What happens to us psychologically when an event in the social or political world appears to divide us starkly into opposing camps? We’ve all experienced them: those explosive family dinners, acrimonious encounters with companions and friends that bloom suddenly, sweep us up like a tornado and dump us in a wasteland. How do the bonds that tie us together unravel so dramatically?
Sara and I have worked in various settings together for years – long enough for us to have lived through a number of world-order shifts and rumbles, including a pandemic, global conflicts, and our continuing landscape of trauma and violence. It seemed that we had built a shared set of assumptions of the broad political position to which we both belonged. Occasionally our engagement would turn to what is often referred to as another apartheid: Palestine. Sara is a health worker from two generations of activists, both Jewish and Moslem, joined together decades before in struggle against the South African apartheid regime. She traverses the lines of heritage easily, political cohesion being the cement, the forever architecture.
Then the catastrophe: the one we have lived day after day in our media, our hearts and our nightmares. October 7th. The invasion of Gaza.
Soon after, Sara and I got blown apart. It all came down to me asking a question about a petition when she wanted me to be at one with her anguish about the rising death toll in Gaza. My query landed with her as implying that her view and mine might differ in some way, although this was absolutely not my intention. It carried for her the suggestion that her horror might be open to interpretation. All she wanted from me was a visceral and authentic response that would contain her anguish. In that instant I became an enemy. Devastation and helplessness about Israel and the events in Gaza confronted her with the disintegration of the very foundations of the disorderly order with which she had battled her whole life. Splitting became a form of survival. If I was not with her, I was against her. Her disgust with me was palpable. I was the white disgraced.
In the context of an increasingly heated debate online about the Israel-Palestine situation, Eyal Rozmarin, a wise colleague, remarked that those participating (in the apparent absence of a Palestinian voice) were “trading annihilatory fears and vengeful delusions” … “splitting and projecting, sunk deeply in a paranoid-schizoid terrain” (IARPPCollective 7/01/24). The paranoid-schizoid position in public debate creates a “good,” “truthful,” “knowledgeable” speaking identity, and a denigrated “ignorant,” “deluded” and “bad” one, with linking being the pivotal activity, tying some together in ways that tolerate no dissent, and just as decisively tying the “bad” together as the abject or ejected. The lines of battle are rigid, the rules brook no dissent.
Eyal’s request to those of us online was that we try to reach for the depressive position – to sit with the complexity of the situation, to recognize immense loss, and to mourn. To find the humanity in one another. Instead, colleagues turned each other into enemies wreathed in projections and fantastical shapes. This created a way of ordering our conversation into a political war, with attempts at mediation falling on deaf ears. It had the effect of transforming emotional overwhelm into structured – albeit sometimes destructive – activity.
The oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is a regular feature of our clinical work and ventures into public discourse. But there is another state of mind, one of confusion, of unknowing, that I have found to be a significant carrier of change and of new possibility. The encounter I describe with Sara threw me into disorder and made linking of any kind an impossibility. In Winnicott’s words I was in a state of falling forever. I lost my bearings, my ability to think, to be coherent, to do anything but shake and feel the tears begin to fill my eyes. It was a state in which survival was at stake. I felt a disgrace.
So perhaps a circle of experience and thought needs to be imagined: unthinkable catastrophe enters our bodies and disrupts our thinking, leaving us overwhelmed. Splitting is a defense against this discontinuity, because it scaffolds a structure for linking through splitting. Paradoxically, the chaos of experiencing unthinkable anxiety – and therefore being unable to think – at times allows a new formation, one perhaps less rigid than whatever went before. Falling forever and then being found creates a new kind of hope.