over the weekend, a friend couldn't figure out why she was crying over something that happened years ago, a memory that surfaced adjacent to what otherwise might have seemed a happy situation. someone she'd hurt a month ago (and she'd also hurt my friend) revealed that all was well between them--it was a symbolic act that my friend interpreted as an olive branch b/c it was done publicly.
she was going to obsess about this issue--and about feeling like an idiot for worrying about the most insignificant thing. then i decided to read to her why i thought she needed to stop obsessing about the memory and get at what was really eating her: her own anxiety about the friend she'd hurt and fear that the olive branch, while welcome, might end up making her feel exposed to potential pain once again.
I read this section from Larry Hirschhorn's "The Workplace Within" (quite good on understanding how psychoanalytic theory attempts to bridge the micro-meso-macro levels of human interaction. i don't agree with what he argues about "postindustrial organizations and society", still):
"As we have seen, people have a strong tendency to produce destructive acts as a way of containing anxiety. Yet, although the propensity to destructive acts is innate, there is a corresponding tendency to repair, to make that which has been split or torn apart whole once again. Klein's theory of reparation represents one of her most important contributions to a theory and pragmatics of human development. She argues that, although people certainly split their awareness of good and bad, they also enter a stage or "position," as she calls it, in which they integrate their once split awareness of the world around them. This tendency can be seen as one expression of the mind's growing capacity to integrate sense perceptions and feelings as it matures.
To be sure, if Klein had posited an "integrating" tendency that opposed a "splitting" tendency, her contribution would have been a minor one. What makes her theory important is that she shows that the tendency to integrate the awareness of good and bad is rooted in an emotional Although we have a tendency or valence to integrate our different perceptions as we mature, integration itself is propelled forward by feelings of depression. We enter what Klein calls the depressive position, because we realize that the people whom we have hated are the people whom we have loved as well and are people who have also contributed to our lives. (People here can be ourselves, since we often split our own self-images, separating good self-images from bad.)
This recognition creates feelings of remorse, shame, and guilt. We realize that we have hurt (in our minds and sometimes in reality) those who have cared for us. Klein argues that people can navigate the depressive position if they can contain the anxiety that ensues when the images of the good and bad are integrated, if they can tolerate their feelings of shame. But if the anxiety overwhelms them, they regress to the position of alienation--the fundamental splitting of self, others, object-world.
Work and Reparation
people can work through the depressive position by repairing their relationships with others. They do this, I suggest, by creating and giving something they value to those whom they have hurt, by doing work. This process of depression and reparation takes place both in relations to real others and through symbolic acts. In the latter instance the gifts we create and the receivers we seek out are symbols of acts that we have committed and people we have hurt in the past. In short, to repair the damage we have done, in splitting apart our feelings of love and hate, we must work, we must create something of value for others.
In describing the work of reparation, Klein refers to the biography of the painter Ruth Kjar. Kjar's career as a painter grew out of a depressive reaction when a picture was removed from her room.... Kelin relates Kjar's depression to the destruction of her internal image of her mother and shows how the painter recreated her mother in the painting to fill the empty place inside herself. For Klein, creativity finds its source in the anxieties of the depressive position and the subsequent reparative urge.
Klein uses the work "position"to emphasize that the depressive experience is not a fixed stage in the life cycle but a recurring experience. As we live and interact with othes, we inevitably have good and bad feelings about them. These feelings are in turn suffused with the emotional memories of earlier relationships, when our love and hate were less modulated and more intense. Thus, we continually face the problem of sustaining a "whole" image of those to whom we are close. If we love and hate them, we may split up and distribute our feelings over others, idealizing some and despising others. Or we may simply flatten our experience of them by denying our dependence on them and making them into non-persons. If and when we reach the depressive position, we can then contain the anxiety of both loving and hating long enough to begin the work of reparation.
...
The Reparative Process
The sense of shame appears to have several roots. One is shamed by the damage done to others, particularly when thes4e others have contributed positively to one's life; one shamed by one's pettiness, and one is shamed by the discovery of one's defensiveness, of the lies one tells to oneself. ...
In a third, key element of the reparative process, shame leads one to repair one relationship to others, but not in order to ask forgiveness. When we act out of guilt, we affirm our insignificance: We cannot transform the feeling that we are unworthy, and we require that others more powerful than we tolerate our inadequacies. In contrast, when we act out of shame, we affirm our value to others by offering something of value to them. In such a situation, we do not see the other person as all powerful, as one who can either punish or forgive, bur rather as someone whom we have hurt. We thus overturn our experience of being inadequate by being adequate and important to that person.
Fourth, in repairing our relationships to others, we overcome our tendencies to split apart our good and bad feelings to others. We stop idealizing others or having contempt for them. We simply affirm their value because of their lively relationship to us. We affirm life in the face of its limits.
Fifth, to experience shame, on has to overcome the anxiety and discomfort of trying to hold, together, both good and bad self-images. <...>
Sixth and finally, the experience of shame, as Lynd suggests, is developmental. It involves the whole character, the entire relationship of self to setting, rather than simply one sing, one transgression, one forbidden pleasure. I The reparation of one relationship has the potential for unleashing a developmental process trough which my habitual modes of relating, carried by memory, wer in some sense restructured. We do not simply relieve our feelings of guilt but restructure our relationships to others. This is why the reparative process is developmental in character.
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Work as a Transitional Objection
Reparation rests on a symbolic process, on the transformation of meanings attached to particular symbols of our inner life.
This symbolic underpinning of reparation suggests how work itself can function as a reparative process. ... the transitional object functions as a symbol that helps the child move from its mother to the outer world. The child invests a teddy bear, say, with the projected images of its mother. In moving past the mother, the child carries the mother forward by holding onto the object. yet the object is a transitional one, and the child ultimately gives it up, in the process developing a new relationship to its mother. The transitional object helps the child take a round trip from mother to the world and bad; but when the child returns "home" the mother, like the world, has become more complex and varied.
Anys... Hirschhorn goes on to elaborate a way to understand Marx's claims about alienation in modern capitalist societies with large-scale division of labor--how we are alienated from work that enables us to invest a sense of 'goodness' in our work--the work we do to create things for others, others whom we will probably never know... etc. I've taken some liberties with the above to condense it without losing meaning.