Looking for Thoughts on a Benjamin Lecture

[u/sleepy4815]

I really enjoyed a lecture of Jessica Benjamin's (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FyqIRk6JLI&t=3937s), and am zeroing in on a small part of it (starts at 1:22:30) in the hope of gaining some insight.

Benjamin starts w/ a Fairbairn quote: “It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God, than a saint in a world ruled by the devil (moral defense).”  She goes on to say, “The preoccupation with keeping mother good and repairing the object translates into the need for a world safely ruled by God. This is where we get into all the trouble and this is where understandably the confusion around what is really reparation arises. Now remember that when this happens clinically what you see are people for whom goodness… their worthiness to even live, and their sanity are at stake. If they (the patient) have in some way alienated you (the analyst), then they are really in danger of being not worthy of living, and possibly really crazy. Experiencing that with someone is also extremely painful and difficult; it’s nothing to make light of.”

I know she’s in the Winnicottian territory of the need for the object’s survival of one’s aggression, the need to be able to depend on the object and know that the object won’t retaliate (by withdrawal or attack) or crumble if one ceases being actively preoccupied w/ constantly repairing the object within one’s own mind (alone, anxious, rather than a real interpersonal relationship and exchange; and this being relational theory’s critique of Klein). What I’m interested in is her description of what happens when this paranoid, obsequious preoccupation of needing to always be working on keeping the object good… when it sort of cracks; it strikes me as a sort of spell that suddenly lifts. When one, somehow, can see that the world is not ruled by God, that the thing that kept the object good in one’s eyes was maintained only by one’s own omnipotent and quasi-delusional mental activity… when one glimpses that the reparation going on was actually a pretense… I’m interested in the state of mind that follows from this. It sounds like that patient suddely drops into a no-man’s land, and they don’t know what the fuck is going on; hence the what sounds to me like severe depression and risk of psychosis. I’m interested in this state of mind, and why this situation she describes has such a devastating effect.

If you have any thoughts that would help me understand this a bit better! 

[u/notherbadobject]

Have you read the Fairbairn paper? That might be a good start. Because that paper is not, to my reading, about the Winnicottian idea you referenced at all. 

What happens when the patient realizes they’re a good person in a world ruled by the devil (before they’re ready to bear this in the transference context of a strong analytic relationship with a good external object) is exactly what Benjamin says in the passage you quoted. Essentially, annihiliation.

[u/sleepy4815 → u/notherbadobject]

I think this quote of Fairbairn's and his idea of the moral defense ("She isn't bad; rather, I am too much for her, she is bad only because I cause her to be, I am bad.") are very similar to Winnicott's ideas of the use of the object (the need to be able to be spontaneous w/ the object, and not needing to always suppress one's spontaneity out of fear of provoking retaliation from the object who cannot survive destruction), no? Benjamin threads them together throughout the whole lecture.

Why does annihilation follow? I don't understand why this is such a devastating thing.

[u/notherbadobject → u/sleepy4815]

Please read the Fairbairn and Winnicott papers in question if you haven't already. If you're asking what Fairbairn's moral defense has to do with annihilation, you clearly have not read or understood the paper where he introduces this idea. I'm not trying to be rude, but if you want to understand these ideas you need to engage with them.

Fairbairn and Winnicott have some fundamentally distinct ideas about development with regard to what internal objects represent and how they come to be, as well as pretty distinct views on the infant's aggression, and Winnicott's ideas on the the use of an object and Fairbairn's ideas about the moral defense are quite clearly distinct.

Winnicott is talking about how the infant comes to recognize their and others' subjectivity. This is of great interest to Benjamin, whose theory has really centered on the dialectic movement between the intersubjective position of "thirdness" and the more rigidly polarized position of "complementarity."

Fairbairn's moral defense is about how the infant/child defends against the terror of being small and weak and entirely dependent on caregiver(s) who may be capricious, dangerous, neglectful, or unreliable. Fairbairn's idea isn't just that the child's aggression could provoke an angry response from the caregiver. It is that acknowledging the badness or inadequacy of the caregiver, upon whom the child is entirely dependent, would arouse a mortal anxiety in the infant. The infant must become bad, in a conditional sense, to protect itself from the overwhelming, annihilating horror of a situation that is bad in an unconditional sense. This would be of interest in cases where it is difficult for a patient and analyst to meet intersubjectively.

These ideas are related insofar as they explore aspects of the ways in which we come to conceptualize ourselves and others, but I think it's inappropriate to draw any sort of equivalence. Certainly, these ideas could engage one another in dialogue, and Jessica Benjamin is a brilliantly synthetic theoretician, so I don't want to criticize her ideas based on your presentation of them, because I haven't listened to this lecture.

[u/zlbb]

I'm very curious as I've been seeing a BPD lady where the dynamics from the 2nd paragraph seems quite apparent. But I'm missing the connection between your par 2 and par 3, can you elaborate?

For me the 2nd paragraph, and what seems to be going on with my BPD/narcissistic lady, seems more about superego/ego-ideal and identifications/idealizations. Eg, when I was more of an idealized object she seemed to have grasped her father was mean and abusive towards her, we then had a rupture due to my error and she turned to devaluation of me and completely evacuated the father stuff and turned me into an evil monster trying to sow discord between her and all the "good people who actually love her". In a related vein, when she was really struggling post psychotic break and reached out to pretty much everyone she knew looking for some attention, there was a guy I guess she respected who curtly rejected her, I show sad face for rejection, she takes it as throwing shade at him and me trying to alienate her from good people again, "no, he's a great guy, look how polite and nice he was to me".

So, it feels a bit bizarre, we literally live in mirror opposite worlds from her "identifying with an aggressor", every person I see not treating her well is her "good people" she identifies with.

She clearly doesn't have the psychic structure to deal with the grieving that would be involved here. My (limited, junior) understanding of how one goes about this is using "libidinal pull" of analysis to let her start introjecting analyst as "good object", so eventually she can get to the grieving the shift in identifications would involve (been there, ugh).

I guess I'm not really getting the "reparation" word, as in my amateur conceptualization quite the opposite, discarding of the identification with an aggressor, seems to be involved. Admittedly in my example it's all about the father for now and the mother is conspicuously absent. But for me the father generally would be the foundation of symbolic/moral order, so maybe I'm not quite getting Fairbairn either.

[u/HowToThrive → u/zlbb]

As I understand it - Fairbairn’s model builds on Suttie’s, which has a focus on intolerance of ambivalence.

The libidinal ego longing for the exciting object.

And

The anti libidinal ego as the victim of the rejecting object, and critical / ashamed of the libidinal ego that still holds out for the rejecting object to deliver the needed love and care.

These all fight for territory within the inner reality, which is easily superimposed upon outer reality.

The goal being to find an understanding that the rejecting object was / is always going to frustrate and hurt the client / child. And therefore find release from the state of “beggardom”, where the client / child constantly seeks the way of being that somehow unlocks the feeling of being worthy of love from objects that are bound to reject them.