The Superego as Herald of Resentment

Abstract

Clinical work shows again and again what large role the affect of resentment (alias unforgiveness) plays in psychopathology. It is not a simple affect and can be recognized as one important way of trying to solve early and late conflicts, but one that leads to a constant renewal of such conflicts. It has therefore a peculiar and special relationship to repetition compulsion.

It is not only with patients that we encounter its intense and drive-like power of motivation, but we hit upon its presence in families and in social institutions. Political leaders owe their power of persuasion often, maybe mostly, to the skillful play on widespread and sometimes contradictory resentments; their own often palpably burning resentment may serve as a magnetically sensitive instrument resonating to the popular and multiply caused sense of resentment.

Furthermore, it was Nietzsche and Scheler who drew attention to the degree of resentment which animates the morality of the West, particularly that of Christianity. Antisemitism represents a particularly virulent form of resentment.

The connection of morality and resentment is also clinically confirmed over and over again. In our analytic work, we keep observing how the value judgments and the underlying value attitudes are many times permeated by a spirit of resentment. This may not only hold true for the patients themselves, but we often notice how a deep resentment has dictated the value feelings which were transmitted from generation to generation in the family and how it has dominated entire religious and ethnic communities.

In the inner life of the patients, this resentment shows itself in a double form: on the one side as a yelling inner voice of self-beratement and self-condemnation, on the other side in the enduring bitterness, in the simmering indignation that suddenly breaks out in impulsive actions and in defiance against the expected or perceived condemnation from without.

Notes

¹See my paper “Nietzsche's War Against Shame and Resentment” (1999) and my extensive treatment of the topic in Ch. 13 of “Das Rätsel des Masochismus” (Wurmser, 1993).

²“The remembrance with animosity of suffered instances of injustice as if one still or again felt them.”

³I derived this mythical figure, of course, from Lagerkvist's compelling novel, Dvärgen, written in 1944, as a poetic transformation of his insights into the spirit of Nazism (at least on one level). Yet, already Nietzsche used this symbol in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), and so did Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers (1924–1942).

⁴I translate the 10 commandments of Jantelagen from the Swedish translation: “(1) You shall not think you are anything. (2) You shall not think you are as good as we. (3) You shall not think you are more intelligent than we. (4) Don't imagine you are better than we. (5) Don't believe you know more than we. (6) You shall not think you are more noble than we. (7) You shall not believe you are of use to anything. (8) You shall not laugh about us. (9) You shall not think that anybody cares about you. (10) You shall not think that you can teach us anything” (Sandemose, 1933/1980, p. 75). I am grateful to Dr. Anders Ryberg for having made me aware of this work and its ideas.

⁵ Wehaló bemaqóm sheyésh mishpát, en shalóm; uvemaqóm sheyésh shalóm en mishpát (Steinsaltz ed. of Talmud Vol. XV. Sanhedrín, 6B, p. 54, slightly modified).