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. (51)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)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 (57)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. (65)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. (68)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. (69)
- same for identities? Categories?