Notes on resentment (with an emphasis on southern African culture)

What I intend, in this brief discussion paper, is to stimulate reflection and conversation among psychoanalysts and other professional observers of the human condition ― philosophical anthropologists, to use Max Scheler’s designation ― on the phenomena of resentment.

The word ‘resentment’ comes from the Latin, meaning “to feel again.” It is commonly defined as “the persistent, repeated re-experiencing of a past hurt, insult, or feeling of injustice, over a prolonged period of time.” The temporal persistence indicated in this definition is notably significant, because although resentment is experienced in the present, it is almost always grounded ― by means of the historicity and historicality of our thinking ― in experiences that belong to an actual or fantasized past … or more precisely, a past that is inextricably both real and imagined.

In the psychoanalytic literature, papers that address resentment per se are scant. Perhaps this is surprising. After all, once one attends to the phenomena of resentment, it seems pervasive. And distinctively human, since logically it seems to depend on second-order thinking (and the use of the conditional subjective), which only our induction within the symbolic order would seem to permit. Perhaps the lack of literature on resentment is not so surprising in that these phenomena may be covered by contiguous or embedded concepts such as hostility, domination, vengefulness and spite, mourning and the failure to grieve, gratitude or appreciation, envy and jealousy, and in general the inmixing of love and hate that is endemic to all human attachments. Plants and animals do not hate, humans do so ubiquitously. However, it seems to me that the conceptual contiguity or embeddedness of the notion of resentment is not sufficient to explain its relative neglect with the professional literature ― when it would seem to be a crucially significant set of processes within the pantheon of human emotions.

Shortly, I am going to suggest that the inadequacy of psychoanalytic consideration on this topic is also because resentment compels us to forego any effort to focus exclusively on intrapsychic phenomena and to confront the ways in which any narrative about psychological processes must address the structuration of human interaction at not only the interpersonal but also the sociopolitical level. And to confront specifically the incendiary issue of the way in which inequities, and our resentful reaction to them, govern so ubiquitously our everyday life.

I will return later to summarize what the psychoanalytic literature does contribute to our understanding of resentment, as well as to the philosophical contributions since Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1887 On the Genealogy of Morality (of which Sigmund Freud had to have been aware, even if he claimed not to have read it).

Let us rather start with some examples ― concrete and autobiographical ― of resentment in action. Because some listeners may not realize that these webinars are being recorded in Africa, I need to preface these stories ― which might mistakenly be taken as demeaning toward the cultures of southern Africa ― by stating how strongly I have become attached to my home here. I lived in England for two decades, in the USA for over three decades, and now in South Africa for the past sixteen years. I have also lived for substantial periods of time in India and in Thailand. It is in South Africa that I have applied for citizenship, relinquishing my American and British passports.

Ethnographers used to have a knack of trying to characterize with generalizations the “character” of any culture being studied. Japan is communal, the USA individualistic, etc. When I arrived in South Africa, Sue Levy ― the eminent founder of Johannesburg’s psychotherapy clinic that caters for those who cannot afford private treatment ― suggested to me that South Africa’s post-apartheid culture is characterized by shame. Many others have suggested that guilt ― especially white guilt ― is the salient feature. But what I am most struck by is the pervasiveness and the intensity of resentment throughout our nation. Admittedly, this is just an informal observation on the part of one individual, me! And, in no way, does it counteract my experience of South Africans as some of the warmest, most generous, and open-hearted people I have ever known.

Resentment always occurs around some axis of perceived inferiority and superiority. The subordinate resents the superordinate, and sometimes ― under specific psychodynamic conditions ― vice versa. Resentment may be toward any of those who are perceived to wield some modality of superior power ― for example, in terms of social prestige, political eminence, self-proclaimed moral stature, sexual prowess or satisfaction, educational standard, or epistemological purview. However, socioeconomic power is the modality that is often prominent, and perhaps always has some determinative role, in the force and virulence of these other modalities. And sometimes, as I shall show, those in the superior position may ― for specific and complex psychodynamic reasons ― resent those who are supposedly in the inferior position.

So, from a socioeconomic standpoint, if is entirely unsurprising that resentment seems to be one of the major motifs of South African culture. Perhaps not so much because of the history of brutal racial oppression under apartheid ― although that is far from dissolving into the irrelevance of distant history ― but because currently the average white citizen’s wages are three times more than those of the average black citizen … despite that fact that, since the end of apartheid in 1994, there is now a comparatively small black elite who earn on a par with wealthy whites. Nowadays, whites comprise a mere fraction over 7% of the population (prior to 1994 it was over 21%), but they still control well over 50% of the wealth. In short, as researchers from the World Bank have reported, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. And data from the World Inequality Laboratory show that this economic gap has narrowed by only a little since 1994.

At road intersections, beggars beg. In my car, I routinely stock a case of tins of baked beans, cans with flip-top lids. When I offer one of these, the donation is almost invariably greeted with excited appreciation ― only once in several years has anyone said something like “fuck you, it’s money I need for a fix…” But one sense what has to be there, underlying the gratitude, because ― after all ― in what insane world do we live … when well-fed me is driving around in car worth several hundred-thousand Rand, while his or her next meal is in question.

As an aside, we may note that, on a sociopolitical level, herein lies the argument against philanthropy. Philanthropy is a regulatory mechanism used by the wealthy to assuage the resentment of those whom the wealthy have a vested interest in keeping poor. Altruism, it would seem, is never clean. But, faced with the beggar at the intersection, do I really want to become like the character in one of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop … the man who goes around insulting service people in order to inflame their resentment and thus bring closer the much-needed socialist revolution?

Here is another ― more multidimensional ― personal anecdote. As I fell in love with Bontle, we collided, and became entangled with, the complex emotional web that ― I believe ― attends all inequity, but that sharply surfaces with intimacy. Bontle is an Ndebele-Sepedi woman, raised in Soshanguve, currently still living there and caring for her four younger siblings. For those not South African, Soshanguve is a “township” ― a historically segregated, under-developed and under-resourced, densely-populated and disadvantaged urban settlement ― located outside the periphery of a more affluent city, and comprising a mixture of formal housing and informal shacks. Bontle lives in a rather minimal RDP house with unfinished masonry and minimal amenities. “RDP” stands for the “Reconstruction and Development Programme” in which a state-subsidized shell of a house provided to qualified low-income citizens. By contrast, I live in a 3-million Rand house, located in the comparatively affluent Northern Suburbs of Johannesburg, where the amenities function most-but-not-all of the time.

For a couple in love, the disparities of this situation are surely unacceptable, intolerable. Perhaps it is evident that they should be unacceptable and intolerable to all of us.

So I offered to take money from the modest funds available in my saving-for-old-age (or for disability) bank account, so that the Soshanguve home might be extended, renovated, and completed. To do this, we needed a quotation from a reputable local builder. Here comes the gist of this story, as an illustration of the dark complexities of resentment.

The quotation arrived and was way more than double what either of us had anticipated. Bontle felt disappointment that perhaps the project would now not be implemented, and perhaps she resented that the decision to go ahead or not was ― at least from a legal standpoint ― entirely mine. I was taken aback at the extent to which my savings might be pillaged (parenthetically, I think even my indiscrete use of the verb “pillage” as I wrote this might be indicative of an entirely inappropriate and obnoxious feeling on my part). As we reacted to the invoice, I made a stupid joke about how we should do the plastering ourselves on weekends. Bontle was understandably hurt that I was making light of such an important matter, perhaps increasing her resentment toward me. Criticized for my insensitive remark, which obviously stemmed from some anxiety that my savings might be depleted beyond some limit that I had not actually even thought about … I then became resentful … why was I being criticized, rather than my magnanimous disposition being appreciated?

I later called myself out, and interrogated my motives. Clearly, it is note that I was taking personal responsibility for rectifying the historical and systemic injustices that are woven into the very fabric of townships in South Africa … although surely, on a moral level, I should be doing my part toward this much-needed rectification. But, leaving that aside for the moment, I still had to question an obnoxiously narcissistic piece pertaining to my feelings and actions. Am I acting in order to relieve a sense of guilt and shame over my privileges? Am I acting in order to prove to myself that I am a “good person”? Am I offering financial assistance because I genuinely want to support the welfare of the woman I love, and the four people for whom she is responsible? Or am I doing this quote/unquote “good deed” merely in order to be a hero in her eyes? Truthfully, I am unsure of the full answer to these questions.

Feelings of resentment have been called the “psychic poison of suppressed aggression” (and also, we should add, aggression that is repressed into an inarticulate but persistently disruptive condition of embodied unconsciousness). In close relationships, such feelings fester, especially if left unspoken and thus unshared. Resentments ― which will unavoidable recur as our intimacy progresses ― could poison the love that Bontle and I share. We “resolved” the moment I have just described by talking about our feelings, openly, honestly, and ― I need to add ― quite extensively. But this is not a “resolution” in the strongest sense. Sure, it assuages the hurt ― dialogue can be an almost miraculous palliative ― but it does not ablate the cause of the feelings.

So here are some hypotheses about resentment that I can draw from my own experiences:

1. The helped will always resent the helper. Often, this seems not to be well understood by the helper. If necessary, I can later illustrate this naivete, by telling you of several conversations I have had with my fellow white South Africans. This resentment can accumulate and eventuate in explicitly aggressive manifestations. I hope this will be addressed in our discussion.

2. The helper may come to resent the one who is helped. This is a psychodynamically more complex form of resentment, not least because it touches on the putative helplessness of the individual in relation to what is socioeconomically systemic. This resentment can erupt into explicit violence toward the oppressed … and, on an individual level, I can ― if necessary ― later illustrate this by a personal story about the violence that I felt and fantasized committing toward a disabled child on the streets of New Delhi, many years ago. Perhaps this will also be addressed in our discussion.

3. Resentments ― If kept private, unshared and unexpressed ― inevitably accumulate and fester. Thus, they are a poison that may be fast-acting, maybe slow, but are always deleterious in relations of intimacy. And also in relations between groups, as we may discuss.

4. On an individual level, dialogue and conversation may ameliorate the pain that is inherent in resentment. But resentments are a form of aggression and hostility triggered by real and imagined experiences of inequity … and the expression and mutual acceptance of feelings of resentment may assuage the hurt, but does not resolve the cause.

5. On a systemic level, in-group bonding may be facilitated by feelings of resentment toward the out-group, and the consequent sense of identity, achieved by belonging, is often founded on what Freud in 1921 called the “narcissism of minor differences.” However, this does not make the phenomena of resentment any less poisonous. Rather, it may exacerbate that which is iniquitous, and thus obstruct the rectification of inequities that is required if authentic healing is to occur.

Now allow me to finish these notes with a summary of what I have found in the philosophical and psychoanalytic literatures:

Resentment is an expression of hostility or aggression that serves as an avoidance of seemingly unbearable experiences of grief, triggered by subordinacy (helplessness, humiliation, etc). It is, so to speak, “violence light.” Nietzsche (1887) wrote about ressentiment as the revenge of the weak. Following Nietzsche, Scheler (1915) wrote of it in terms of a repetitive return to a wound, because the injury cannot be metabolized, and he linked this to systemically inscribed injustices that prompt envy and jealousy. What I think Scheler meant was that what he calls metabolization on an individual level cannot be effective without systemic transformation.

In his rather scattered observations about resentment,^ Freud amplified these conclusions. He argued what none of us wish to believe, namely that love always coexists with hate. And that, in intimate relations, since the latter cannot be discharged in a socially acceptable manner, it is usually held in a chronic simmering state. This is a condition that arrests time in that it perpetuates a past that cannot be mourned and thus resolved and released. In this sense, resentment involves a contemporary refusal of reality-testing about past events.

Various psychoanalysts coming after Freud have extended one or other aspect of his commentaries. Melanie Klein and her successors emphasized how the resentful person keeps the offender in a perpetual state of prosecution. This can be a desirable form of attachment … the perpetuation of resentment involves a failure to grieve and let go the past … a hated object still has the virtue of keeping us company, and thus we avoid the pain of loss and separateness. Jacques Lacan emphasized how resentment toward a punishing superego that is internal, is then projected outward toward others. Heinz Kohut emphasized how resentment follows from the narcissistic injuries that are wounds to one’s own sense of worth

We need not go further here, but there are so many threads that our discussion could pick up. For example, consider the resentment between…

the Employer and the Employee
the General and the Lieutenant
the Righteous and the Unrighteous
the Male and the Female
the Cis-gendered and the Trans
the Hetero and the Homo
the Clergy and the Congregation
the Director and the Actor
the Teacher and the Pupil
the Sick and the Healthy
those who have enough and those who do not
the one who writes and those who read…

I merely want to end by indicating the point that I hinted at the beginning. As rich as the psychoanalytic literature may be on the inner workings of resentment, it has limited itself by its reticence to connect its insights about the intrapsychic to a confrontation with the inequities of the external. Resentment is, when all is said and done, largely the psyche’s attempt at internal “justice” in the palpable presence of disparity and inequity, as well as in the absence of justice in the world at large.