Political hatred and psychoanalysis: the other as enemy

Psychotherapy

On the moment when someone close to you starts to seem like a threat, and what Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion help us understand about this movement, which cuts across every side.

October 16, 202610 min read

Illustration for the article: When the other turns enemy: what psychoanalysis sees in political hatred

He has known his brother-in-law for eighteen years. They have shared barbecues, an apartment move, and an entire night in a hospital waiting room, the night his father-in-law was rushed into surgery. He knows how the other man takes his coffee, which joke he will tell at Christmas, what he is like when his team loses.

About three weeks ago, something shifted. There was no fight. There was a forwarded message in the family group chat, a curt remark at Sunday lunch, a laugh at the wrong moment. And ever since, he has caught himself doing something new: rereading what his brother-in-law writes, looking for evidence. Evidence that he was always like this. That all that kindness was hiding something else. That the man who spent the night beside him at the hospital is, deep down, someone he needs to protect himself from.

A few miles away, the brother-in-law is doing exactly the same thing. Neither of them thinks he is being unfair. Both are certain it was the other who changed.

With Brazil’s runoff between Flávio Bolsonaro and Lula set for the 25th, scenes like this are playing out in many homes, in both directions. And the people living through them tend to notice an uncomfortable detail: the reaction seems bigger than what actually happened. This is someone familiar, whose face has not changed. Even so, seeing their name pop up on your phone sets off a kind of alarm in the body. Perhaps you recognized that feeling, from one side of the table or the other. It deserves to be understood before it is judged.

The enemy is almost never a stranger

The deepest anger is rarely aimed at the unknown voter in another state. It is aimed at a brother, a college friend, the coworker at the next desk. The most heated hostility tends to arise where there was closeness, and that is no accident: only someone who matters can let us down like that.

What happens in these weeks is not exactly a change of opinion about the person. It is a change in the way we see them. Someone who had many layers (the sense of humor, the generosity, the quirks, the shared history) comes to be read through a single trait. The rest disappears, or is reinterpreted in light of that trait. Kindness becomes pretense. Silence becomes provocation. A joke becomes an attack.

And the body follows along. The heart races when the message comes in, the jaw clenches before the family lunch, the reply is ready before the question is finished. This is how we function when we feel we are facing a threat. The problem is that the threat, in this case, is someone who until just the other day knew your dog’s name.

A world divided into good and bad

Melanie Klein, a Vienna-born psychoanalyst who spent most of her career in London, gave a name to this way of functioning in 1946, in a paper called Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. We all know it, though we rarely recognize it in ourselves: it is the paranoid-schizoid position.

The name is more frightening than it should be. “Schizoid” comes from the idea of splitting, of breaking in two. “Paranoid” comes from the fear of being attacked. Klein described how, early in life, a baby cannot yet recognize that the mother who feeds and soothes is the same one who takes too long and frustrates. For the baby, there are two: a good one and a bad one. Separating them is an ingenious solution, because it keeps what is good safe from what threatens it.

The crucial point is that Klein chose the word “position,” not “phase.” A phase passes and does not come back. A position is a place we return to, throughout our lives, whenever anxiety rises high enough. Mature, educated, affectionate adults go back to it in the face of an illness in the family, a job loss, a separation. And a close election, in which the outcome seems to decide something about who we are.

In splitting, the world becomes simpler. There is us and there is them. There is no need to tolerate doubt, or contradiction, or the uncomfortable idea that someone who thinks so differently could be a decent person. That simplicity brings relief, and that is why it is so hard to give up.

What I can’t bear in myself, I find in the other

Splitting rarely works alone. Alongside it, Klein gave a central place to projection, the movement by which what is unbearable inside us comes to be perceived outside, in someone else.

During a campaign, everyone feels anger, fear, contempt, the urge to shut someone up. These are heavy feelings that don’t fit the image each of us has of ourselves. One quiet way out is to locate them in the opponent. He is the aggressive one. He is the one who doesn’t listen. He is the one who has been fooled, he is the fanatic. And once the aggression is over there, mine starts to look like mere self-defense.

There is an even more treacherous effect. Treated as an enemy, the other ends up reacting like an enemy, and the prophecy fulfills itself. Each one hands the other, without realizing it, the proof he needed.

Anyone who has watched an argument between relatives who vote differently notices something curious: the accusations are almost identical. Each says the other can’t think for themselves. Each says the other is blind. Both feel cornered. It is no coincidence. It is the same mechanism at work in both chairs at the same time.

It is worth spelling out: this is not the preserve of one side. It happens to those who vote for one candidate, to those who vote for the other, to those who cast a null vote, to whoever is reading this and to whoever is writing it. No political position protects anyone from splitting, and none is a symptom of it.

When the group gathers to fight

Wilfred Bion, a British psychoanalyst, worked with groups at a military hospital during World War II and, later, in London. In Experiences in Groups, from 1961, he described how every group functions on two levels at once. On one, it thinks, works, and deals with reality. On the other, it acts as if it had gathered around an assumption that no one has stated but everyone feels.

He described three of these basic assumptions. The one that matters most here is fight-flight: the group begins to behave as if it existed to confront an enemy or to escape from one. In that climate, thinking becomes difficult. Whoever weighs things up becomes suspect. Whoever asks an awkward question seems to be playing into the other side’s hands. Doubt is felt almost as betrayal, and each person’s worth comes to be measured by their readiness to attack or to pull away.

Just look at the family group chat, the school one, the work one. In these weeks, many of them have stopped being places for conversation and started functioning as trenches, on both sides. And flight is the other side of the same coin: leaving the group, cutting the visit short, inventing a commitment so as not to stay for dessert. A study published in the journal Science in 2018, on Thanksgiving in the United States right after the 2016 election, found that dinners were 30 to 50 minutes shorter when they brought together families from areas that had voted for opposing parties. Other researchers estimated a smaller effect. But anyone who has ever glanced at the clock in the middle of Sunday lunch knows what this is about.

Seeing the other whole

Klein did not describe only the problem. She also described the movement the mind makes when it manages to get out of it, and from 1935 on she called it the depressive position.

Once again, the name is misleading. This is not depression as an illness. She used that word because this movement brings a certain sadness: that of realizing that the person who frustrates us is the same one we love, and that the bad was not all on the outside. The baby discovers that the mother who takes too long is the same one who comforts. The adult discovers that the brother-in-law of the forwarded message is the same one from the hospital waiting room.

Putting the two images together hurts. It brings ambivalence, it brings guilt for what was said or thought, sometimes it brings shame. But it also brings what splitting does not allow: the wish for reparation, and the possibility of disagreeing with someone without needing to turn them into a threat.

This does not mean agreeing, or toning down what you think, or pretending the disagreement is small. It is possible to disagree with someone wholly and still see them whole. Nor is it something reached by decision or by argument. No one settles into the depressive position for good. Life is a back-and-forth between the two, and when the threat subsides, the ability to see the other again usually returns, little by little.

When anger starts to take over everything

Most of the time, this passes along with the election. The temperature drops, conversations go back to soccer and the kids, and the brother-in-law goes back to being the brother-in-law.

There are situations, however, that deserve a closer look. When anger starts to take over the day and is no longer confined to politics. When sleep disappears for several nights. When the ruptures pile up, not with one person but with several. When what was said in the heat of the moment leaves someone no longer recognizing themselves. When frightening thoughts come up. And also when, weeks after the result, the alarm is still ringing.

In these cases, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy offers something of its own. It is not a place to change your vote or to be persuaded of anything, and the therapist is not there to say who is right about the election. It is a place to think about what the anger is carrying. Often, today’s enemy occupies a place that existed before him: that of a brother you always competed with, of a father who never listened, of a part of yourself that was never quite accepted. When this can be examined calmly, with no one applauding and no one condemning, splitting loses some of its force.

And the very movement of idealizing and mistrusting also shows up in the relationship with the therapist, where it can be seen happening in real time. That is very different from reading about it.

The brother-in-law is the man from that message and also the man from that night at the hospital. On the other side of town, he may be trying to put together the same two images.