State and society are inundated with pain
The capacity to tolerate mental agony must be developed, writes FRANCOIS RABIE
SA EXISTS in a condition of predictable instability. The state functions along a similar psychic trajectory as seen in the personality condition known as borderline organisation. Diagnostically, this means chronic emotional disregulation (poorly modulated emotional response), relational instability, struggles to manage self-image; impulsivity, intense anger and at times high anxiety — symptoms of a paranoid nature that could regress to psychotic experiences where external reality becomes subverted in the service of furthering a warped internal reality.
The causes are many. A major feature is trauma. Research shows this goes along with some type of mismanaged early emotional experience, the effects of which build over time so that optimal psychological mechanisms are not developed.
Conditions such as poverty, social upheaval and perverse material neglect also contribute to people growing up with maladaptive psychological mechanisms because the object providing care — the mother or mother substitute — is herself psychologically overstretched. The state can also be seen as such a mother figure.
In SA, the government system including parastatals, maintains chronic instability. Why? Because the borderline personality unconsciously requires chronic turbulence and upheaval. Society too expresses borderline pathology because state and society act as mirrors for each other.
Psychologically speaking, emotional turmoil has become an “object of desire”, to quote the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. Emotional upheavals are comforting because they are known.
Race is an object of desire. How can we live in a nonracial society when the very idea of it is needed by the government unconsciously to fuel borderline pathology? This does not mean we should not have painful or difficult conversations about race. However, the current political power structure defines the scope of the conversation in such a way as to perpetuate pathological desire and connection to race because it has emotional leverage.
The borderline organisation of the state came into sharp focus during #FeesMustFall. Due to the developmental sequence coded for this personality disposition, psychic mechanisms can come into play that facilitate a longed-for journey where reality becomes dissociated from the internal world due to high anxiety and internal conflict.
The state, to draw on the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, engages in K, where K (knowledge: emotional knowing) is attacked to block reality.
WHEN students marched on Parliament and the Union Buildings, the state demonstrated K with a defensive retreat to fantasy and refusing to know something. Most South African students cannot afford a university education and are poor. This stands in perverse contrast to senior employees of the state, who live in a world of grotesque wealth.
To maintain the split, the people with their hands on the levers of power engaged in a psychic retreat: Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene continued with his budget speech, President Jacob Zuma was driven off in his motorcade and Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande cut a small figure as he stood behind the iron gates of Parliament, overwhelmed by the sight of reality in front of him.
In addition, the borderline state engages in “projective identification”, in which troubling aspects of the self are disowned and projected onto another person. The more violently you project, the more you fear retaliation from the object you are projecting into.
The state exists in a mode of psychic reality, where it perceives an enemy — concrete, such as “the West” or “white capitalism”, or diffuse, such as anybody opposed to the national democratic revolution — as existing to scuttle an image of SA that only the African National Congress can provide. The projection exists to discharge fearful and anxiety-filled feelings.
Certain psychological theories place aggression at the centre of psychic development. Good enough development contains the aggression, which opens up psychological space for creativity.
When containment fails — when the mother or object of care cannot adequately make meaning of the child’s inevitable aggression — fear and anxiety take up the psychological space. This is termed “annihilation anxiety”, a process in which fears of being overwhelmed, unable to cope and of losing control take shape and adaptation fails. This can escalate to the point of fearing disintegration.
THE current political process seems to be activating annihilation anxieties for the state and the ruling party.
The link between aggression, annihilation and the expression thereof probably has no better example in postapartheid SA than the Marikana massacre. The fears the state faces relating to its struggles to govern found brutal expression when the police acted as an extension of the senior structures of the state.
South African society is awash with mental pain, as is the state. The capacity to tolerate mental pain must be developed. If this cannot happen, growth and the ability to tolerate contradictions and conflict and expand the capacity for thought and reflection becomes impaired. Mental pain is a psychological guarantee.
The state, in its current mode of relating, is defensively trying to bypass this mental pain and exists in a state of almost psychotic omnipotence. The result is pathological deflections leading to predictable instability — the borderline mode of being in the world. Ultimately, for receptivity and creativity to occur, vulnerability has to be experienced and allowed into the psychological system. A journey the state cannot at present bear.