Jessica Benjamin’s work continues to provide a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective today on power relations as when she wrote The Bonds of Love in 1980. As Benjamin highlights, those who seek connection, fluidity, and nurture are confronted by a culture which repetitively undermines selfhood through a divisive capitalist realism where profit and ‘efficiency’ precede and override nurture and connection, despite its frequent and empty claims to the contrary (Fisher, 2009). Benjamin’s work thus emphasises the schism between ‘rational’ orthodoxies and non-Western epistemologies which are regarded by more fundamentalist representatives of the former as ‘primitive’ or ‘irrational’.
The fundamentalist aspect of rationalism is what Benjamin calls ‘instrumentalism’, which defers to ‘objectivity’, and is – I believe due to its inherent and willful blindness –unable to hold the necessary tension between dependency and differentiation that is required in order to form a society which accepts other ways of being in the world. This rigid worldview maintains cultural bounds where beliefs which diverge from phenomenal orthodoxy are quickly dismissed, driven by a primitive, narcissistic fear of annihilation.
“The most familiar conflict that arises from differentiation is between the need to
establish autonomous identity and the need to be recognized by another. . . . This world view emphasizes difference over sameness, boundaries over fluidity. It conceives of polarity and opposition, rather than mutuality and interdependence, as the vehicles of growth. That is, it does not tolerate the simultaneous experience of contradictory impulses: ambivalence.
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As Benjamin’s work demonstrates, it is this splitting process which ensures that that the powerful – through the ‘instruments’ of differentiation and rationality – maintain a position of control. For the individual who already feels profoundly alienated from his/her own subjectivity, the continued brutal demarcation of rationalism results in an exponential depletion of agency which leads to despair. The most horrifying aspect of this subjugating dialectic is that for those who are unable to ‘benefit’ from it, the only real means of differentiation become desperate acts of self harm; both physically and/ or emotionally. This sense of powerlessness therefore becomes the DNA of what I call ‘the curse position’; this psychic orientation therefore becomes a defensive maneuver; an attempt to reclaim the differentiation that has been lost through the undermining of one’s subjectivity and personal agency. In the curse position, the individual experiences a psycho-somatic deficit that a core, vulnerable self has been tarnished or stolen: one feels emotionally obsolete.
Given the doomed scenario I have set out, it is not difficult to see the appeal of magical practice as a curative possibility, as it offers the possibility of empowerment through the will, and potentially a community with whom to connect. Magical practices can also become a means of expressing hurt and hostile aspects of the self which have hitherto been denied a voice, whether it be by institutions, societal inequalities, or interfamilial relationships. Those who practice magic may however have had to contend with the judgements of orthodox religion and the sometimes sneering contempt of forms of hyper-rationalism which invoke ‘science’ to discredit other ways of seeing the world. It is not a surprise, then, that those who have felt unfairly judged in this way would like to get their revenge through uncanny means. This raises an important issue with regard to the way in which we relate to aggression in ourselves and in the other, and,in a reversal of the dialectic, how attributing and/or denying hostility to the other becomes a means of undermining subjectivity by asserting difference in the way that Benjamin highlights.
To illustrate this point, it is now widely accepted among historians that the witches’ testimonies at the time of their trials in early modern Europe were the result of forced confessions by the manipulative agenda of demonologist churchmen (Callow, 2018; Hutton, 2017). However, as the historian Emma Wilby argues, notwithstanding the demonologists’ clear coercive agenda and use of forced confessions, this does not rule out the possibility that ‘maleficent’ magic such as cursing practises took place and questions why it has since become a taboo to suggest this (Wilby, 2013). Wilby’s research therefore provides a complementary historical perspective to Benjamin’s in that she also pinpoints a continuing cultural inclination within the post-Enlightenment West to idealise ways of being in the world which fall outside of the narrative which it has for itself prescribed.
“Post enlightenment mentalities, unschooled in the subjective reality of magical thinking, may find it easier to rationalize how an individual might slaughter in the heat of battle, or execute a child in response to the letter of the law, than rationalize how they could create a clay image and carefully roast it before a fire in order to cause the death of an enemy. In conclusion, it could be argued that despite all the scholarly attention which early modern witchcraft has received over the last fifty years, in some respects maleficent magic remains taboo.
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By following Wilby’s argument, one can see that the rationalist Western paradigm then unconsciously may collude with the demonologists it criticises, though draws a boundary through denial rather than projection. The unconscious taboo denies the witch her daemonic aspects, and renders her a ‘manageable’, de-potentiated object through the unsolicited ‘cleansing’ of her dark, aggressive aspects through the filter of rationalism. The unconscious installation of the aggression taboo into cultural subjects that fall outside of the Western rational paradigm also means that pernicious levels of aggression may continue to be enacted through the well-established ‘civilised’ means of advanced capitalism of projection and the denial of subjectivity. Those who do not possess the required leverage of habitus are thus denied their basic right to express hostility in order to claim the subjectivity that has been denied them. In cases where aggression is accepted in ‘the other’, it is – as Wilby says – only done as a justified response to an attack, yet it is only those who are in positions of power that can make that judgement call and who wield the privilege to truly indulge in aggression for its own sake.
It is also only the powerful who have the means to commit acts of indulgent aggression with impunity, and who use denial as their main weapon of choice. In this scenario, is one where particular affective experiences – such as the satisfying catharsis of aggression – are only reserved for those who are privileged enough to experience them. This cultural cleaving of the dark and light aspects of the subject also holds profound significance for the curse position, where an already split individual feels morally ‘bad’ and wishes to extricate this part of the self, yet is full of rage at the sense of injustice towards those whom s/he implicitly blames for putting the ‘badness’ there. Here again, magical practice offers a means of empowerment, yet if one’s traumatic wounds are not sufficiently tended to, one may easily be tempted to embrace one’s idealised ‘love and light’ aspects, mistaking empowerment for omnipotence. One thereby re-enacts one’s childhood trauma by denying and disowning one’s own aggressive impulses, identifying with only what is ‘good’ in the self, and denying its opposite, and inadvertently identifying with those who one so fervently rallies against. Thus, the mutuality and interdependence which Benjamin describes can only be realised through recognition of the aggression taboo; in other words, to recognise how aggression can easily go unrecognised in the self, yet denied to the other. It is of course much more difficult to do the opposite and listen to somebody else, and recognise that their hostility may come from a place of hurt.
This article is adapted from an excerpt of my book ‘Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy: Working with the Curse Position in Clinical Practice.’
References
Benjamin, J. (1980). The bonds of love: Rational violence and erotic domination. Feminist Studies, 6(1): 144–174.
Callow, J. (2018). Embracing the Darkness. London and New York: I.B Tauris & Co. Ltd.
Hutton, R. (2017). The Witch. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wilby, E. (2013). The Visions of Isobel Gowdie. Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press.