""fear of breakdown"... the kind of agony that can lead to serious regression for individuals and, as I will argue here, for collectivities too. The fear is of something to come that is really an agony over what has already transpired" (209)"political practices will not be improved with better forms of reasoning alone; getting on a better course calls for working through, affectively and not just cognitively, the demons that make democracy seem like a fool's errand" (209-210)"While it is true that we are social creatures raised in webs of kith and kin, it is not at all obvious that we are born recognizing our own sociality. At the start of our lives, this view claims, there is no differentiation between ourselves and others and hence no way to appreciate or even cognize a self-other relationship. The passage to reflexive sociality is contingent and fraught, easily derailed. Some people don't make it, and such failures can lead to political catastrophe" (210)"Is early infantile experience (1) undifferentiated plenum and omnipotence or (2) early ego sense of self and relationality? The first view hews to a version of Freud's notion of primary narcissism - though I will use the word plenum - and the second follows the new relational theorists' claim that babies have proto-egos from the start and so are unproblematically disposed to see others as distinct beings and value recognition" (210-211) I have no clue what a plenum is so I google'd it. It looks like there are two meanings, which McAfee is no doubt playing on: (1) a space completely filled with matter; (2) an assembly of all members of a group. It's a filling of space such that the whole is regarded or experienced."Since then, as Joel Whitebook notes, the relational view that there is no such thing as primary narcissism as well as no such thing as an early symbolic state, has become dogma. I will return to this" (211)"In other words, it needs something like a cocoon, where all needs are met in order for its sense of self to develop. This plenum is made possible by what normally befalls the mother at the every end of pregnancy and the first few week's of the infant's life: "maternal preoccupation." Gradually the plenum is impinged by reality and lack, and the infant develops the ability to live without needs always being constantly met. But as Green and Kristeva (and also Fairbarn) argue, this transition involves an originary breakdown of plenum that can later lead to a fear of breakdown, which, as Winnicott argues, is a fear of what has already happened" (212)"Winnicott's position can be clarified by reading backward through the prism of his final essay, "Fear of Breakdown"" (212) [I love it when writers describe how they read. It helps clarify the process of coming to ideas and defeats the canonical image of one person sitting and writing from nothing but a single mind.]"While psychotic patients are particularly susceptible to this anxiety, anyone should be able to recognize it, Winnicott writes, for it taps into universal agony over the possible loss of all ego organization, which, after all, was at one time in the history of every individual utterly absent and only contingently created" (213)"At its best, the process of development from absolute dependence to independence (and, I'd add, interdependence) keeps pace with the neurobiological capacity of the infant's mental apparatus" (214) [I found this line curious because of the shift in conversation from "the process of development" to "the neurobiological capacity of the infant's mental apparatus".]"(This is the very phenomenon that Freud attempted to unpack in his essay, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through," that is, the difficulty in working through something that is repeatedly enacted but not remembered.)" (216-217)"Recall Winnicott's point that the breakdown "is a fact that is carried round hidden away in the unconscious." Some past breakdown in fact may have inaugurated the unconscious. The conscious ego arises in the wake of the mother's "not-me." The cost of becoming an I is repression of what had been before and the ability to split off, thereafter, whatever does not accord with the new (fictively constructed) sense of a boundaried self" (217)"It is easier to recall trauma than it is to recall emptiness, for how is one to know that nothing is happening when one does not know yet to expect anything to happen?" (217)"For Kristeva, narcissism is a means of exorcising this emptiness. The best way over the abyss of emptiness is identification with a Third Party (the father, the law...). For Freud, "identification with the father in [one's] own personal prehistory" is a "direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object-cathexis"" (217)"Absent from Winnicott's tale is how the unconscious repositories of the holding environment shape the emerging self, including how collective losses become incorporated rather than introjected (to use Abraham and Torok's distinction between unmourned incorporations versus metabolized introjections). The facilitating environment is hardly neutral; it is laden with myriad deposits of previous and collective secrets, crypts, and stories. In a previous book I referred to this as the political unconscious, "an effect of processes: failures to sublimate well, desires unarticulated, voices kept silent, repressions reenacted without acknowledgment of their origins... a contingent effect of power relations and harms that have not been tended to." I also argued there that the individual is "always born in a social context, constituted through that context's prescriptions, shaped in the to and fro of human connection"" (220-221)"Whatever one thinks of one's own desires, they can never really be only one's own. They are shaped by holding environments, which have in turn been shaped by previous forces.The mother may hold the infant, but she too has been held and shaped by larger environs. The facilitating environment is already thoroughly social and historical. History makes us, deposits in us, unconscious desires, stories, and purposes" (221-222)"If democracy means ruling ourselves, we surely need to know ourselves... Freud showed more than anything else that a great majority of our own psyche is inaccessible, remote, and often a trickster, leading us to think one thing of ourselves when something entirely otherwise is the case. Moreover, political environs often shape ourselves; so we are already confabulated in political situations where what we are to decide has already been decided in advance of our own willing" (222)""Peoples" are always imaginary extensions of individuals' social identifications. There is no separate social psyche: we are always in the social and the social is in us. Not only are we all born into social networks (even if we are not first aware of this), we are also born of them" (222)"Collective identities are extensions of individual ones, in fact there is hardly such a thing as an individual identity, for "identification," whether external or internal, is always a social relation, a relation with another. Moreover, failures to integrate social identities lead to their own maladies of the soul" (223-224)"fear of breakdown can lead to maladied nostalgia for an imagined plenum and a paranoid schizoid insistence that perfection can be had. This phenomenon can easily lead to nativism and the lure of authoritarian regimes' promise to solve all problems" (224)"Primitive agonies affect collectivities, but instead of showing up as a fear of loss of the unit self, there is a fear of loss of the unit collective" (225)"As Claude Lefort writes, attempts to maintain order by invoking "Property, Family, the State, Authority, the Nation, Culture" testify "to a certain vertigo in the face of the void created by an indeterminate society"" (225)"The names of the defenses that arise against these collective primitive agonies are familiar: anarchism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, nationalism, nativism, fundamentalism, even neoliberalism, along with sexism, ableism, and racism. I suggest that these are all in one way or another levied against collective primitive agonies of a fear of breakdown that already occurred but was not experienced. These defenses operate to suture a body politic together, to create a "we" out of people who are not really integrated as a we but born into a hallucinatory oneness that is quickly sundered and emptied when reality intrudes upon our omnipotent fantasies of plenty" (225)"peoples are at risk of breakdown when they adamantly deny any contingency to their own collectivity, when they insist that their group really is singular and unique rather than a happenstance of history. The feared breakdown of unity is a fear of what has already occurred: that early move from unintegration into an integrated we was a making of meaning without foundations" (225-226)"A defense against loss and disintegration can be an extreme "self-holding" that reifies what are really contingent social identifications. It is crucial to understand the temporality of teh fear of breakdown: a fear experienced here and now about something to come, but at the same time a fear of what has already happened but was not experienced. In the context of ethnic conflicts, Volkan refers to this as a time collapse, when here and now some archaic dread wells up that threatens an established unity and creates an urgency to react and settle ancient scores. To try to unpack this, let me posit these four moments:
- an archaic past, like the holding environment of early infancy, the sense of plenum, prior to any differentiation between self and other, which comes to an end with something that triggers loss of plenum;
- a constructed past, constructed in immediate response to the loss of plenum, the experience of differentiation and the need to create identifications to suture the self together as one self and to suture it to a common community of identifications;
- the here and now, which might be haunted by a fear of breakdown (perhaps triggered by a current event), the residue of the splitting apart of the archaic past and entrance into a very contingent and unstable constructed identity; the here and now is oriented toward
- a future, which might loop back by reifying the constructed past to ward off breakdown or, alternatively, might become open to making new and more open constructions and identifications" (227)
"The "backward glance" in the construction of nationness is ambivalent and anxious. A psychoanalytic genealogy of anxiety, Bhabha writes, shows that amor patriae is a "'sign' of a danger implicit in/on the threshold of identity, in between its claims to coherence and its fear of dissolution." Anxiety's indeterminancy signals a trauma at the core of "the cathexes that stabilize the I"; in fact, fear of breakdown is an anxiety of the antecedent" (227)"This is where contemporary critical theory could step in - not to identify normative footholds for doing critique at all but identifying how to recognize the ghosts in the forum and then how to proceed. This may well include returning to insights of the first generation of critical theorists, for example in trying to understand the roots of the authoritarian personality" (229)"Cultural theory has been bent more on diagnosis than remedy. Critical theory has been attuned more toward finding transcendent criteria, namely rational ones for critique. It is time we start learning from each other and move toward thinking about how communities can actually get past, that is, work through, their fears of breakdown. A critical social theory that is informed by psychoanalysis, including the negativity that Freud identified, can focus "on the dynamic reworking of affect," as Allen suggests, which could make "social transformation possible"" (229)