Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World by Hent de Vries

Author:Hent de Vries
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI005000, Philosophy/Ethics and Moral Philosophy, PSY026000, Psychology/Movements/Psychoanalysis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

ECHOING KLEIN, DONALD WINNICOTT, the British child analyst who greatly contributed to our understanding of the importance of aggression for the development of a love that is not narcissistic but acknowledges, accepts, and originates from an acute sense of difference, imagined a psychic process in which aggression, paradoxically, enables love. In this process the infant phantasizes that it aggressively attacks the frustrating mother. If she loves the infant and survives, and does not retaliate, the child thus learns that its aggression is not necessarily destructive. In a lecture at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, under the heading “The Use of the Object and Relating Through Identification,”20 Winnicott describes the positive aspect of aggression as he explains how love makes aggression creative and how aggression makes love real.

The love of the “good enough mother” (to use Winnicott’s term),21 who survives the rage and destruction of her infant and remains available to be discovered again and again, makes her infant’s aggression creative. For her survival means that she was constituted as a separate subject that belongs to the external reality and does not operate under the sway of the infant’s phantasies. The mother’s love allows her child’s aggressive phantsies to discover, indeed, create her as a separate human being. This is precisely why the infant’s aggression is creative.

By the same token, the infant’s aggression “makes love real,” since it now becomes affection toward a real, that is, external object and not toward a phantasized extension of its own self. One can add that the infant’s love is real in yet another sense, namely it is now tested and proven, no mere whim; it was fought for and gained.

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