual maturation. Given family, schools, moral and religious principles, and so on, a complex affective life accrues to the primary affect constellation. There develops an open-ended and flexible emotional disposition in human interactions. It may be more or less filled

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at one time or another by different affects and attitudes: mercy, compassion, sorrow, regret, for example. What defines the ethical sensorium is that it builds up on the basis of the affective value constellation instilled in the link with the other as helper. Where we differ from Honneth’s conception, then, is that the ethical sensorium is formed from an object relation with an essential value component. In sum, the entwinement of the sense of self-worth in self-love with the sense of self-limit in gratitude grounds the versatile ethical sensorium, which provides the emotional situation of the social recognition of human dignity. One further point is essential to our argument. For the affective value constellation to be a stratum of human dignity, it must inhabit bodily intentionality and instrumentality. It enters into human interactions through the individual struggle for bodily integrity. The accession to bodily boundaries is first required both for the involuntary and the voluntary body as well as for their coordination. Since the affective value constellation arises in the context of radical dependence, where corporeal helplessness and involuntariness are paramount, it lies closest to the bodily sense of vulnerability. Briefly, if “I am another” (Lacan, Kristeva), the “other” first and foremost inhabits the involuntary “body I am.” The sense of self-worth and the placeholder for the “other” in bodily life are lodged, in the first place, in sensations and affects where there is the experience of involuntariness in the presence of the helper. We may call gratitude at the deepest level the involuntary ethical emotion. The affective sense of self-worth and sense of self-limit come to inhabit “my” intentional, agential, instrumental body in and through the immediate task of coordinating the voluntary and the involuntary body. They are carried directly into bodily instrumentality through the struggle for  bodily integrity. We may illustrate this with the action of  reaching for a tissue in feeling a sneeze coming on. The

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acknowledgment of the other seems to belong to the voluntary action, yet the spontaneity of the action is dependent upon coordinating the voluntary body with the involuntariness of sensation. The placeholder for the “other” is first lodged in the involuntary body, but the sense of self-limit is actualized in instrumentality. In this illustration, the ethical sensorium is active in an unreflective way, close to the involuntary body in sneezing. Nonetheless, as we have said, for this open-ended and flexible disposition to support “dignity,” it must develop within a widening social field into a range of implicit or explicit emotions and attitudes that inhabit the voluntary body at different times: sympathy, mercy, regret . . .

TORTURE’S MISSING AFFECT We can now confront the vanishing of the ethical sensorium in torture. Améry points to it when he claims that the “Hitler vassal” is only fully realized in torture, in his “having obliterated his feelings of mercy.”47 The obliteration of mercy comes with the perpetrator abandoning the struggle for individual bodily integrity, forcing the victim into extreme involuntariness that is correlated with the torturer’s instrumentality. On our account, the perpetrator’s escalating, unchecked instrumentality is dependent on this surrogacy for the other side of embodiment. The instrumentality of torture is cut off from the conditions for bodily integrity in which the sense of self-limit in bodily life holds open a place for the “other.” As Bernstein has shown, there is no “other” for the torturer, only the victim whose pain is essential to the attempt at absolute sovereignty. Bernstein found that the torturer’s deliberate dissociation of the victim’s voluntary body from his or her involuntary body, destroying the other’s bodily

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integrity, is essential to the sovereignty structure. We propose that this structural element of torture has a counterpart in the dissociation of the voluntary body of torturers from all involuntariness of their own within their interaction with their victims. This is indicated where Améry states, as victim, that the other has placed torture in his or her service but is also the servant of torture. The former corresponds to Bernstein’s insistence that the purpose internal to the “means” of torture is incommensurable with its official “purpose” of information gathering. Devastation is the purpose of the one who places torture in his or service. That the torturer is, in Améry’s words, also the servant of torture points to something else: the actual disappearance of the fellow man is a “missed moment” in the act of torturing. It does not itself appear within the relation of the torturer and the tortured. What is not itself grasped, in the act of taking away the other’s trust in his or her continued existence, is the advent of the antiman itself. This is not present for the victim, for whom the fellow man that the torturer is for others is simply never there. It is not present for the perpetrator either, who does not hang his feelings of mercy on the door, to be retrieved later, as must be supposed if information gathering is made the reason for the emotional detachment of torturers. While it is apparent that the rule of the antiman arrives with the disappearance of all feelings of mercy, Améry cannot give a phenomenological description of the obliteration in the torturer of the ethical sensorium. The perishing of the kindness of strangers is a missed moment. What I have sought to show, then, is that affective capabilities are necessary to the social recognition of dignity. However, the affective capacity is not in the last resort a specific emotional inclusion of or identification with the “other.” Neither empathy nor sympathy nor the attitude as such of mercy, compassion, or loving concern is the source of the possibility of perceiving the

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suffering of others. Varying emotions and attitudes may arise in the ethics of care. What we underline is the essence of the ethical sensorium: the affective value constellation that combines the primordial sense of self-worth, in self-love, and the sense of selflimit, in gratitude. Gratitude is the implicit and, indeed, involuntary emotional component not only of the spontaneous human expectation of aid but also of the condition for reciprocal treatment in the “inviolability” of bodily boundaries. It is in acknowledgment of Honneth’s moral sensorium, rather than strict continuity with it, that I have presented the ethical sensorium. Its vanishing in the sovereignty structure of torture is what, unbeknownst to the torturer, underlies emotional detachment. Unbeknownst to the victim and to the perpetrator, the vanishing of the ethical sensorium inhabits the inversion of fellow man into the antiman. In failing to grasp this, perpetrators assume that if their acts do not extend to the crime of murder, the survivor may return to her or his life and world, even as a gift of clemency. In conclusion, the absence of the self-relation of bodily integrity defines the act of torturing in such a way that perpetrators are unable existentially to recapitulate, later, the ethical significance of their acts. The lack of coordination of the voluntary “body I have” with the involuntary “body I am” cancels the agent’s access to the ethical sensorium in the torture setting. In this cancellation the “subject” becomes the perpetrator. Moreover, absent the self-relation of bodily integrity, memory is affected. Perpetrators will not later recall being the “subject” of the sovereignty structure. They cannot existentially recuperate having been the cause of the destruction of human dignity. The perpetrator lacks not only moral agency but also moral experience. Thus the vanishing of the ethical sensorium illuminates why the sovereignty structure clings solely to the victim in the aftermath of torture. The moral experience of the victim, alone, is the source of the

Who Is the Perpetr ator? Z 257

concept of human dignity and its renewal. It presupposes the obliteration in the perpetrator of the kindness of strangers, which is a feature of trust relations articulated in “human rights.” The kindness of strangers is included in the conception of dignity as the dignity of tormentable bodies.

NOTES 1. See Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Martha K. Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo, Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 3. Jürgen Habermas, “The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,” Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (2010): 466. 4. Habermas, 465. 5. Habermas, 467–468. 6. Habermas, 469. 7. Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 122, 115. 8. Honneth, 71, 25. 9. Helmuth Plessner, Die Einheit der Sinne: Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des Geistes, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980). 10. Honneth, Disrespect, 24. 11. Honneth finds that Habermas acknowledges this need in his conception of the “other” side of justice in the essay “Justice and Solidarity.” Honneth, 123. 12. Honneth, 120–121.

258 Y Sar a Beardsworth 13. Honneth, 121. 14. Honneth, 124. 15. J. M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). 16. Bernstein, 60. Rape is the other paradigm for Bernstein. 17. Bernstein, 19. 18. Bernstein, 200. 19. Bernstein, 60. 20. Bernstein, 10. 21. J. M. Bernstein, “Torture,” Political Concepts, New School for Social Research, [email protected] 1, 2011. 22. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity, 7–8. 23. Bernstein, 141. 24. Bernstein, 45. 25. Jean Améry, At the Mind ’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). 26. Améry, 28. 27. Bernstein, “Torture.” 28. Améry, At the Mind ’s Limits, 34. 29. Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego,” in Love, Guilt, and Reparation, and Other Works, 1921–1945 (London: Virago, 1998). 30. Melanie Klein, “The Psychoanalytic Play Technique” (1955), in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (New York: Free Press, 1975). 31. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Sources (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 87. 32. Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 33. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Vintage, 2001), 19:26. 34. Klein, “The Importance of Symbol Formation,” 221–222. 35. Jacques Lacan, Freud ’s Papers on Technique: Seminar 1, 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), 84. 36. Klein, “The Importance of Symbol Formation,” 224.

Who Is the Perpetr ator? Z 259 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Lacan, Freud ’s Papers on Technique, 86. Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 19. Klein, 16. Klein, 17. Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 142. Kristeva, 140. Kristeva, 143. Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 19. Klein, 17. Klein, 19, 67, 84, 18, 20. Améry, At the Mind ’s Limits, 30.

REFERENCES Améry, Jean. At the Mind ’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz. Trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Bernstein, J.  M. “Torture.” Political Concepts. New School for Social Research. [email protected] 1, 2011. Bernstein, J. M. Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id (1923), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.  19. London: Vintage, 2001. Habermas, Jürgen. “The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights.” Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (2010): 464–480. Honneth, Axel. Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Huggins, Martha K., Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo. Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

260 Y Sar a Beardsworth Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Sources. New York: Basic Books, 1957. Klein, Melanie. “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego.” In Love, Guilt, and Reparation, and Other Works, 1921–1945. London: Virago, 1998. Klein, Melanie. “The Psychoanalytic Play Technique” (1955). In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963. New York: Free Press, 1975. Kristeva, Julia. Melanie Klein. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Lacan, Jacques. Freud ’s Papers on Technique. Seminar 1, 1953–1954. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Norton, 1991. Levinson, Sanford. ed., Torture: A Collection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Plessner, Helmuth. Die Einheit der Sinne: Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des Geistes. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980.

INDEX

abstraction, 144 Adorno, Theodor W., 75, 112, 152–154, 155; on appropriation, 55, 60; on coldness, 2; on commodities, 141–143; critique of liberalism, 175; on Freud, 126; on progress; 129; and real abstraction, 145; reification, 135– 36; on theology, 60– 61 Aeschylus, 69 affect, 200, 229; as communication, 34; mineness of, 249; missing, 237, 246; and the other, 240, 246; primary, 252; and thirdness, 198; and understanding, 187–188 agency, 180, 190, 199, 202; Althusser on, 160; intrapsychic, 99; and liberalism, 161 aggression, 51, 54, 55, 56, 77, 83–84, 87, 104n28, 109–110, 121–124, 127–128, 131n7 aggressiveness. See aggression

agony, 209, 213, 216, 218, 220; primitive, 218–19, 224, 225, 226, 228. See also anxiety Ainsworth, Mary, 68 alienation, 1– 2, 14 Allen, Amy, 15–16, 229 Althusser, Louis, 159 Améry, Jean, 245, 254, 255 Ananke (need/necessity), 117, 120 analysis, 200, 219, 228 analyst, the, 32, 50, 78; as mother, 31, 219; patient and, 200; transference and, 28, 65, 220, 247 anticipatory recognition, 82, 85, 90 antiman, 245, 255, 256 anxiety, 7, 41, 46–47, 64, 65, 66– 68, 163, 225, 227, 248; primitive, 46 Arendt, Hannah, 236 Aristotle, 76 attachment, 188–89; attachment theory, 59, 68

262 Y Index At the Mind ’s Limits, 245 attunement, 58, 62 Authoritarian Personality, The, 96 baby, 27, 38, 46; and bipolar self, 79, and father, 182n8; intentionality of, 43; and mother, 28, 45, 53, 163; and reality, 29, 32– 33, 45; selfhood of, 163–165; and selfobject, 80, 82; subjectivity of, 168; and play, 180–181. See also infant bad conscience, 17. See also conscience Beccaria, Cesare, 244 Beebe, Beatrice, 32– 33, 211 Benhabib, Seyla, 205 Benjamin, Jessica, 17, 23, 56 Benjamin, Walter, 175 Bernstein, J. M., 241– 245, 254– 255 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 109 Bhabha, Homi, 227 body ego, 166, 169 Bonds of Love, The, 188 Bowlby, John, 188–189 breakdown, 18, 194, 199, 202 breast, the, 33, 70n2, 127, 215 Browning, Christopher, 236 capital, 140 Capital (Das Kapital), 135, 137 capitalism, 114, 140, 143, 155 care ethics, 239, 240 caregiver, 80, 88, 188, 190, 191, 197. See also mother, the Castoriadis, Cornelius, 214

child, the, 16, 251; agency and, 199; aggression of, 122–123; anxiety of, 7, 41, 47; fantasy and, 194–196; father and, 197; fusion and, 40, 47; holding and, 57, 61; intentionality of, 38– 39; love and, 120–121, 176–177; mirroring and, 58, 61; narcissism of, 93; omnipotence of, 48, 164– 65; phantasy and, 247–49; play and, 64, 148; recognition and, 69, 80–81, 90, 98, 176, 190; selfhood of, 61, 112, 189, 247; selfobject and, 79, 82–83, 92; separation and, 49; sexual drive of, 5, 120; subjectivity of, 59; symbiosis and, 52; thirdness and, 200. See also infant, baby Chodorow, Nancy, 196 Christianity, 169 Civilization and Its Discontents, 111, 118–125 cocreation, 190 cognition, 144 communicative interaction, 186, 202, 205 complementarity, 203 conscience, 122. See also bad conscience contingency, 179 countertransference, 28– 29, 32, 65, 220. See also transference counterman. See antiman critical theory, 75, 87, 94– 96, 100, 240; authoritarian personality and, 229; death drive and, 132n7;

Index Z 263 human dignity and, 235; moral theory of, 237; recognition and, 84–85, 99. See also Frankfurt School Critique of Political Economy, 145 cultural theory, 229 culture, 223 Damasio, Antonio, 35 death drive, 26, 52–53, 62– 63 democracy, 98– 99, 222 depressive position, 64, 69, 128 destructiveness, 26, 54, 56, 84, 111, 129, 131n7; creativity and, 66– 67, 118; narcissism and, 122; repair and, 129; repression and, 116; thirdness and, 203 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 61, 112 dignity, 18, 202, 235– 244, 246, 253– 257 discourse ethics, 203– 205, 239, 240, 246 disintegration, 68, 86, 102n13, 121, 218, 226, 231 domination, 186, 187 Durkheim, Émile, 76 Ecce Homo, 170 ego, 166, 210– 211; breakdown and, 213, 217; as embodied, 248; mirroring and, 81; of mother, 165; as true self, 164, 169; wholeness of, 220. See also self, the; I, the ego permanence, 168 ego psychology, 75, 76, 100n2, 189

emancipatory interest, 75 emancipatory political theory, 205 emotion, 193, 248, 249, 250; attachment and, 189; care and, 256; coldness and, 2; dignity and, 253– 254; fear and, 70, 98; femaleness and, 197; fusion and, 40, 43; inhibition and, 251; love and, 70; narcissism and, 93; omnipotence and, 81; phantasy and, 247; play and, 219; regulation of, 59, 94; repair and, 51; selfobject and, 97; separation and, 199; torture and, 236– 237, 255. See also affect emptiness, 217, 218 Enlightenment, the, 111, 112, 124–126, 160, 170–171, 186 eros, 115, 120–121 Eros and Civilization, 111, 113 ethics, 123 Europe, 179, 243 excentric positionality, 239– 240, 241 exchange, 144, 145–146 exchange value, 136–137, 152 existential helplessness, 242, 243 Fairbairn, Ronald, 211 fantasy, 54, 225, 229; countertransference and, 28; gender and, 196; I, of an, 213; justice and, 201; mother and, 81; omnipotence and, 87; the other and, 193–194, 195; stultified, 247, 249, 251. See also phantasy

264 Y Index father, the, 182, 197, 223, 225 femaleness, 197 Fonagy group, the, 30 food, 81 Foucault, Michel, 117, 132n13, 221 Frankfurt School, death drive and, 15; appropriation and, 55; early 16, 110, 135, 141–142, 156; liberalism and, 175; Marxism of, 155; progress and, 111, 132n7; utopia and, 60, 61; See also critical theory freedom, 119, 240, 241 Freedom’s Right, 96 Freud, Anna, 188 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 41, 76, 101n4, 216– 217, 228, 229; on aggression, 54; on attachment, 188; critique of, 211, 248; Frankfurt School and, 36, 75; Habermas on, 25; on melancholia, 101–102n5; on narcissism, 13, 47, 92; on rationality, 5–8, 24; utopia and, 68 Fromm, Erich, 2, 62, 110, 126, 131n6 fusion, 88, 189, 210; anxiety and, 14, 18, 47; attunement and, 68; mob psychology and, 62; narcissism and, 39–42, 214; primary objects and 61; reality-orientedness and, 45; See also symbiosis Future of an Illusion, 117 gender, 195–196, 197, 188, 204 Genealogy of Morals, 159, 169, 171 Gergely, György, 30

God, 60– 61, 149–152, 153–155 gratitude, 250, 251, 252, 256 Green, André, 211, 216, 230n2 Habermas, Jürgen, 43, 132n12, 257n11; and cognitivedevelopmental psychology, 3–4; on discourse ethics, 203– 205; on ego-identity, 96; on emancipatory interest, 75; linguistic turn and, 13, 25, 185–187; on moral injury, 237– 239, 240; on progress, 132n7; rationalism of, 12, 200; on sociality, 35, 36; on selfhood, 175 harm, 243 Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 76, 86–87, 176, 192 History and Class Consciousness, 139–140 Hitler, Adolf, 254 Hobbes, Thomas, 12, 67– 68, 76, 98 holding, 58, 91, 212, 214, 221– 222, 230n1 holism, 76 Honneth, Axel, 5, 12–13, 14, 75, 86, 87– 91, 96, 104n37, 132n7, 132n12, 175–180, 229n1, 230n2 Horkheimer, Max, 55, 60– 61, 75, 112, 131n Horney, Karen, 111 How Does Analysis Cure?, 96 Hyppolite, Jean, 34 I, the, 44, 218, 221, 227. See also self, the. See also ego

Index Z 265 I in We, The, 88, 179–180 idealization, 79, 82, 97 identification (primary), 94, 217– 218, 227, 228 identity, 195, 204, 223– 227, 239 impingement, 215 independence, 49 individualism (in sociology), 76 individuality, 83 individuation, 197, 223 infancy. See infant, the infant, the, 217, 221, 225; aggression of, 50, 52; anxiety of, 7, 216; fusion, 39, 41–42; holding, 212, 214; intentionality of, 43; reality-orientedness of, 25, 27; subject-formation and, 188–191; narcissism and, 211. See also baby, child instinct, 6, 9 integration, 44, 51, 214, 218, 244, 250 integrity, 241, 242, 247, 250, 252– 256 interaction, 31, 33, 34, 35 interdependence, 214, 223 intersubjectivity, 17, 76; in Freud, 7–10; in Honneth, 14, 62, 86, 104n28; linguistic, 34; prelinguistic, 44, 56; primary, 57, undifferentiated, 58, interpellation, 159 intrapsychic experience, 7, 77, 212; and destruction, 185; fantasy and, 191, 193, 195; in Freud, 8; and gender, 196; in Lacan, 10; the self and, 99 intrinsic value, 242

Jay, Martin, 131 Judaism, 61 justice, 244 Kant, Immanuel, 173–174, 238 Klein, Melanie, 19, 20n17, 133n22; on aggression, 122– 3; on anxiety, 219, 228, 248– 250; on the death drive, 9, 14–16, 131n7; on drives, 101n3; on gratitude, 252; on play, 246; and progress, 109, 126–129; on sociality, 230n2 Kohut, Heinz, 15, 100n2 Kristeva, Julia, 19, 24, 211, 216, 217, 246, 247– 250 La Boétie, Étienne, 98 labor, 137 Lacan, Jacques, 10, 20n17, 34, 248, 249 Lachman, Frank, 211 language, 223, 227; development of 216, and experience, 59– 60; and primary identification, 217; the self and, 44, 185–187; and sociality, 204, 251. See also linguistic turn, the Laplanche, Jean, 27 Lefort, Claude, 225 Leviathan, 67– 68 liberalism, 160–161, 170–171, 173–175, 178–179, 181 libido, 6, 77, 78, 93, 215 Likierman, Meira, 63 linguistic turn, the, 13, 33. See also language

266 Y Index Locke, John, 173–174 Loewald, Hans, 48 love, 66, 69, 91, 187; and analysis, 48; and anxiety, 41; capacity for, 251; and coldness, 2; and drive, 101n3; first, 241; and fusion, 57, 62, 176–178; and gender, 196; and hope, 130; and narcissism, 78, 92; and nationalism, 70; and need (Ananke), 120; and omnipotence, 47; and phantasy, 64; and recognition, 56, 86–87, 194; responsibility and, 240 Lukács, György (Georg), 1, 12, 135, 139–141, 143, 152–153, 155 Mahler, Margaret, 29 maleness, 197 Marcuse, Herbert, 10, 62, 132n8, 132n12; on the death drive, 15, 75, 111–114; on emancipation, 134n25; and utopia 68, 129 Marin, Inara Luisa, 132n8, 134n25 Marxism, 109, 144 Marx, Karl, 1, 12, 16, 135–136, 145, 153 materialism, 144 McDougall, Joyce, 33 Mead, George Herbert, 13, 31, 35, 36, 76 Meissner, William, 150 melancholia, 101n5 Meltzer, Donald, 65 Milgram report, the, 236 mirroring, 79–82, 91, 93 misrecognition, 80–81, 85, 91, 245. See also recognition

modernity, 177 Moral Man and Immoral Society, 69 moral obligation, 240 moral psychology, 37 mother, the, 33, 211, 251; and affect, 34; and aggression, 49, 54–55, 66; analyst as, 31, 65, 219, 221; anxiety and, 41, 65; and caregiver, 80; dead, 211; and fusion, 45, 58; and gender, 197–198; good/bad, 62; good enough, 162– 63, 214; and hate, 53; and intersubjectivity, 189–190; loss of, 215– 216, 227; narcissism and, 211, 217; no baby without, 28, 32; not-goodenough, 89; and omnipotence, 87; and phantasy, 64; and recognition, 35, 194–196; as selfobject, 79, 90; and symbiosis, 52, 176–177; and true self, 166, 180. See also caregiver; paranoidschizoid position; parent, the narcissism, 15, 99, 100n2, 217; of caregiver, 86, 122, 217; and the mother, 211; and the object, 78, 92– 94; recognition and, 80; and selfobject, 82, 97. See also primary narcissism National Socialism, 236 need. See Ananke negation, 194, 205 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 125, 159, 169–173, 174, 176, 179–181

Index Z 267 nirvana, 62, 63, 116–117 Nirvana Principle, the. See nirvana object, the, 6, 8, 53–54; anxiety and, 46; appropriation of, 55–56; destruction of, 65– 66, 88; love of, 78, 92– 93, 102n5; and the mother, 7; omnipotence and, 48; permanence of, 162, 163, 168; sexual, 6, 120. See also primary object; selfobject; transitional object object permanence, 168 object relations psychoanalysis, 5, 7, 8–11, 23, 41, 75, 76, 77, 78, 100n2 O’Connor, Brian, 142 Oedipus complex, 83 Ogden, Thomas, 216, 230n10 omnipotence, 70n1, 210; and aggression, 122; fantasy and, 87; loss of, 88, 194; and love, 187; and the mother, 89, 164–166; and recognition, 195; and social identity, 223; and transitional objects, 147; and utopia, 133n22. See also plenum Oresteia, 69 original sin, 69 other, the, 190, 205, 255; affect and, 43; discourse of, 250; and embodiment, 254; exploitation of, 53; and fantasy, 193, 201; fusion and, 40–42; independence of, 47–48, 55, 176; internalization of, 35; love of, 64, 177; as mental object, 191; and moral obligation,

240, 249, 253; narcissism and, 78; and omnipotence, 195; and the paranoid-schizoid position, 69; and primal repression, 217; and thirdness, 197– 200 paranoid-schizoid position, 62– 64, 67, 68, 69, 127. See also depressive position; good/bad mother parent, the, 9, 193; aggression and, 122–123; love and, 121; mirroring and, 58, 81; narcissism and, 80; recognition and, 91, 194; thirdness and, 200. See also caretaker; father; mother, the Parsons, Talcott, 76 performance principle, 111, 114, 115 personhood, 193 Petherbridge, Danielle, 59 phantasy, 70n3, 247, 248, 249. See also fantasy philosophical anthropology, 109, 110, 111 Pine, Fred, 29, 39, 45 Plato, 76 play, 64, 148, 165, 166, 246– 247, 248 pleasure principle, 26, 114, 119, 120 Plessner, Helmuth, 239, 242 plenum, 210, 211, 212, 215, 221, 223. See also omnipotence power, 205 primary narcissism, 28, 103n25, 211; and antisocial behavior, 39; and fusion, 13, 31– 32, 41, 214; and omnipotence, 27, 210; and reality, 218. See also narcissism

268 Y Index primary object, 8, 40, 61, 127 public sphere, 240, 243

Rilke, Rainer Marie, 60 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 91, 98

rationalism, 37 rationality, 185, 186 real abstraction, 144–146 reality, 53–54 reality principle, 26, 113–115, 119, 120, 180 reason, 200 recognition, 15, 23– 24, 84–85, 211; anticipatory, 82–83; denial of, 239; dignity and, 235, 242; drive theory and, 88–89; freedom and, 5; fusion and, 42; horizontal, 98, 99; independence and, 14, 48; mutual, 70n1, 75, 180–181, 192; rights and, 177; selfobject and, 80–81, 90; teleology and, 176. See also misrecognition reification, 1– 2, 14, 135, 140–141, 226, 227 relational pattern, 87 relational psychoanalysis. See object relations psychoanalysis relationship, 192–194 religion, 149–150 reparation, 65, 66, 69 repression, 7, 101n4, 113–117, 129, 216– 218 responsibility, 240 Restoration of the Self, 78 Ricoeur, Paul, 33– 34 rights, 160, 174, 176–179, 237– 238, 257

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 60 Segal, Hannah, 65 self, the, 128, 205, 210; antisocial, 39, 42; atomistic, 75; bipolar, 82; core, 40, 43, 61, 67; false, 88, 90, 211, 218, 219; firm, 83; fusion and, 40; integration and, 214, 218; loss of, 228; moral status of, 243; prelinguistic, 14, 39, 42–43, 44; presocial, 43; primary, 13; rational, 37, 44; social, 43; thirdness and, 200– 202; tripolar, 96; value of, 241. See also intersubjectivity self-conception, 241 self-love, 249, 251– 253, 256 selfobject, 79–84, 86, 90, 92, 94, 96, 97. See also caretaker; mother, the self psychology, 76, 79, 100, 100n2 self-realization, 2, 240, 241 self-worth, 250, 252, 253, 256 separation, 14, 18, 29, 40, 49, 88, 162–163, 176, 189, 190 sexuality, 5– 6, 204 social hieroglyph, 136, 142, 152–153 socialization, 44 social philosophy, 239, 240 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 136, 143–147 species-being, 2 Spencer, Herbert, 76 Stern, Daniel, 29, 34, 39, 43, 59– 60, 70n1, 103n25, 189

Index Z 269 Struggle for Recognition, The, 23, 88, 90, 176 subject, the, 24, 33, 191; attachment and, 188; and the commodity, 146, 154; embodiment and, 219; formation of, 188; fusion and, 57–58; recognition and, 176, 180; sexuality of, 6 subjectivation, 221, 223 subjectivity, 59, 186, 199, 200, 202, 210; pathologies of, 15 superego, 77, 122–123, 125, 182 surplus repression, 114 surplus value, 140 symbiosis, 14, 214; and analysis, 65; as attunement, 68; and holding, 57; and recognition, 60, 90, 176. See also fusion symptom, 143 teleology, 124, 161, 169, 173, 175, 178 Theory of Communicative Action, The, 96 thirdness, 186, 187–188, 198– 203, 205, 217, 221 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 172–173 time collapse, 226 toddler, the, 197 transference, 65, 96– 97, 219, 220, 247. See also countertransference transitional object, 32, 41, 49, 87, 94, 214– 215

transitional phenomena, 148–151, 152–154 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 189 trust, 242, 245, 247, 252 truth, 169, 171, 200 Tugendhat, Ernst, 35 unconscious, the, 34, 38, 101, 185, 191, 213, 216– 221 unconscious drives, 37, 38 understanding, 189, 190 universal, the, 178–179 utopia, 68– 69 Volkan, Vamik, 226 von Redecker, Eva, 117, 132n13 Weber, Max, 76 welfare state, the, 179 Whitebook, Joel, 13–14, 59, 70n1, 117, 133n22, 211, 230n2 Winnicott, Donald, 14, 16, 136, 160; on aggression, 9–10; on agony (anxiety), 216– 219, 228; on breakdown, 209– 212; and the commodity, 147–151; and fusion, 230n1; on holding, 91; on love, 194; on the mother, 89, 162–171; on narcissism, 27– 28, 32; on omnipotence, 41; on the self, 17, 86–87, 90, 173, 174, 230n2; on separation, 18; and the unconscious, 220

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

Amy Allen, General Editor Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones Democracy in What State?, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Ýiĥek Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Jacques Rancière The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa

The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, edited by Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, Anita Chari The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière, edited by Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty What Is a People?, Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism, Benjamin Y. Fong Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Enzo Traverso Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics, edited by Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad The Habermas Handbook, edited by Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, and Cristina Lafont Birth of a New Earth: The Radical Politics of Environmentalism, Adrian Parr Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Continental Thought, Clayton Chin Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony, C. Heike Schotten Naming Violence: A Critical Theory of Genocide, Torture, and Terrorism, Mathias Thaler Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Ernst Bloch Fear of Breakdown: Politics and the Work of Psychoanalysis, Noëlle McAfee