"Having studied Hegel in Frankfurt, in turn, I had felt a shock when reading Winnicott's (1971) "Use of an Object": when I asked my friend who had studied there with me to read it, she too spontaneously remarked, "It's just like Hegel"" (3)"if we are lucky enough to be exposed to genuinely different disciplines and traditions, we can recognize the homologue in two entirely unlike forms, sameness despite difference.
"Establishing within American psychoanalysis the position of infancy as well as the importance of the mother was a new enterprise in the 1980s, and the arguments in The Bonds of Love (1988) reflected, in part, a decade of immersion in research on infancy (and motherhood). The discovery of the interpersonally active infant—more than a bundle of disorganized drives declared unsuitable for psychoanalytic understanding by orthodox analysts of the time—constituted a kind of revolution in psychoanalytic thought.
We need to grasp why the more progressive side of mainstream politics utterly failed in challenging this appeal. I will suggest it was based on an inability to acknowledge harming, to admit that such destructive anti-democratic forces are and have always been part of our legitimated political structure. That is, we can think about how this inability to fully face and work through the history of slavery and genocide is related to the inability to admit that economic exploitation—the use of others to make a profit—involves harming, especially when unchecked.
“I believe there is also an outright intimidating effect produced by the psychological violence of openly expressed psychological splitting—I have experienced it on the left as well. I believe it has to do with projections of badness, and the threat of being cast out of the “Us.”-yes, this this this!“I would argue that the Democrats failed to create an equal sense of power because they were not tied to an explicit cry of outrage nor a promise to protect us from the wolves.
472 - “This perspective helps us to understand how the American model of modern, secular society with its failure to provide forms of social caring and holding, its lack of recognition for the value of all persons as members of the Gemeinschaft (community), contribute to the continuing prominence of support for patriarchal relations and authoritarian psychology, as found in evangelical fundamentalist communities (Benjamin, 1988). “
"What concerns us, then, is not only the ascendance of a right-wing demagogue but also the failure of the institutionalized liberal forces in the media and politics to properly acknowledge and resist attacks on our democracy, to name and call out the "wolf"" (472)"combining contradictory appeals to the working-class resentment toward the elite and its shame-induced submission to austerity and deprivation of social security. We need to grasp why the more progressive side of mainstream politics utterly failed in challenging this appeal.
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.
“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”“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.
51 - “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.”
"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).
