Theoretical notes on our sense of belonging and its vulnerabilities

This paper was submitted in 2020 for the Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Sydney, Australia. It was never presented and its reproduced here without revision.

ABSTRACT: A theoretical paradox concerning the psychoanalytic examination of the sense of belonging is identified and discussed. Although the notion pervades many scientific and humanistic disciplines, it is addressed only implicitly or indirectly in the psychoanalytic literatures of object‑relations, attachment processes, and trauma studies. The exception is the literature that focuses on the self, on identity, and on “self‑states.” But these approaches tend to neglect Freud’s seminal contributions to the topic, which pivot around notions such as repression, the ego‑ideal, and the libidinal economy. These “self‑oriented” approaches typically both rely on dialogical methods of clinical inquiry (rather than on free‑associative speaking and listening, which Freud insisted is the since qua non of his discipline), and explain the phenomena of a sense of belonging in terms of descriptions of their manifest content, both when adaptive and when disrupted. While appreciating the value of such contributions, these notes attempt to unpack the sense of belonging, its limitations and its vulnerabilities. They do so both in terms of the ego‑ideal’s role in buttressing the ego organization’s capacity to establish and sustain self‑love for the sake of emotional wellbeing, and in terms of the way in which processes of suppression and repression determine the extent to which we are always strangers to ourselves, and hence can never truly belong even to ourselves (implying the extent to which a sense of belonging is fictive, illusory or even potentially delusional. Finally, it is suggested that clinicians, because they attempt to heal the victims of disruptions in the sense of belonging, habitually understand this sense as always being benign. In this context, it is noted that a sense of belonging is also important for the perpetrator. Movements such as authoritarianism, fascism, and fundamentalism (all of which are contemporarily on the rise) depend precisely on a sense of belonging being ardently maintained by their participants.

TEXT: There is a paradox in our psychoanalytic thinking, as we address humanly vital questions about the way in which every human develops and maintains a sense (or senses, in the plural) of belonging. Commonsense and popular psychology assert that every individual needs to sustain a sense of belonging, to another individual, a group, a place, a belief system — or any and all of these — and take it as obvious that the consistent fulfillment of this need is central to our basic emotional wellbeing. Indeed, in the tumultuous state of today’s global upheavals (with families and tribal formations torn apart by escalating patterns of voluntary and involuntary migration and many other factors), the traumas resulting from disruptions in the sense of belonging are everywhere around us. Social and community psychology, ethology and neuroscience, sociological and political studies (as well as those that address our “spirituality”) persistently emphasize the importance of belonging (and the stability of group identifications). These literatures may be variously informative (e.g., Block, 2018; Carter, Lederhendler & Kirkpatrick, 1999; Hooks, 2009; Schachter, 1959; Sollars, 2016; Turner, 2017), but they are generally focused on manifest content and are far from psychoanalytic in their orientation.

However, the notion of belonging as such is not conceptually conspicuous in the diverse literatures of psychoanalysis. This should surprise us. It may be implicit in the theorizing of self-psychology, of object relations, of attachment processes, and of trauma studies, but rather rarely is it discussed directly or explicitly. This may be because use of the notion, like that of identity, has always comprised an awkward “attempt to straddle the gap between two disciplines, social and individual psychology” (Gedo & Goldberg, 1973).

This problem of “straddling” has perhaps been most directly bridged by those mid‑century psychoanalysts who wrote about identity and fluctuating self‑experiences (e.g., Federn, 1952; Kohut, 1950‑1978; Schilder, 1935) and contemporarily by those who focus on the theorization of “self‑states” (e.g., Bromberg, 1996; Harlem, 2010; Sands, 2009; Stein, 2012; Stern 1983). But it remains a challenge for much psychoanalytic theorizing. Descriptively, the notion of belonging is close to that of feeling “at home.” Yet here too, there is too little psychoanalytic writing that explicitly theorizes, from an object‑relational standpoint, the determinants or the significance of such feelings, or even of what “home” may mean psychoanalytically. For example, Winnicott’s essays, posthumously collected and titled Home is Where we Start From, are surprisingly unhelpful in this regard (Winnicott, 1990). Indeed, there is a ubiquitous tendency in our field to assume that “home” is merely an extension of the maternal relationship — like Rey’s notion of the “brick mother” (Rey, 1994). Although profoundly suggestive — and here I am definitely not contesting the importance of these modes and directions of theorizing — these contributions may perhaps be limited in their capacity to help us understand fully boththe crucial importance of a sense of belonging throughout the life cycle, the psychodynamic sequelae of its jeopardization, and the way in which having a sense of belonging can be, or perhaps necessarily is, problematic.

I suggest that this is not just an issue of disciplinary focus, scope and application. Rather, it arises because, from one important and provocative standpoint, the praxis of psychoanalysis calls into question why, or in what sense, we need to belong and what, both positively and negatively, is entailed by having a sense of belonging (whether it be to one’s self, to one’s family, and indeed to one’s community, to one’s favorite sports team, to one’s ethnic or cultural tribe, to one’s nation state, or, more abstractly, to a political or religious ideology). The precept that we all need a sense of belonging is not — so to speak — indigenous to classical psychoanalysis for two reasons. First, since 1921, the notion has been assigned to the complex questions surrounding the differentiation of the ego‑ideal from the general ego organization (and of the ongoing relations between their operations). Second, the central lesson of classical psychoanalysis, by which I mean the method committed to free‑associative speaking and listening (which Freud insisted is the sine qua non of his discipline), illuminates the extent to which we do not, and cannot, fully “belong” to ourselves. This is the lesson that distinguishes what is repressed from what is unconscious in a merely descriptive sense. And it is one that, arguably, the dialogic emphasis of self, interpersonal and relational psychologies, tends to miss. The establishment of the repression barrier implies that our self‑consciousness can only ever have limited access to the fullness of who we are. On these two levels, which I will elaborate shortly, psychoanalysis “calls into question” our sense of belonging, despite the fact that we know intuitively and descriptively its importance and we know clinically the suffering caused by its rupture.

It cannot be disputed that a sense of belonging — which may well operate simultaneously on many levels — is vitally significant for psychological health. Many of us have had patients express the terror of not belonging, of being disaffiliated interpersonally and of being geographically or culturally dislocated. As a male patient once said to me, “I sometimes feel that, if I don’t see my group of friends regularly, I will float away into some dark vacuum of outer space.” Most of us have also had patients traumatized by being disrupted geographically and culturally. Recently, a single woman of 35 years asked for a consultation with me. A Muslim whose parents fled India after partition, she and her family had been forced to live in a succession of several Middle Eastern and European countries as perpetual refugees — never able to settle legally or even to feel that they belonged in the various cultures, subcultures or communities, in which they resided. Now in the United States with a permanent residency application still pending (as if interminably uncertain), she finds herself plagued by a diffuse sense of anxiety. This has been with her as long as she can recall, but is now becoming more acute, with intermittent panic attacks. She associates her pervasive feeling of anomie (which Durkheim discussed so ably in 1893 and again in 1897) to “never knowing quite where or who I am.” Highly talented, she is trapped in her feelings of inability to approach people for employment or for ordinary social pursuits. Desired by several appropriate suitors, she finds herself unwilling to go on dates. Instead, she rarely leaves the apartment owned by her elderly parents, clinging to them even while expressing how irritatingly unpleasant she finds their company. As she articulates it, she has lost what we could call her sense of agency over her life and, with great anguish in her voice, she adds “it’s as if I can’t belong anywhere.”

The paradox I am emphasizing is this. On the one side, the discipline of psychoanalysis leads us to have the utmost empathy for all those victims whose coordinates of personal and social identity have been disrupted and who are thereby traumatized by such detachment, disaffiliation or dislocation On the other side, the method of psychoanalysis surely empowers us to question why belonging is so emotionally vital even in adulthood, and also to question the various ways in which it can actually operate to create, rather than alleviate, suffering. That is, psychoanalysis should surely enter the currently fashionable debates over the “politics of identity.” It must do so, not so much by discussing how the oppression — contestation and intersectional conflict — of identities might be resolved by greater dialogue and understanding (e.g., Fukuyama, 2018), but rather by questioning, directly or indirectly, the psychodynamics underpinning the need to belong to, or identify oneself with, a familial group (e.g., Dodson & Iddan, 2015; Kaufman, 2013), an ethnic or cultural group (e.g., Fogelman, 1998; Kestenberg & Kestenberg, 1988), a geographical location, a political or linguistic group (e.g., Mabhikwa, 2018; Mann, 2015; Rozmarin, 2017), a religious experience (Pedroni, 2015), or an ideology (Barratt, 1985; Varvin, 2005), and so on.

As I said previously, the contemporary literature that broaches these questions psychodynamically usually does so in the theoretical terminology of “self states.” For example, Kanwal (2018) provides a sensitive and useful discussion of the experiences of a migrant analyst treating both migrant and non‑migrant patients in New York City, and much of his insights seem applicable to all sorts of treatment undertaken by any dyad with differences of race, ethnicity, culture, nationality, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, and so forth. But in such contributions, the role of the repression‑barrier, the ego‑ideal, and the libidinal economy seem to have disappeared. It is as if the internal dynamics of belonging are occluded by the discussion of manifest similarities and differences in this sense. So in this context and given the conciseness required in these notes, I will now return to the two significant aspects that I already mentioned concerning the deeper phenomena involved in the sense of belonging, and I will then conclude with a third point.

(1) First point: In 1921 Freud notoriously but somewhat indirectly challenged the sense of belonging, when he gave as prime examples the affiliative devotion inculcated by the church and the army. He does not actually use the term “belonging” anywhere in his text. Yet he presents his ideas in a tone that is trenchantly critical (hardly surprising at a time both when clerical fascism was rising dramatically and in the aftermath of four years of a European war that produced about 40 million casualties). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego develops the construct of an “ego‑ideal” (Ich‑ideal, not to be confused with the superego, Über‑Ich, nor with the ideal‑ego, Ideal Ich) that had been conceptually introduced, but not named as such, in earlier papers (Freud, 1914, 1917a, 1918, 1919, 1920). Freud initially acknowledges how many factors are involved in the individual’s reactions to group dynamics (whenever this involves identifications with entities — or with the leader of entities — such as the church, the army, the state, or with a family, tribe, race, ethnicity, location, or indeed with belief systems and ideologies). He then demonstrates how being recognized or respected, perhaps we might add “being seen” in Steiner’s terminology (1996‑2011), by an “other” stimulates the establishment of narcissism or “self‑love,” in a way that differentiates the ego‑ideal from the general structure of the ego organization. And, despite that “belonging” is not the term he uses, Freud shows how this ego‑ideal determines the individual’s sense of belonging to this “other.” That is, these processes create a libidinal economy in which the ego organization’s capacity for self‑love becomes tied to the ego‑ideal’s libidinal investment in its connection with this “other.” As with the formation of the superego, much of this involves identifications with the paternal function and it has been argued, for example by Lacan (1960‑1961), that the ego‑ideal specifically involves processes of symbolic introjection. Thus the dynamic of belonging is often tied to an idealization of the leader or to some other specifically recollected characteristic that emblematizes the “other” to whom one believes one must belong. One idealizes die Fuehrer; one dresses in traditional costume on “Heritage Day” (an annual South African event), one shares the communion wafer and donates to a religious institution, or one kills when the commander issues the order. Obviously, I am not suggesting the equivalence of such experiences, merely that the psychodynamics of their constitution are similar. They suggest, if you will, the diverse ways in which we maintain self‑love in the face of loss, and of the ways in which our ego organization allows us to go on living on the basis of multiple levels and modalities of sublimation, present or past, and with both positive and negative consequences in relation to our constructions of current “reality.”

All these lost connections, relational and material, previously sustained a sense of self as one that belonged to someone, to somewhere, or even to an abstraction such as that of a divinity. That is, they were connections that buttressed self‑love via the influence of the ego‑ideal, and thus can easily become sources of vulnerability for the ongoing maintenance of an ego organization and its sense that life is worth living. That is, the ego organization that must then face the here‑and‑now of what we call “reality” and indeed it must mourn whatever once sustained the ego‑ideal and/or find substitutive experiences that furnish the sense of belonging. Benefitting from Freud’s insights, it would seem that individuals who are most vulnerable to disruptions in their nexus of belonging are those for whom, in his words, “the separation between the ego and the ego‑ideal is not very far advanced … the two still coincide readily … and the ego has often preserved its earlier narcissistic self-complacency.” The issue of our capacity to mourn, find new resources for our ego‑ideal, and thus still love ourselves, is — as so many commentators have discussed in different ways — crucial to our capacity to survive traumatic experiences of detachment, disaffiliation, dislocation and other sometimes catastrophic disruptures.

(2) Second point: If Freud taught us anything, he surely showed us how the notion of belonging is inherently flawed in the sense that we do not belong to ourselves. Freud (e.g., 1916‑1917, 1917b) stressed that our resistance to psychoanalysis is precisely because it demonstrates how our ego organization — and one might add our “self” — is not, and can never be, “master in its own house.” We are, in Kristeva (1991) words, condemned interminably to be “strangers to ourselves.” This surely raises the question to what extent a sense of belonging — whether judged positively or negatively, whether consistently maintained or catastrophically disrupted — is inherently fictive, illusory or even potentially delusional, and thus a sense of which we would be advised to be deeply and seriously suspicious.

Laplanche (1987, 1992, 1992‑1993, 1999, 2000‑2006) discusses compellingly how we are psychically born of processes of interpellation. We are initially “hailed into being” by voices that come to us from outside — initially incomprehensibly or “enigmatically.” Thus, both an inchoate ego organization and the desire or libidinality that animates it are differentiated from out of our biological repertoire (which is depicted by Laplanche’s brilliant riff on Freud’s notion of Anlehnung). Later, when representational or linguistic abilities are more firmly established, other voices inform us — as forming us into who we believe we are and know ourselves to be. This has been endlessly discussed by theorists of the self‑concept from Cooley (1902), Sullivan (1953), and Mead (1954), as well as innumerable psychoanalytic commentators who pioneered a focus on the notion of the self and its formation via multiple processes of identification (e.g., Fenichel, 1926; Greenacre, 1958; Grinker, 1957; Jacobson, 1964; Lichtenstein, 1977; Spitz, 1959). Thus, after what Laplanche calls our “fundamental anthropological situation,” our ego organization develops from countless communicational — representational — exchanges and internalizations or identifications composing the inner theatre of our ego organization’s multiple constructions of self or selves and “objects.” Such exchanges not only compose our ego organization (and its self-constructs), but also inspire an ego‑ideal that buttresses our sense of existence, our sense of being lovable, and our sense of it being libidinally worthwhile to continue to live in the here‑and‑now.

Green (1974, 1999) and others (e.g., Barratt, 2016, 2017) discuss how the representations of the ego organization and the ego‑ideal are susceptible to the radically different processes involved in suppression and repression. Representations of our selves and our objects, as well as of the value of what is here‑and‑now, may be transformed by procedures of condensation and displacement that always involve some degree of suppression (Ünterdruckung). One’s allegiance to die Fuehrer can shift to a different leader, one’s respect for history can be acknowledged by techniques other than dress‑up, and so forth. However, some representations are not just suppressed but subjected to repression (Verdrängung), in which they lose their representational form but persist as traces within our embodied experience. Repression is a transmutation (not merely a transformation of representations). This distinction is crucially important because it explains — among other matters — why some traumatic ruptures to our sense of belonging are successfully healed by methods such as “somatic experiencing” (cf, Levine, 2008; Marlock, Weiss, Young & Soth, 2015; Weiss, Johanson & Monda, 2015). It also compels us to question whether the dialogic methods of self, interpersonal and relational psychologies (let alone many versions of the object‑relational standpoint) actually obscure the repressiveness of self‑consciousness and thus settle the patient into a sense of belonging that may actually — at least to some extent — be inherently fictive, illusory or even potentially delusional, rendering the patient vulnerable to further traumatization (via the repetition‑compulsion).

(3) Third and final point: To be brief, we must start to examine further how the notion of a sense of belonging challenges our ideals of psychoanalytic neutrality. The sense of belonging, as emotionally important as we know it to be, cannot be addressed with any pretense of apolitical scientificity. In our consulting rooms and in psychoanalytically‑informed labors outside the consulting room, we typically confront the sense of belonging in individuals for whom it has been disrupted, often traumatically. That is, the bereaved and the displaced — all those for whom the ego‑ideal’s external accoutrements have been lost or destroyed. However, this focus is on the side of the victim. We also have to recognize the weightiness and forcefulness that a sense of belonging has on the side of the perpetrator, the oppressor. It is generally acknowledged that today authoritarianism, including fascism, and fundamentalism are expanding and flourishing worldwide — which should be highly alarming to those of us who value human rights and civil liberties. Almost every psychoanalytic or psychodynamic examination of these phenomena has noted that participants in authoritarian and fundamentalist movements experience a seductively powerful sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. In this context, as much as a sustainable sense of belonging may seem wholly benign in relation to those patients we typically see in our clinical practices, it is nevertheless a set of phenomena of which we must be seriously and profoundly suspicious.

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