“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt
you.” - African proverb
In the weeks before and after the US Presidential patients and
colleagues alike have been drawn into the incessant pull of a partisan
political climate. The United States has just witnessed a bitterly fought
presidential election laying bare the fault lines of divisiveness within this
nation. What has been striking has not been the divisiveness per se, but
the extreme, one-sidedness of each camp, as exemplified by the notion of living
in “bubbles,” impervious to contrarian influences. Witnessing this isolation of
viewpoints in Facebook feeds and self-selected news sources, a question arises
in my mind about what can the study of psychotherapy provide as a guide to the
current predicament of this divisiveness. President Obama in his State of the
Union address in January 2016 expressed his regrets about the increased
divisiveness of the politics in the country. Things apparently did not improve
in the rest of the year as well. As President Obama pondered about the politics
of this chasm, we can attempt to understand the psychological underpinnings of
it.
This election defied logic. Apparently during the election, there
were rule-breakers on both sides but the people who were absolutely shocked at
the rule-breaking actions of one party’s nominee were unperturbed by the
rule-breaking behavior of their party’s nominee. There was also the strange
phenomenon of people being absolutely shocked by the statements and behaviors
of a candidate in the primaries but miraculously becoming unperturbed by those
statements and behaviors after the candidate became their party’s nominee. The
election cycle teemed with rage, disgust, the propensity of seeing the world as
black or white. Partisan news organizations and social media accounts repeated
portrayed the “other” as the object of the hate and ultimately, destruction.
The permeating belief was that MY nominee was a human being of good intentions,
but with human flaws, but YOUR nominee was the devil incarnate, needing to be
erased from the planet!
As this point, anyone familiar with the history of psychology
hears a few familiar notes on a theme. Anyone who took an Intro to Psychology
college course might recall mentions of the development of psychoanalytic
thought and within it, the development of object relations theory, attributable
to the work of Melanie Klein. In the 1930s, Klein formulated important ideas in
psychological maturation on the basis of her work with young disturbed children.
Klein postulated that infants begin to internalize caregivers as objects.
These objects are mental representations of an actual other, primarily a
caregiver, whom they perceive as good when the other fulfills their
needs, and bad when their needs are not met. Eventually, the child
internalizes this split between good and bad, and comes to perceive
herself as good or bad at different times. Healthy psychological
development occurs when the child is able to integrate the good and bad aspects
of self and others (love and reparation) and move from a fragmented,
anxiety-driven state of good versus bad (paranoid-schizoid position) to
a more nuanced, reality-based appreciation of the good and bad aspects of the
same person, including oneself (depressive position). The children who
do not successfully make this transition remain trapped in a state where they
have a constant need for self-validation, to be seen as a good object,
with a corresponding constant need to expel the bad object from within
themselves and locate it in another person or entity. Freud had described a
process of painting others with the disowned aspects of the self (projection).
Klein went a step further and described a process where a person takes actions
to not only project unto others but to engage with others in a manner so as to
evoke a confirmatory response of their badness. She called this process projective
identification.
We can view the communication between the two parties and their
allied media bullhorns, for the most part, as projective identification. If all
statements and actions become attacks, and all defenses and counter-attacks are
confirmations of the other’s badness, then we start living in a fragmented
sense of reality, perpetually winning or losing the sense of self with every
news cycle. This is why a question in the second presidential debate regarding
an appreciation of the other candidate seemed prima facie ludicrous to
so many observers. How is it possible that there is anything redeeming about
the other? That is after all the bad object, unidimensional and
expendable. How can you ever support THEM?
The media supported this split as it does make for
entertaining reality TV. Headline after headline proclaims the newest
confirmation of the other’s depravity and disgusting behavior, while
validating the self as all-good, suffering, enduring and above all,
beyond reproach. The fragmented self looks outside for confirmation of its
views of the good self and bad other and the media and the politicians are
eager to provide it. The fragmented self makes for reliable votes and higher
ratings. It does not matter which side the other represents, as long as there
is an other.
It is important to note that
integration does not mean a blanket tolerance of the other. When the other
treats another as the other, then it should be met with proportionate
resistance. The danger lies in the adoption of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid
position in the face of either victory or defeat, refusing to accept that the
other even exists or the unthinkable, the other now prevails! Not all ideas are
created equal but all human beings are, and recognizing the complexity and
nuances allow both a child and a populace keep themselves grounded in reality.
The antidote, as Klein put it, is love and reparation, the ability to have
respect for the separate other, that you can argue with a part without
destroying the whole. Voting in an election, as well as living in a democratic
society, should be about subjective identification, not projective
identification. Ironically, we really are all stronger together.
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