#50. On Revenge (a reflection after the assassination of Osama bin Laden)
Soon after the Second World War, Donald Winnicott, an English pediatrician who later became the most important pediatric psychoanalyst of his generation and any since, launched himself on a train of thought about hatred and revenge. This train of thought, as he developed it over the rest of his life –he died in 1971—became a seminal contribution to psychoanalysis post-Freud. Winnicott helped psychoanalysis free itself of a profound misunderstanding of human aggression –Freud’s “blunder” (Winnicott’s word) in thinking that there is a “death instinct” at the root of aggression. In England, starting in 1952, Winnicott began to urge Melanie Klein and her followers, among whom he had trained, to give up their rigid and doctrinaire allegiance to the death instinct idea, to destroy (as he put it) the institution of Kleinianism and look again, without distortions, at the phenomena of aggression. Look specifically at how the roots of aggression lie not in biology but in early caretaker-child interactions where the hate is coming (unconsciously) from the caretakers. Winnicott really opened the variegated territory of aggression to independent, non-doctrinaire psychoanalytic exploration.
But Winnicott’s initiative also has, I think, significance for political thinking, and I am going to take it up from that angle—an angle he was well aware of but developed less thoroughly. It is the assassination of Osama bin Laden at a compound in Abbottsbad, Pakistan by a U.S. Navy Seal commando team, under orders from Barack Obama, that provokes my reflections. This is an event that has been discussed in the past week among American commentators and pundits at an abysmal level of jingoism and ignorance.
Winnicott was working at the War’s end and for several years afterward in Oxfordshire, where shelters and homes had been set up for children and adolescents –often very disturbed ones–evacuated from London during the Blitz. Some of the children were—tragically– psychotic or nearly so. In the same period, the British Labour government was setting up the National Health Service, a very important social democratic initiative with a glaring flaw at its center, in Winnicott’s view (and I agree with him). On both of these fronts, Winnicott found himself furious.
Politically, he was furious that Lord Beveridge, architect of the NHS, found it reasonable to propose nationalizing the medical profession, that is, making doctors work as civil servants, for a government that would change from election to election, rather than as scientists, dedicated to the science of medicine and to their patients. On 15 October, 1946, Winnicott wrote a hard-hitting letter to Lord Beveridge which is also shocking for its implied idea about how to influence a politician: “I think your suggestion that the medical profession should be nationalized was made in good faith, and that you were truly ignorant of the harm your suggestion must do. It was true ignorance that allowed you to make medical practice subservient to politics instead of to science, but ignorance cannot absolve you of my hatred.” In this letter, Winnicott was, after his fashion, “managing” his hatred, which he felt was natural in the face of such harmful ignorance. (There is no evidence of Lord Beveridge’s response, but one can easily imagine him not being inclined to manage his own hatred.)
During this period Winnicott’s hatred was also roused by the adolescents he worked with who had “an antisocial tendency” and by those among his adult patients who were psychotic. Hard as he tried to cure them, he kept hitting walls in them and getting angry, feeling burdened and overwhelmed. Psychotics are not like neurotics who, no matter what their difficulties, have had some degree of love in their childhoods, some opportunities to fuse in themselves their loving and hating feelings and thus to tolerate loss of love or other traumas, social traumas or war-time traumas, without becoming pure haters. The tragic psychotics could do nothing but project their hate onto their analyst and constantly expect to be hated back.
In February, 1947, Winnicott delivered a paper to the British Psycho-Analytical Society which has since become a classic of our scientific literature: “Hate in the Counter-transference.” Acknowledging the hate poured onto him and provoked in him, this paper argued, is the only way for an analyst “to get the hatred sorted” and not strike back at a psychotic patient, not retaliate, even in some subtle way that is quite a distance short of murder. Practicing this kind of “sorting,” Winnicott eventually came to his idea that what the analyst ultimately does in working with psychotics is “to survive,” by which he meant offer the psychotic patient the evidence that hatred need not be deadly, that learning to love is possible, that a cycle of revenge can be broken. Refraining from retaliation is the condition of cure, while revenge is a step in the direction of defeat for both the patient and the analyst.
Winnicott’s formulation was like that of the ancient Chinese sage Confucius: “If you set out on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Both the one who is hunted down and the one who hunts will end up destroyed. But, further, Winnicott was connecting with a strand of thought and experience present in all the world’s great wisdom traditions: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Or, as the Confucians phrased this “Golden Rule”; “Do not do to others, what you would not have them do unto you.” This is the psychologically wiser formulation, I think, for it emphasizes the condition for restraint: that you recognize your desire to retaliate and understand, simultaneously, that your retaliation will come back at you or hurt you from within because you have become corrupted by it.
This is the way Dante framed the Golden Rule in his portraits in The Divine Comedy of what the Italians call contrapasso: the sinners and criminals in the Inferno are suffering versions of what they during their lives made others suffer, they are being ceaselessly reminded by God of their hateful behavior, which they never got “sorted” when they had the chance. My favorite of the multitude of Dante’s graphics –I think of it every morning when I read the newspaper—comes in Canto XX, where a troop of sorcerers, corrupt astrologers and false prophets — all manner of arrogant pundits –are condemned to walking backwards because they have had their heads twisted 180 degrees on their bodies. Their punishment for practicing magic and pretending to be able to see the future is to be continually and painfully at cross-purposes with themselves. Beware, you neo-conservative economic theorists with your self-serving magical thinking about the future! Beware Paul Ryan with your haranguing about future American collapse if the deficit is not addressed by abusing the poor! The rich must take revenge on the poor for being a drag on the prosperity of the rich! says this arrogant young man, whom I hate.
There is a universal consensus among the ancient sages that revenge is morally wrong and politically counter-productive. The consensus, as well, condemns all manner of “eye for an eye” vendetta actions, all clan or tribal law of the talion “cycle of violence” actions, even if they are tempered with notions of “proportional retribution” (where you exact no more in revenge than was wrecked on you and your family). Political actors who place national and international law above homemade revenge and hold all accountable before the law are considered civilized. There are even many signs of hope in the modern world that this old consensus could be translated into specific politico-legal forms –the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that began with the one in South Africa following the defeat of the apartheid regime, are examples (although much clearer in theory than yet in practice). Forgiveness is a topic in modern political thought, often with reference to Hannah Arendt’s profound meditation in The Human Condition on forgiveness as one of the key capacities of political people (promise-making is the other). She drew a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth as a political thinker about forgiveness. (Winnicott’s equivalent meditation was summarized in a remark he made when he was a twenty-five year old medical student, in a 1919 letter to his sister: “Christ is a leading psychotherapist…”)
Winnicottt believed that it was a central task of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts to help people acknowledge and understand their hate and their desires for revenge, and to learn restraint; or, in the case of a person who has become a criminal, learn to feel guilty because he has understood that he once felt unloved and hurt and shamed. A boy who has become a thief and feels no guilt about it –who has developed “an antisocial tendency”—can learn that he is a boy who once felt deprived of love and care and in need of a way to compensate and defend himself.
Psychotherapists can assume the same responsibility as citizens. For example, by exploring the need that people in societies feel for revenge against criminals. But Winnicott was a realist about how possible this is on a societal or collective level. “Unpunished misdemeanors or crime swells the reservoir of unconscious public revenge, and unless this revenge is expressed periodically it will come out in some ugly form. The main function of legal procedure is the prevention of lynch-law, which always hangs around the corner even in this country where (because of the success of legal procedure) it is never seen. I have found this view is an extremely unpopular one especially among the sentimentalists in the penal reform movement. The public must be avenged.” He concluded this August, 1949 letter to the London Times: “The doctor (psychoanalyst) will surely be more and more liable as time goes on to say: this antisocial child or adult is antisocial because ill. And then the law must follow on by considering how far public (unconscious) feeling needs punishment to be given, regardless of the psychiatric diagnosis.”
The public’s need for revenge is even more obvious and dramatic, of course, when an individual has wrecked a huge and terrifying attack upon it: an attack for which the individual feels no guilt and has an absolutely ironclad rationalization, an attack which is, in fact an act of revenge. Such was, of course, Osama bin Laden’s attack upon America on 9/11: a monumental act of revenge for America’s many trespasses upon Muslim religious sites and attacks upon Muslim populations, for example, in Afghanistan. The public must be avenged. If it is not, some “ugly form” –even uglier form–of its need for revenge will appear anyway –for example, in all-out war upon all Muslims, regardless of whether they do or do not share bin Laden’s revenge extremism.
But one might –psychotherapeutically—wish that when revenge is taken in the form of assassination of an unarmed man not defending himself, ten years and two revengeful wars against Muslim countries after the fact of his crime, that the man who ordered the assassination might have had something educational to say about it. Like, for example: “We should not rejoice in this death, as we have brought it about outside of the laws that are meant to protect people from cycles of revenge, from endless violence and counter-violence. If we feel “justice has been done,” let us say at the same time that it is not the justice of courts, which we, as a democratic people, value as the essence of our political life. Even while this operation was being carried out by our brave commandos, we are –with our allies—holding back from taking revenge on another psychopath who has killed many more than 3,000 human beings who have opposed his dictatorship in Libya for decades. We, as a people, do not want to be applauded or applaud ourselves for taking a revenge that we hope will make the world safer for people everywhere who long to be free of terroristic leaders and their followers. This is a solemn moment, not one for revelry in the streets, but one for remembering the 3,000 human beings who died in our country because of this man’s mania for revenge. I wish that this cycle of revenge in which all humankind is so diminished, could stop with this act of ours for which I gave the order.”
Maybe Newt Gingrich’s announcement today that he will run for president is his “revenge” on Obama for assasinating bin Laden.
Wonderful post, Elisabeth. I am having a hard time, though, resolving the need to avoid revenge on an individual level with the justification of it on a societal level. In Winnicott’s terms, that the public must be avenged. How do we square this with Arendt’s argument that both forgiveness and promise-making are political capacities? If we settle accounts, even on a social level, by engaging in an act of vengeance “outside the law”, isn’t the law trivialized in the process? Isn’t that what the TRC tried to do differently. One can still sustain the idea of punishment, but separate it from vengeance, and be consistent with what you otherwise rightly support as the “civilized” approach.
Your remarks, though, go much further in clarifying the central issues than the oped commentary by another psychologist, Jonathan Haidt.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opinion/08haidt.html?src=tptw
Excellent post. Very thought-provoking. Thank you.
Thank you Elizabeth for your thoughtful post. You are really stimulating my thinking on the idea of potential space. I think Winnicott’s desire for us to acknowledge and process our hate and desire for revenge creates a space between the feeling and the action. The law (as Winnicott sees it) is a form of space between feeling and direct action (revenge). What you would have liked Obama to say would have been that processing work that creates a more reflective process which we desperately need in our culture. What Winnicott’s work would do, is demolish the simplistic concrete automaticity of the equation: HATE = REVENGE.
Robin
I have a complex and somewhat conflicted response to your excellent and important post on revenge. Winnicott’s brilliant formulations, and your own elaborations of them, should be the basis of a resilient, more civilized and democratic legal framework in any country that truly desires to promote global cooperation. As in his work generally, Winnicott opens a space for thinking and cultural dialogue where the potential for the collapse of thought into action is strongest. Like Hamlet, he turns the injunction to revenge into a reflective space, even as he acknowledges the need, ultimately, to submit to that social imperative. You bring out the central tension between the management of hatred and desire for retribution in the murder of bin Laden, the tension between the sense of justice and the institutional requirements of law. In the case of bin Laden, Chris Matthews on MSNBC pointed out that young people celebrated the raid with no thought of legalities, because, he opined, it confirmed a basic collective strength. “We can do basics,” he said, like getting up in the morning, getting the kids to school — and killing bin Laden!” I must admit that I, too, felt an archaic sense of power when the news broke. And when Obama said, “Justice has been done,” the look on his face seemed to me to convey unambiguous conviction. There’s the rub.
I’d like to take a closer look at your phrase, “two revengeful wars against Muslim countries.” The war in Iraq was based on the blatant exploitation of the desire for revenge in the American public after 9/11. Even the NY Times ran articles that fell for that exploitation, the pretense that Saddam would “pay” for bin Laden, but the logic of the Bush people was, as some pointed out, the deluded logic of Brutus contemplating the murder of Caesar, imagined danger masking rivalry. And, of course, Bush failed to capture or kill bin Laden at Bora Bora, prolonging the public’s need for revenge, prolonging the revenge cycle. It seems to me that Obama’s behavior comes close to your wished-for educational response, perhaps as close as a contemporary President can come in the current American political atmosphere. In marked contrast to Bush, he refused the gestures of triumph, the codpiece moment on the aircraft carrier, the trophy pistol on the White House wall. In characteristic style, Obama combined the (extra-legal) sense of justice with Winnicottian restraint.
In the case of men like Hitler, Pol Pot or bin Laden, men whose ideological certainty places them beyond the possibility of therapeutic response, the “laws that are meant to protect people from cycles of revenge” are tested at the limits of tolerance. In the aftermath of WWII it was possible, in some cases, to use legal means, and in the case of Eichmann, the trial served both legal and deeply educational purposes. (Interestingly, the killing of bin Laden coincided with the renewed focus on Eichmann on the 50th anniversary of the trial.) But I cannot imagine how the capture of bin Laden could have led to a viable legal process in the current American political situation. So Obama’s decision seems to me to have served two contradictory purposes, a validation of the social need for revenge and the promotion of a more sober and civilized attitude toward that need. The price of fulfilling the first purpose is to reanimate the the Bush crowd’s desire to shape the law to their will, Hitler-like. But in promoting the second purpose, I hope that Obama did move us a small way toward Winnicott’s and your position.
I appreciated this post very much. Here’s a link to a related one that I posted on Huffington Post (excuse the misspelling in the link): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-d-stolorow/death-and-ressurection_b_856748.html
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