Alford

"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" (51)"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" (53)"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" (54)"Not the act of reparation, by which we attempt to make amends for our destructiveness, but the mother's continued 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)" (54-55)"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" (55)"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" (55)"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" (56)"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)" (57)"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 re-experience throughout her life" (Honneth 1999: 240; Petherbridge 2015: 158)" (57)"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" (58)"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" (58)"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" (59)"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 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" (59-60)"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" (60)"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)" (61)"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" (62)"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. 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)" (64)"[quoted speech] "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" (65)"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" (66)"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" (68)"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" (69)"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, itse correlate rooted in hatred, as when loyalty to one's own nation depends on hatred of others. There is little that is utopian this exercise, but it is necessary. Any serious account of politics must keep it firmly in mind" (70)This is all well-and-good realism, but isn’t this “splitting” accounted for by Benjamin? I’m having a difficult time seeing what this adds to Benjamin’s arguments besides a possible critique of why we should think more with Klein than Winnicott.