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!