political theory · of aggression and play of donald winnicott. drawing on winnicott, i argue ......

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published online 14 August 2014Political TheoryIrena Rosenthal

Reading of Democratic ResilienceAggression and Play in the Face of Adversity: A Psychoanalytic

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Aggression and Play in the Face of Adversity: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Democratic Resilience

Irena Rosenthal1

AbstractRecent discussions about the affective dimension of democracy have said too little about the way in which disempowered citizens can sustain their struggles in the face of adversity. This article develops a theory about democratic resilience of disempowered citizens by turning to the theory of aggression and play of Donald Winnicott. Drawing on Winnicott, I argue that resilience depends on a capacity to mourn, a capacity for dissent, and a capacity to invent new techniques for interaction. Yet, we need also think beyond Winnicott and investigate how these capacities are radically transformed by democratic struggles. This allows us to see that democratic struggles can open up new possibilities for facing adversity but that they can also undermine resilience by developing rigid attachments to strategies of resilience. I conclude with a preliminary discussion of how democratic struggles might undo a tendency to rigidity.

Keywordsaffect, democracy, play, Winnicott, psychoanalysis

And then, whenever something upsets my mind, which is unused to meeting shocks, whenever something happens that is either unworthy of me, and many

1VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Corresponding Author:Irena Rosenthal, Faculty of Law, Department Legal Theory and Legal History, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105 Amsterdam 1081 HV, Netherlands. Email: [email protected]

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2 Political Theory

such occur in the lives of all human beings, or that does not proceed very easily, or when things that are not to be accounted of great value demand much of my time, I turn back to my leisure, and just as wearied flocks too do, I quicken my pace toward home. I resolve to confine my life within its own walls.1

In his essay On Tranquility of Mind the Stoic philosopher Seneca offers advice to a friend who feels exhausted by civic life. The unpredictability and disappointments inherent in civic action have become so overwhelming to Seneca’s friend that he is tempted to cease his public activities and seek shel-ter behind the “walls” of introspection. To keep this from happening, Seneca recommends to his friend numerous techniques for becoming more resilient when faced with the strains of civic action. These techniques vary from seek-ing out the support of friends to relaxing the mind with sleep, leisure, and moderate doses of alcohol.

Seneca’s musings about the need to cultivate resilience in the face of civic disappointment and exhaustion have not lost their relevance to this very day. Even more so than in the relatively small and cohesive Roman city-state, participation in late modern large-scale, fragmented, and fast-paced demo-cratic regimes can be an overwhelming experience. This is especially the case for citizens who are excluded or disempowered by hegemonic norms and customs and who engage in democratic politics to challenge the status quo. For example, citizens aiming for a new ordering of political institutions will often need to cope with disappointment, frustration, and shame when their calls for change are not heeded, or are ridiculed or rejected. Seeking political transformations outside the terrain of formal institutions, such as through experimentation with new ways of life or sensibilities, can be equally taxing: such “micropolitical” struggles can be difficult to sustain when the environ-ment remains unresponsive or hostile to the dissenting customs or alternative modes of being.2 So how do disempowered citizens become resilient enough to persist in their struggles in such unfavorable circumstances? In what ways might they ward off a “democratic burnout,” that is, a sense of exhaustion that may culminate in a withdrawal from democracy altogether?

Recent political thought has increasingly attended to the affective aspects of enacting democratic struggles with hegemonic power relations. In a chal-lenge to overly rationalist accounts of political engagement, political theo-rists working in highly divergent traditions have brought to the fore the argument that instincts, bodily energies, sensations, desires, moods, and feel-ings are pivotal in dissenting democratic struggles and can even, as Sharon Krause puts it, serve as “resources for potentially liberatory political transfor-mation.”3 Relatively little, however, has been said about how disempowered



Rosenthal 3

citizens become capable of sustaining such struggles in unresponsive situa-tions. For instance, agonistic democrat William Connolly notes that minori-ties need to be “persistent,” but he does not explain how disempowered citizens cultivate this disposition.4 In a different vein, Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition explains how negative emotions such as anger motivate dis-empowered citizens into starting a struggle yet he is silent about the affective conditions of perpetuating such struggles.5 Or, consider Danielle Allens’s work about the centrality of sacrifice in democratic regimes. While Allen argues persuasively that democratic struggle burdens disempowered citizens with painful feelings of anger and disappointment, her focus is so much on restoring a responsive dialogue between majorities and minorities that she does not explain which strategies disempowered citizens could turn to when majorities remain unresponsive.6

This article shares the insight of the aforementioned theorists that attend-ing to affects can enhance our understanding of the democratic politicization of power, but argues that this development needs to be pushed further towards an understanding of the democratic resilience of disempowered citizens. In focusing on the affective dimension of starting a new democratic struggle or, for that matter, the cultivation of majoritarian responsiveness to novel move-ments, political theory has not adequately contended with the fact that affect is also crucially needed to revitalize such struggles in the face of adversity.

In this essay, I develop a theory of democratic resilience that takes its bear-ings from the theory about play and aggression put forward by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Winnicott’s account is useful for thinking about democratic resilience because it clarifies the point that the creative transformation of the status quo—a practice that Winnicott calls “play”—implies the capacity to remain resilient in the face of adversity. Subjects develop this capacity through the mobilization and cultivation of aggression: a set of affects that, for Winnicott, includes spontaneous, contestatory bodily energies as well as more reactive feelings such as anger and frustration that arise in response to an unaccommodating environment. From Winnicott’s account of play and aggression, I will reconstruct three capacities for culti-vating resilience in dire circumstances: the capacity for mourning, the capac-ity for dissidence, and the capacity to invent new techniques for interaction. My suggestion is that these capacities are vital to the democratic resilience of disempowered citizens because they support the recovery from loss and allow aggression to be put to use in the resistance to conformist pressures and hegemonic forms of communication.

In highlighting the capacity for playful action at the heart of facing adver-sity, Winnicott’s approach offers a unique perspective for developing a psy-choanalytic account of resilience. For instance, as opposed to psychoanalytic



4 Political Theory

thinkers such as Freud and Klein, Winnicott shifts focus from acquiring inter-pretative insight about the conditions of unhappiness towards strengthening the ability to creatively change those conditions.7 This shift holds significant promise for democratic theory because it helps us appreciate that the chal-lenge for dissenting citizens is not only to better understand the causes of their subjugation but also to develop a capacity to initiate and persist in cre-ative transformations of oppression.8 Furthermore, Winnicott takes into account that developing resilience not only should attend to the capacity to mourn—an ability so much emphasized by Freudian and Kleinian accounts of developments—but also requires more contestatory capacities, such as persisting in dissent and creating new forms of interaction.9

Meanwhile, Winnicott’s approach to resilience also has a shortcoming that needs to be addressed when making his work useful for democratic theory: in treating early childhood experiences as the most significant environmental condition for realizing democratic agency, he tends to obscure how social-cultural practices other than those involving infant care significantly trans-form the capacities for democratic resilience. In developing my theory of democratic resilience, I will thus argue that we need also to think beyond Winnicott, more specifically, that we need to pay close attention to the way in which democratic struggles radically transform the potential for facing adversity.

This essay begins with a critical discussion of the work of Honneth, Allen, and Connolly in order to substantiate my claim that the turn to affect in con-temporary political theory could usefully attend in more detail to the role of resilience in democratic life. The second part of the essay lays out how Winnicott’s perspective contributes to a theory of democratic resilience, while part three addresses the limitations of his approach. By way of conclu-sion, I turn to the question of how democratic struggles might undo overly rigid attachments to strategies of resilience.

The Affective Turn and Dissenting Democratic StrugglesThe critique that drives the theorists who reflect upon the affective dimension of democratic politics is well known: many political thinkers—in particular, liberal and deliberative democrats—have put so much emphasis on cognition that the influence of feelings and bodily energies upon the democratic politi-cization of power has been neglected. There are of course vast disagreements between the theorists who have contributed to the affective turn. Most promi-nent perhaps are the debates about the extent to which affective states should be seen independently of cognition and, concomitantly, to what extent



Rosenthal 5

discursive strategies, such as argumentation, should be privileged as the most important form of democratic politics. But my main goal here is not to give a conclusive evaluation of the existing disagreements. It is rather to indicate a problematic convergence between the contending approaches, that is, the relative lack of attention to the affective resources for cultivating resilience.

Consider, for instance, Axel Honneth’s innovative account of the affective underpinnings of struggles for recognition. Seeking to repair an omission of earlier theorists of recognition (Hegel and Mead), who failed to explain “how experiencing social disrespect can motivate a subject to enter a practical struggle of conflict,” Honneth turns to affect to explain how social struggles emerge.10 He argues that negative feelings such as rage and shame can make subjects cognizant of the fact that they are misrecognized by a society’s legal institutions or predominant norms of achievement and that these feelings thereby function as “psychological symptoms” of injustice.11 Social move-ments—which offer a shared language for those feelings—help to transform suffering into collective acts of resistance against misrecognition and thus to “dispel the emotional tension . . . as a result of humiliation.”12

But why should the emergence of social struggles serve as the most impor-tant mode in which to address the affective dynamics of struggles of disem-powered citizens? Feelings of rage and shame will continue to arise when the struggle for recognition has started and is, so to speak, in full sway. For instance, a claim for a new right might be ignored or become the object of ridicule.13 In such a case, subjects are faced with not so much the challenge of initiating a struggle but rather the task of persisting in their resistance. Honneth, however, says very little about how disempowered citizens become resilient enough to undertake that task and, in the rare case where the dynam-ics of continuing with democratic struggles does arise, shifts his attention to the powerful. For example, he suggests that the livelihood of cultural minori-ties might be enhanced when their distinct vocabularies are given “well-meaning attention and consideration by the majority, so that the process of intercultural communication can get started in the first place.”14 Yet, Honneth is insufficiently attentive to the political work that minorities themselves might need to do to realize such a responsive ethos. Majorities could remain deaf to the call for intercultural communication: they might not see the point or experience it as existentially threatening. In such circumstances, minori-ties will need to convince their fellow citizens to respond to them with well-meaning considerations. They therefore need strategies that help them to persist in this task.

Danielle Allen perhaps did more than any other contemporary democratic theorist to highlight the emotional burdens of democratic politics for disem-powered citizens. She claims that the sense of loss and disappointment



6 Political Theory

resulting from democratic decision making calls for “rituals to manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly powerless sovereign.”15 For example, the distribution of benefits and loss needs to become an explicit theme of democratic debates and participants in dialogues should check across various constituents to what extent their proposals induce “a feeling of political vulnerability.” In this way, democratic politics can transform the anger accompanying such losses into more positive feelings such as “mild-ness” and “goodwill.”

Allen is surely onto something important in treating the losses of demo-cratic struggles as a key concern for democratic dialogues. This could expose psychic tensions that have remained invisible and that, when left unchecked, could significantly undermine the willingness to participate in democratic politics. Yet, like Honneth, Allen focuses so much on enhancing the dialogue between minorities and majorities that a discussion about cultivating resil-ience in the face of unresponsive majorities does not get off the ground. For example, Allen is inattentive to the empowering possibilities of withdrawing from mainstream discursive fora. When dialogical forms do not open up ade-quate space for challenging current hegemonic forms, it might be more pro-ductive for minorities to retreat from those dialogues and to look for alternative strategies, such as strikes, road blockages, and the occupation of public space, or, for that matter, to create new arenas for dialogical exchange.

We need also ask whether the transformation of anger into mildness and goodwill that Allen aims for does not, in fact, undermine the resilience of disempowered citizens. Citizens who express anger about established norms and customs are often interpellated to tone down their anger or to transform it into positive feelings that seem more akin to harmony. Sarah Ahmed makes this point beautifully in her portrayal of the angry feminist or “feminist killjoy”:

The feminist killjoy “spoils” the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness. . . . In order to get along, you have to participate in certain forms of solidarity, you have to laugh at the right points.16

From the perspective of Ahmed’s killjoy, the life of power is often sus-tained by encouraging those who resist hegemonic demands to give up their negative feelings. That is, transforming anger into mildness and goodwill often serves the ends of conformism, not resistance.

In contrast to Allen and Honneth, William Connolly’s work on agonistic democracy attunes us to the role of nondialogical techniques in developing more majoritarian sensitivity toward the struggles and claims of dissenting



Rosenthal 7

democratic struggles. For example, his discussion of the right to doctor-assisted suicide highlights that a more generous hearing of this right does not only call for a “reformulation of an old pile of arguments” but might also benefit from exposing the opponents of this right to memories or images of dying people who undergo long periods of suffering.17 In this way, the oppo-nents could become more compassionate with citizens who request doctor-assisted suicide to end their pain and may attenuate their initial harsh rejection of this right.

Connolly acknowledges that the cultivation of such responsiveness requires hard work by disempowered citizens. When majorities remain deaf to the plights and suffering of disempowered citizens, democratic politics is in need of a “militant, experimental and persistent political movement.”18 However, it is not clear how these movements can successfully cultivate per-sistence. What sort of tactics or approaches might help foster resilience among those who might otherwise give up, dispirited, on the face of resis-tance to their work?

Democratic theory needs to attend more closely to the cultivation of dem-ocratic resilience of disempowered citizens. When thwarted in their attempts to challenge exclusions, citizens are in need of strategies that help in the persistence with democratic struggles. Of course, in shifting the attention to the affective underpinnings of democratic struggles of disempowered citi-zens, I do not want to suggest that we should now place the entire burden of democratic politics upon disempowered citizens, or that we can disregard theorizing the affective politics of majorities. My claim is, rather, that while democratic life needs majoritarian responsiveness, it also crucially requires disempowered citizens who are resilient enough to perpetuate their struggles in unresponsive environments, and that democratic theory should help us understand better how such resilience might be cultivated. Donald Winnicott offers a promising starting point for pursuing that task. In contrast to current political thought, his account of play and aggression explores the conditions of developing resilience during the transformation of the status quo.

Aggression, Play, and Democratic ResilienceAxel Honneth has put Winnicott to use for his theory of recognition. In his attempt to displace atomistic liberal conceptions of self, Honneth draws attention to Winnicott’s claim that every human life starts in a symbiotic state of “undifferentiated intersubjectivity” and only gradually, with the help of the caretaker, becomes a more independent individual.19 But Honneth downplays somewhat a vitalist or even “innate agonistic tendency” in Winnicott’s work that offers productive resources for a theory of democratic resilience.20 At the



8 Political Theory

heart of Winnicott’s ontology is the idea that human existence is animated by spontaneous, impulsive forces or “primary aggression” that stem from an innate bodily propensity to motility.21 In opposition to the desire to merge with the other (which is satisfied by the symbiosis with the caretaker), pri-mary aggression searches for opposition: it looks for an object “to push against.”22 Though this force emerges spontaneously, Winnicott assumes that its manner of operation is crucially dependent upon cognitive abilities (such as consciousness, reason, and the imagination) and social contexts. From birth onwards, aggression interacts with the “psyche,” that is, the capacity to imagine the aliveness of the body and its relation with the environment.23 While the psyche initially only allows for omnipotent fantasies and aware-ness of satisfaction or need, it gradually becomes capable of reasoning and developing interpretations about one’s aggressive impulses. In turn, the inter-play between psyche and aggression is crucially shaped by the “holding envi-ronment”: a social context that, at first, is constituted by parental care and, later on, extended by other social-cultural settings such as groups and poli-tics.24 If the environmental conditions are right, Winnicott suggests, the aggressive impulses can be cultivated on behalf of play, that is, the experi-mental revision of reality in light of a dream of fantasy.

Winnicott understands play as an “intermediate area of experiencing” where fantasy and reality are linked but not conflated.25 In play, the subject is capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality and realizes that the environment does not fulfill her wish for complete (omnipotent) control. The playing subject does not, however, comply with the current terms and mani-festations of reality but tries to appropriate these worldly conditions in light of her fantasies. Play is thus situated in between subjectivity and objectivity, internal and external, fantasy and reality, yearnings for complete control over the world and acquiescing with the actual possibilities of this world.

The subject develops a capacity for play during the first months of early childhood when, after the initial symbiotic state, the infant gradually sepa-rates from the caretaker. Winnicott envisions the symbiotic state as essen-tially creative: the infant hallucinates that the breast which feeds her is her own creation and available at will. This stage of “primary creativity” is not similar to play, however, because the infant cannot yet acknowledge that real-ity (the breast of the caretaker) is distinct from herself. The transition from “primary creativity” to play takes place through an agonistic confrontation between the infant’s aggression and the caretaker. At this point of develop-ment, the infant’s aggression is inherently ruthless: it bites and squeezes the caretaker without concern for the results of its actions. The caretaker needs to “survive” these destructive attacks26: she should neither retaliate the aggres-sion with rejection or punishment nor smother the infant with so much



Rosenthal 9

comfort that the infant can no longer feel the “zest for life” that the aggressive search for opposition provides.27 When the caretaker succeeds in this task, the infant begins to experience reality as something that is not identical or susceptible to the control of her destructive behavior.

From here on, the infant learns to distinguish fantasy and reality and begins to manage the anxiety that arises from being separate yet dependent upon the caretaker. To this end, it develops cognitive abilities, such as the potential to interpret the changes in the environment as dangerous or benign and the capacity to form beliefs about the reliability of the caretaker. But along with intellectualizing her environment, the infant also soothes herself by actively seeking to transform the environment through playful acts. At first, play emerges through attachments to a “transitional object”: a doll or blanket that is experimentally altered (squeezed, bitten) in the light of fanta-sies. This embryonic form of play develops into more constructive forms of play during the “stage of concern”: a stage wherein the infant’s affective life is enriched but also complicated by an ambivalent mixture of feelings. On the one hand, she begins to feel grief and guilt for the ruthless effects of her aggression upon the caretaker and this allows her to take responsibility for aggression. But, on the other, she also starts to experience more reactive forms of aggression, such as anger and hatred. As in the earlier stage, the caretaker needs to remain resilient when confronted with the infant’s out-bursts so that the infant learns that the turmoil of her inner world need not lead to the collapse of the outer world. Meanwhile, the caretaker needs also to nourish the infant’s joy in play. By receiving the infant’s attempts to repair the (imaginatively) broken social ties, the infant develops “a personal urge to give and to construct and to mend.”28 At this point the infant also develops the capacity to use words. This allows the caretaker to expand the holding envi-ronment (that so far primarily consisted of bodily care such as feeding and physical holding) with verbal techniques such as exchanging interpretations about feelings. Eventually, these achievements evolve into the ability to par-ticipate in more mature forms of play: the “transitional phenomena,”29 such as art, religion, humor, philosophy, groups, and political participation (the “maintaining and rebuilding of the political structure”).30

For Winnicott, the achievement of play, and the management of aggres-sion that supports it, is an ongoing accomplishment that is “never fully estab-lished.”31 Throughout adult life, the subject is confronted with the challenge of relating the imagination to external reality: accepting, on the one hand, that there exists a gap between one’s fantasies and current norms, demands, or possibilities and, on the other hand, bridging this tension through play. This challenge implies that the subject has to cope with circumstances that hamper one’s playful activities. When environments fail to accommodate or



10 Political Theory

adequately hold playful interventions the subject needs to be able to search for or, better perhaps, create alternative conditions favorable to play. For my purpose of developing a theory of democratic resilience, I reconstruct three capacities that are central in the Winnicottian quest for play in the face of adversity and cite examples from democratic life to show how these capaci-ties resonate with features of struggles of disempowered citizens.

MourningFor a start, the subject needs to develop a capacity for mourning to rearrange his primary aggression after loss. When a playful appropriation of reality is unsuccessful, primary aggression searches for another, more feasible, object. This search is characterized by a stage of mourning or a depressed mood that evokes feelings of sadness and self-loathing which, like a “fog over the city,” deaden one’s sense of aliveness.32 Although the ending of a depression can-not be enforced, Winnicott argues that an adequate holding environment can mitigate these painful feelings. Such an environment offers the support of “memories of good experiences and of loved objects” which help the subject to lessen the hatred he feels toward the lost object.33 Also, it might make available “an external bad phenomenon” upon which the subject can project some of the self-loathing in order to relieve inner tension. And, finally, it could enact possibilities for play to cope with the strains of mourning:

For instance, one is at a music hall and on to the stage come the dancers, trained to liveliness. . . . Might it not be that the main point of the performance is a denial of deadness, a defense against depressive “death inside” ideas . . . ?34

The exercise of playful acts is thus not only an end-state of the mourning process but also an important technique that facilitates mourning: by engag-ing in play, the mourning subject cultivates a sense of aliveness that can miti-gate the painful feeling of internal emptiness typical for the mourning stage.

One way in which Winnicott’s account of mourning can be extended for thinking about the resilience of disempowered citizens is suggested by David Eng and Shinhee Han’s work on mourning patterns among Asian Americans.35 Drawing on Winnicott, among others, Eng and Han see in Asian American studies programs a promising holding environment for Asian Americans that could displace the pathological mourning habits cultivated in the mainstream practice of “psychic citizenship” for Asian Americans. The hegemonic model of citizenship typically represents Asian Americans as such an economically successful and self-reliant “model minority” that it leaves little room for Asian Americans to address and mourn their structural exclusions in cultural



Rosenthal 11

and political life. Negative feelings resulting from inequalities are thus dealt with intrasubjectively and attributed to a failure of the individual self rather than worked through in concert with others and related to exclusions in main-stream society. These pathological mourning habits, Eng and Han argue, might be one of the reasons why depression and suicide have been rising so rapidly among Asian American students. In contrast, the recent establishment of Asian American studies programs helps to establish communities for Asian American students wherein sadness and hatred about structural inequalities can be acknowledged and worked through collectively. Moreover, by allow-ing for “the creation of new representations of Asian Americans,” the pro-grams offer possibilities for play that alleviates the suffering resulting from structural exclusions while also establishing a healthier object for putting to use primary aggression than the homogeneous representations in mainstream culture. Eng and Shan thus offer a compelling example of how Winnicott’s account of mourning can be put to use for the resilience of disempowered citizens.36 Without an adequate holding environment, disempowered citizens could remain enclosed in grief, focusing on their own inferiority rather than attempting to create new possibilities for politicizing exclusions. The enact-ment of an alternative mourning environment which opens up possibilities for support, play, and opportunities for releasing depressive feelings is a pow-erful strategy to break this circle and might help to build up the capacity for democratic resilience in the face of an unresponsive society.

DissidenceWinnicott’s approach also highlights that resilience is dependent on a capac-ity for dissidence. Winnicott treats some degree of conformism to reality—or, as he puts it, “the ability to compromise”—as a sign of emotional maturity. For instance, adjusting to predominant codes of civility is often central to gaining a place in the social practice to which the subject seeks to contribute. However, when such a compromise is no longer favorable to play, the subject needs to be able to change course and resist pressures to conform:

In health, the compromise ceases to become allowable when the issues become crucial.37

The capacity for dissent can be developed by holding on to anger. When experiencing anger, the subject feels she has become “filled” up by unpleas-ant bodily sensations and disturbing ideas about being invaded.38 Winnicott suggests that accumulating some of these negative tensions can energize the subject on behalf of a defense against intrusive forces:

In health, the individual can store badness within for use in an attack on external forces that seem to threaten what is felt to be worth preserving.39



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Holding on to anger can only serve as a healthy defense mechanism, how-ever, when the subject is not entirely controlled or “possessed” by fantasies and bodily tensions but remains open for feedback from the external world. In this way, angry energy will be spent on threats that actually exist so that “the enemy can be met with economy of effort.” In contrast, those who have lost touch with the world might usher angry attacks even when the environ-ment no longer puts the subject at risk. In such a case, holding on to anger has become a compulsive habit rather than a potential resource for efficacious forms of dissent.

This connection between holding on to anger and remaining in touch with the external world is perhaps also the reason why Winnicott does not treat holding on to anger as a necessary condition for dissent. Rather than prescrib-ing one particular strategy as a solution for all circumstances, Winnicott gen-erally advocates flexibility or “elbow room” in the usage of defense mechanisms and argues that attachments to these mechanisms should not become “rigid.”40 Although Winnicott does not specify what his plea for flex-ibility entails for anger, his argument likely implies that the attachment to a particular defense strategy, such as holding on the anger, should not become overly strict but that one needs to be capable of adjusting or even letting go of the strategy in light of the characteristics of the environment in which the struggle for play is carried out. In this sense, we might say that holding on to anger functions like a transitional object: it can contribute to resilience when it sustains the capacity to transform reality, but when its task is done or when specific circumstances make holding on to anger corrosive of the quest for play, it is time to let anger go.

In response to debates about the affective conditions of democratic strug-gles that I discussed earlier, Winnicott’s claims about dissidence and anger thus highlight an affective tactic for cultivating “persistence”—the attitude that Connolly rightly identified as necessary for dissenting politics. Building up a stock of anger can help citizens who are committed to a transformation of the status quo to sustain their resistance against hegemonic forces. Yet, when holding on to anger no longer supports dissent or when particular cir-cumstances make anger ineffective in perpetuating democratic struggles, we should not persist in our anger but, rather, look for alternative tactics that can be put at the service of dissent. Winnicott’s qualified defense of anger also helps to show the limits of Allen’s claim that democratic politics needs to transform anger into mildness and goodwill. Although holding on to anger might not be essential for every democratic struggle, a democratic regime could, like the overcomforting caretaker, rob citizens of their vitality by ask-ing them to give up their anger. In her study about an AIDS activist move-ment the sociologist Deborah Gould shows that holding on to anger can



Rosenthal 13

indeed help to invigorate democratic struggles. As one of the participants in this group puts it:

We helped perpetuate that anger in the discussions that we had around the actions so that you [were] a bottle of emotions with a great sense of purpose. When you were at the demonstrations you sustained yourself on an adrenaline rush because you were chanting the whole time. . . . Physically maintaining that energy level does incredible things to you. You walk away from the demonstration feeling elated, really elated and purposeful.41

So when majorities are unresponsive the democratic resilience of dissent-ing citizens could greatly benefit from social forms that cultivate anger on behalf of struggles against exclusions.

Invention of New Techniques for InteractionIn addition to capacities for mourning and dissent, Winnicott’s perspective suggests that resilience calls for a capacity to invent new forms of interaction. Winnicott emphasizes this capacity in light of the dangers that the exchange of interpretations poses for playful agency. For instance, he notes that inter-pretations can inhibit play by intruding upon fantasy life: they call the subject to make experiences intelligible while play is dependent upon the possibility of dwelling in fantasies without having to make (immediate) sense. Furthermore, interpretations always to some extent compel the subject to make herself known in words that are never entirely her own and thereby harbor the risk of compliance. In view of these threats Winnicott’s asserts that individuals are in need of a so-called “right not to communicate.”42 On the one hand, this right seeks to provide for a resting place, that is, to allow the subject to withdraw temporarily from the pressure to make her fantasies intel-ligible through verbal exchange and to offer a shelter against the dangers of compliance inherent in dialogue. But, on the other hand, this right may also make room for the creation of new forms of interaction that playfully trans-form predominant forms of communication. When the current modes of com-munication in a particular setting hamper the quest for play, a retreat from the norms and customs from that setting could help to put aggression to use for “the establishment of a personal technique for communicating with does not lead to violation of the central self.”43

Winnicott’s innovations of psychoanalytic practice exemplify how Winnicott himself tried to develop a new technique of interaction. In opposi-tion to orthodox Freudian therapy—that encouraged patients to verbalize all their associations—Winnicott insisted upon the right of the analysand to



14 Political Theory

remain silent. When the analysand was suspended from the pressure of talk-ing out loud, Winnicott expected that the analysand would feel more free to sojourn in his fantasies and to put these in use for creating his own interpreta-tions about his condition. In this way, therapeutic interaction would help the analysand to develop confidence in his capacity for play: instead of waiting for the analyst to deliver an authorative interpretation about the analysand’s associations (as in the traditional Freudian “talking cure”), the analysand could initiate the interpretative exchange.44 In other words, Winnicott believed that implementing a new technique of interaction was central in revising the traditional power relations between analyst and analysand and, in doing so, could make the analysand more resilient in his struggle for play.45

While Winnicott does not explain how the retreat from hegemonic forms of communication may benefit subjects who are engaged in action in concert, such as democratic struggles, his account acknowledges that collective tran-sitional phenomena can offer the subject a “resting-place” during the ongoing challenge of relating fantasy and reality.46 Moreover, seeking out the solidar-ity of others who are engaged in similar quests for play can greatly benefit creative action and may thus serve as an important holding environment for the invention of new interaction techniques:

We can share a respect for illusionary experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusionary experiences. This is the natural root of grouping among human beings.47

These thoughts, taken together, suggest that disempowered citizens may build up resilience by collectively retreating from mainstream fora of demo-cratic interaction. Such a withdrawal allows citizens to put their aggression to use for the creation of new strategies for interaction that are more favorable to a particular democratic struggle. In this respect, Winnicott’s account indi-cates that Honneth’s and Allen’s reflections about strategies to ameliorate dialogues between majorities and minorities might have missed the empow-ering potential of retreating from such dialogues. If the current power rela-tions governing the interaction with majorities do not allow for politicization, or fail to establish a more responsive form of civic engagement, citizens should not hesitate to put these dialogues to a halt and create alternative tech-niques of interaction that unsettle the power relations in those dialogues.

To illustrate how a retreat from mainstream dialogical settings can support the invention of new techniques of interaction and thereby build up the resil-ience of disempowered citizens who come together as a group, it is useful to turn to the Industrial Areas Foundation, a network of U.S. grassroots organi-zations that was established by Saul Alinsky in 1940. A central tactic



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in contemporary IAF politics is the formation of so-called “accountability sessions”: political meetings where public officials and candidates are invited to buildings situated at the heart of the local communities that take part in IAF.48 The withdrawal from mainstream political fora, such as government buildings, to spaces like churches and cafeterias that are frequented and con-trolled by the participants in IAF allows the movement to create forms of interaction that challenge the power relations in established political settings. For example, in being confronted with the numerous people that support IAF, the politicians come to see the potential power of the organization and this, as Jeffrey Stout puts it, helps to “put officials in a position of needing to negoti-ate with it.”49 Furthermore, by taking charge of the meetings, IAF can put topics on the agenda that are much more difficult to address in established fora. During accountability meetings, the politicians are thus less capable of dismissing claims by IAF and, not unlike the Winnicottian analyst, called upon to wait for and respond to the interpretations of those who are normally situated in an inferior position. In doing so, IAF significantly enhances the resilience of its members. When citizens who are normally marginalized in official political arenas are enabled to alter the mode of interaction that struc-tures political meetings, they learn that the confrontation with adversity might harbor possibilities for creative renewal and that they need not have to comply with norms and customs that inhibit their struggles for play.

Transforming Resilience in Democratic StrugglesSo far I have argued that Winnicott’s theory about play and aggression offers a highly instructive starting point for our thinking about democratic resil-ience. His perspective suggests that capacities for mourning, dissidence, and the creation of interaction techniques are central in sustaining playful agency in the face of adversity, and I offered various examples in order to show that his view resonates with important elements of building up resilience in every-day democratic life. Yet, when putting Winnicott’s theory to use for demo-cratic politics, it is important to ask whether the dynamic of democratic practice not also resists or fails to comply with some assumptions in Winnicott’s thought. In this section, I argue that paying close attention to actual democratic struggles indeed exposes a limitation of his approach: it plays down that collectivities which constitute citizens in later life, such as democratic struggles, cultivate resilience in ways that are irreducible to fam-ily dynamics and it underestimates how such groups might also undermine resilience by developing rigid attachments to strategies of resilience.

We have seen that Winnicott acknowledges that the cultivation of resil-ience is dependent upon environmental conditions other than good enough



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parental care. The various transitional phenomena—arts, groups, humor, politics—that exemplify adult forms of play offer the subject possibilities for retreat and building up creative agency when facing adversity. Yet, despite this emphasis on the contribution of social-cultural practices to developing resilience, Winnicott underrates the distinct transformative effect of these practices upon the capacities for mourning, dissent, and the invention of interaction techniques that sustain the struggle for play. In his account, the influence of transitional phenomena upon affective life appears as an aggre-gation of the potential for play that was acquired during early childhood: he argues that the transitional experiences provided by social-cultural practices are “in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is ‘lost’ in play”50 and claims that “cultural influences can . . . be studied as an overlap of innumerable personal patterns.”51 And, throughout his work, the family is privileged as the most crucial site for realizing this “play area” and “personal patterns.” For example, Winnicott treats the family as the most important environmental condition for constituting democratic agency: “ordinary good homes provide the only setting in which the innate democratic factor can be created.”52 But social-cultural practices shape democratic agency in ways that exceed the family environment and often remold the capacities that were shaped in childhood. Consider, for instance, the alternative mourning envi-ronment offered by Asian American studies programs that I referred to ear-lier. Eng and Han emphasize that many of the Asian American students who might benefit from this holding environment often acquired their pathologi-cal mourning habits during their own upbringing. That is, since many Asian American families internalized the stereotype of the self-reliant Asian American minority prevalent in mainstream society, Asian Americans who do not conform to this model are not only barred from possibilities to mourn by the wider culture but often also rejected by their very own families.53 This suggests that rather than singling out the family as the privileged site for cul-tivating democratic resilience, we should investigate more closely how the capacity to endure adversity is shaped and altered by the various transitional experiences in which citizens participate in later life. In other words, what could be relevant here might be the second homes of political collectivity rather than our first homes.

Along these lines, the sociologist Erika Effler has shown in her ethnogra-phy of an anti–death penalty movement and a Catholic welfare movement how much the employment of anger in social movements is dependent upon locally specific rules and techniques that radically transform the affective life of the participants.54 The anti–death penalty activists tried to change capital punishment laws through acts of civil disobedience (such as disrupting law trials that called for the death penalty), by organizing vigils at the office of the



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district attorney, and by getting media attention for their cause. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, however, the political climate made it increasingly difficult for this group to gain attention for their cause: the media and local politicians focused mainly on the war on terror. To help the participants to confront and transform these unresponsive circumstances, the staff of the group cultivated anger to encourage the mourning of losses and the persistence in dissent.55 For example, by narrating stories about past injustices and drawing attention to impending death penalties, the staff helped the group members to redirect feelings of inadequacy and desperation into “feelings of righteous anger and power.”56 Furthermore, the staff stimulated the participants to hold on their anger by organizing protests that put the activists in face-to-face conflicts with their political opponents. Effler’s account illustrates powerfully how these techniques—that were so well suited to the group’s militant style—over time radically altered the affective experiences of the participants. For instance, while participating in the pro-tests initially unsettled new participants, it eventually strengthened their appetite to assert their cause:

Newcomers found the small, highly visible, and confrontational vigils threatening and exhausting. . . . Vigil regulars, on the other hand, tended to get pumped up by the jeers of passersby. Face-to-face conflicts with hecklers enabled regulars to experience intense feelings of convictions and camaraderie.57

The participants in the Catholic movement were also pressed into an affective conversion process that transformed the usage of anger. This group was com-mitted to ideals such as universal hospitality and a radical change in the hege-monic attitude to the poor, and enacted these aims by living in voluntary poverty in a poor urban neighborhood and by helping homeless people. Realizing these ambitions was challenging however: homeless people would confront the group members with so many problems (stealing goods, drug abuse, and aggression toward others) that they had to be kicked out. When thwarted in their attempt to deliver hospitality, the participants felt a painful sense of failure, disappointment, and frustration. Moreover, the experience that some people abused their service often initiated a judgmental, angry response toward the homeless people. But because anger tends to increase consciousness about boundaries and can thereby diminish the willingness to deliver universal hospitality, the rules and techniques of this group encour-aged the participants to let go of this feeling or, better perhaps, to transform anger into feelings that were more attuned to the group’s distinct ideal. For example, by sharing their sense of inadequacy, telling tragic stories about “the injuries of children working in the sugarcane fields and grandmothers



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and their children sleeping on benches in the cold” and highlighting the absurd aspects in the stories, the participants tried to convert anger into grief, humility, and a sense of humor.58 In this way, the participants could not only accept their failures but also cultivated a more easygoing attitude towards the disorderly and bleak circumstances that shaped their daily work and thereby build up the capacity to persist in their dissenting way of life. For example, in the early stages of his involvement with the group, the Catholic worker Nick experienced profound anger and cynicism because of the frustrations of liv-ing and serving in the rough conditions of a poor neighborhood. But eventu-ally “angry Nick” became “unflappable Nick . . . smiling in the face of personal aggression, hopelessness and chaotic conditions.”59

Effler’s case studies offer a detailed account of two groups which tried to enact a dissenting ideal in dire circumstances and were thus, in a Winnicottian sense, involved in a struggle for play. Her ethnography suggests that Winnicott is right in pointing out that holding on to anger can serve democratic resil-ience but that it is not a viable strategy in all circumstances: for the Catholic movement, sustaining their dissent from mainstream society was much better served by stimulating the participants to let go of anger. Yet, her analysis also unsettles Winnicott’s suggestion that the potential for dissent in groups derives from the family environments of the participants involved. The spe-cific rules and techniques in the democratic struggles that Effler discusses gradually displaced the habits for anger that the participants had learned in previous environments and inculcated a “new emotional rhythm” that was better attuned to the ideals that the groups were committed to.

Winnicott’s perspective is not only inattentive to the transformative effects of transitional phenomena upon resilience but also says too little about the way in which these practices might undermine the potential to confront adversity. Consider, for example, Winnicott’s claim that one needs to remain flexible in the usage of strategies of resilience so that they can be revised in light of particular circumstances. His account of the environmental failures that produce a tendency for rigid attachments treats inadequate parenting in early childhood as “the most significant” environmental condition.60 This suggests that our analysis of what endangers flexibility in democratic politics would need to focus primarily on the care that individual citizens received as infants; conversely, it suggests that such flexibility might be adequately secured when citizens have received good enough parenting early in life.61 But, surely, the transitional phenomena that shape attachments in later life can also significantly diminish the potential for flexibility. In this respect, Effler’s study also offers a helpful supplement: it reveals the crucial effect of social movements upon developing a predisposition for rigid attachments to strategies for resilience. Take as an example the cultivation of humor among



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the Catholic workers. While humor made the workers more laidback and thereby helped them to endure daily frustrations, it also had a cost: in becom-ing more easygoing, the workers developed a strong aversion to planning and this often put off financial donors that the group relied upon for its survival. Yet, the local history of the movement made it difficult for the participants to alter or let go of this strategy: because humor had been so successful for con-fronting setbacks in the group’s past, the workers insisted upon telling each other funny stories when the conflicts with the financial donors intensified. This left little room for experimenting with alternative approaches to con-fronting the problems with the donors or, for that matter, for trying out a new approach to attract necessary funds. So, in other words, Effler’s analysis offers a compelling illustration of Winnicott’s point that resilience can be undermined when we become trapped in strategies. Yet, at the same time, it also diverges from Winnicott’s account insofar as it derives a tendency for rigidity not primarily from childhood experiences but conceptualizes it as a potential drawback effect of the local histories of social movements. Effler’s case study thus shows that rather than focusing primarily on the early child-hood of individuals we need to probe deeper into the particular histories of political collectivities when trying to understand why some people become incapable of renewing strategies for resilience.

Conclusion: Playing with Strategies for ResilienceEngaging the conditions of democratic resilience of disempowered citizens, so rarely talked about in contemporary democratic theory, is essential for understanding the vitality of dissenting democratic struggles. The approach suggested here indicates that we need to take seriously how democratic strug-gles can open up new possibilities for facing adversity but also pays attention to the possible dangers residing in these struggles, such as discouraging the renewal of strategies for resilience.

To end, I want to consider to what extent political collectivities that breed a loss of flexibility might harbor possibilities for undoing rigidity. The move-ments that Effler studied seemed incapable of circumventing their rigid ten-dencies: over time, the movements became in the grip of a stifling “logic” that was increasingly limiting possible actions, “damming up potential paths so that action is pulled towards the few remaining paths, which reduces the flexibility of the actor.”62 And, on Effler’s understanding, this “logic” is not only characteristic of the particular groups that she studied but illustrative of patterns of group involvement more generally. But are groups really destined to inflexibility? Or might there also be a more Winnicottian way of address-ing a loss of flexibility, such as engaging in playful experiments with strate-gies that call for renewal?



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For a preliminary answer to that question, I want to take my cue from the notion of “boundary markers”—a term coined by the sociologist Michael Farrel.63 In his study on influential artistic and political innovation move-ments, Farrel highlights the point that the vitality of dissenting groups is dependent upon group members who experiment with the boundaries set by the group’s rules and practices:

Rather than being a target of ridicule, their ideas [of the boundary markers, IR] are taken seriously and openly discussed. . . . The presence of a questioning minority stimulates thinking in other members, and, confronted with the negative feedback, the group develops more creative and workable solutions to their problems.64

While Farrel concentrates his reading of the practice of boundary marking on the circulation of dissenting views within groups rather than strategies for resilience, his case studies suggest that boundary marking might also be mobilized for the account of democratic resilience that I am developing. Consider, for instance, his discussion about the rise and fall of the “bloomer dress”: a technique that was central to the resilience of the American nine-teenth-century suffragette movement Ultra. For several years, the members of Ultra wore a loose-fitting combination of trouser and a short skirt that was radically different from the tight corsets and crinolines fashionable at the time. The bloomer dress served both as a new technique for interaction with the wider society—expressing the group’s critique of male-dominated soci-ety—and also built up the capacity for dissent by daily disciplining the women into the feeling of nonconformism. At the point, however, when the group shifted its focus from criticizing gender inequality to proposing legal reform, the dress became somewhat of an obstacle for realizing their goals. It was the dress rather than their proposals for legal reform that attracted the media attention, and the radical appearance of the Ultras was a barrier in building coalitions with more conservative women’s groups. In light of these problems, one of the leaders of this group, Elizabeth Stanton, urged the other members of Ultra to take off the dress. Her plea initially confused the others, and some women refused to give up the dress: they had become attached to its comforts and saw it as a crucial exemplary practice for other women. But Stanton persisted in her appeal to change course and eventually the others too came to realize that the dress had become a hindrance to realizing their quest for women’s rights and, like a transitional object, let the dress go.

What Farrel’s account of boundary marking suggests to me is that it is indeed possible for dissenting groups to diminish rigidity by engaging in playful experiments with strategies for resilience. In fact, such Winnicottian



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experiments could be crucial to enhance the groups’ potential to confront adversity. Enduring a certain amount of aggression, instability, and conflict within the group could help it to creatively adapt to changing circumstances, even though many participants may initially experience this trial as an under-mining of their democratic resilience.

The practice of boundary marking, moreover, may mean that the relation between majoritarian responsiveness and minority practices within activist groups to some extent mirrors the interplay between majorities and minori-ties within the wider democratic arena. As I argued earlier, enhancing demo-cratic struggles against hegemonic norms not only requires that majorities cultivate responsiveness towards minorities but also calls for minorities that are resilient enough to persist in their struggles when majoritarian respon-siveness is unavailable. The Stanton example indicates that this point might also apply to the inner operations of activist groups. To invigorate their strug-gle against gender inequality, the participants in Ultra had to open up space for boundary markers and thus needed to develop responsiveness to a minori-tarian practice within their own group. That is, if the participants had not at some point reacted favorably to Stanton’s proposal to let go of the dress, the group could have remained stuck in a ritual that, arguably, would ultimately have undermined their struggle. But when the others felt threatened by her proposal and were not yet willing to engage with it, Stanton was audacious enough not give up. As such, the practice of boundary marking points toward a potential for resilience that exceeds the availability of majoritarian respon-siveness and shows that encouraging change within democratic struggles also calls for capacities that help dissenters to persist in their resistance when one’s fellow activists do not provide a responsive holding environment. How exactly resilience might be cultivated when neither dissenting democratic struggles nor the democratic arena at large offers a good enough holding environment is a topic for further research. Favorable parental care might be one condition that we need to take into account, but, most importantly, the perspective presented here orients us to settings where early childhood cir-cumstances are potentially transformed, such as the workplace, education, and informal networks between friends. In any case, democratic resilience requires ongoing care in environments that cultivate the playful and defiant possibilities of aggression, enabling disempowered citizens to become more able to face the challenges of democratic life.

AcknowledgmentI would like to thank Marieke Borren, Luigi Corrias, Yolande Jansen for their helpful suggestions and criticisms. A special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for Political



22 Political Theory

Theory for their generous and detailled comments. Thanks, too, to Bert van den Brink and Bonnie Honig for offering insightful feedback at an earlier stage of this project. I am also grateful for all the comments received during presentations of previous ver-sions of this article.

Author’s NoteEarlier versions of this article were presented at Erasmus University, University of Sussex, Leiden University, and University of Amsterdam.

Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

FundingThe author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-tion of this article.

Notes 1. Seneca, “On Tranquility of Mind,” in Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. J. Basore

(Cambridge: Harvard & Heineman, 1928), 155. 2. I borrow the phrase “micropolitical” from Jane Bennett and William Connolly.

See Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000).

3. Sharon Krause, “Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics” Political Theory 39, no. 3 (2011): 300. When referring to the turn to affect in polit-ical theory, I do not only mean theorists who employ Deleuze’s notion of affect but also include theorists who work in Aristotelian, Hegelian, liberal and psycho-analytic traditions. In addition to the thinkers that I cite elsewhere in this article, theorists that have been central in articulating the affective dimension of demo-cratic politics include, a.o., Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 106–26; George E. Marcus, The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Verso, 2005); Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensations (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

4. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 51. 5. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social

Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 6. Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown V.

Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).



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7. For more on Winnicott’s replacement of the “capacity to know by the capacity for play,” see Adam Philips, Winnicott (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 46–47, 138–44.

8. However, as I indicate below, Winnicott’s view does not assume that creative action operates independently from cognition.

9. In “Bringing Ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning,” Political Theory 40, no. 4 (2012): 409–36, David McIvor puts Melanie Klein’s theory of mourning to use for democratic theory. He explains how Klein’s view of mourning, which centers on the ability of subjects to accept the ambivalence of their attachments, might help to sustain nondogmatic identities. While I agree with McIvor that the capacity for mourning supports a democratic ethos, my Winnicottian approach also emphasizes the need for contestatory capacities so that citizens can sustain the enactment of alternative practices when majorities refuse to mourn and cannot live with ambivalence.

10. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition,135. My emphasis.11. Ibid., 136.12. Ibid., 138.13. Bonnie Honig observes that new rights always seem laughable because they resist

recognized legal standards in Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 62.

14. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 168.15. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 41.16. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press,

2010), 65.17. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 148.18. Ibid., 51. Emphasis added.19. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 98.20. I borrow this phrase from Adam Philips, who uses it in Winnicott, 109. While

Honneth notes the role of reactive types of aggression in Winnicott’s account, such as anger and its role in separating the self from the environment, he over-looks Winnicott’s affirmation of spontaneous forms of aggression and the impor-tant relation between this latter force and the creative transformation of the status quo.

21. What Winnicott initially called “primary aggression,” he later referred to as “aggressive impulse” or “life force.”

22. Winnicott, “Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development,” in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1982), 212.

23. Winnicott, “Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma,” in Through Paediatrics, 244.

24. Winnicott, “Parent-Infant Relationship,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Karnac Books, 1990), 47.

25. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005), 3.



24 Political Theory

26. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification,” in Playing and Reality, 120.

27. For instance, the infant might lose the “zest for life” when the caretaker offers food before receiving the infant’s signal. In such a case, the infant cannot suffi-ciently discharge aggression in the feeding process. Winnicott, “The Depressive Position in Normal Emotional Development,” in Through Paediatrics, 268.

28. Winnicott, “Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development,” 206.29. Winnicott, “The Concept of a Healthy Individual,” in Home Is Where We Start

From (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 36.30. Winnicott, “Cure,” in Home Is Where We Start From, 119.31. Winnicott, “The Capacity for Concern,” The Maturational Processes, 74.32. Winnicott, “The Value of Depression,” Home Is Where We Start From, 75.33. Winnicott, “The Depressive Position in Normal Development,” 275.34. Winnicott, “The Manic Defense,” Through Paediatrics, 131.35. David Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” in Loss: The

Politics of Mourning, ed. D. Eng and D. Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 343–71.

36. This section focuses on the analogies between Winnicott’s theory of resilience and the case study of Eng and Han. Yet, as I point out in the next section, their case-study (and the other examples that I cite) also challenges some core assump-tions in Winnicott’s account.

37. Winnicott, “True and False Self,” in The Maturational Processes, 151.38. Winnicott, “Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development,” 207. Winnicott

does not specify how anger is experienced in the body, but I assume we might think of sensations, such as a tightening of the chest or a clenching of the fists and jaw.

39. Ibid., 209.40. Winnicott, “Freedom,” Home Is Where We Start From, 231.41. Cited in D. Gould, “Passionate Political Processes,” in Rethinking Social

Movements: Structure, Meaning, and Emotion, ed. J. Goodwin and J. Jasper (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 172.

42. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,” The Maturational Processes, 179–92.

43. Ibid., 190.44. This is not to say that some features of Freudian therapy cannot be made fruit-

ful for challenging the classic power relations between analysand and analyst. Consider, for example, Nancy Luxon’s agonistic reading of Freudian psychoana-lytic practice in which the analyst is challenged to be “drawn into the patient’s world and experiences, rather than insisting on her own world or knowledge-base” (“Risk and Resistance: The Ethical Education of Psychoanalysis,” Political Theory 41, no. 3 [2013]: 395–96). Luxon supports her reading of Freud with var-ious writings from the relational school of psychoanalysis (of which Winnicott is part), but she does not discuss Winnicott’s plea for silence—a practice that could offer a significant contribution to Luxon’s aim to make psychoanalytic therapy an occasion for undoing sedimented power relations.



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45. Winnicott’s idiosyncratic prose provides another example of Winnicott’s own struggle to develop new techniques of interaction. By using self-created words rather than the technical terms characteristic for post-Freudian psychoanalytic writing and by infusing his writing with digressions (or, as Honneth puts it, “cryptic asides”), Winnicott tried to preserve a sense of individual playfulness that the hegemonic psychoanalytic style in his view tended to undermine.

46. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 3; Winnicott, “The Concept of a Healthy Individual,” 35.

47. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 4.48. Several studies about IAF discuss the role of accountability sessions in empow-

ering marginalized citizens. See, for instance, Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Romand Coles, “Moving Democracy: Industrial Areas Foundation Social Movements and the Political Arts of Listening, Traveling, and Tabling,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 678–705. Alinsky had also underscored the need for his organization to devise “new tactics and a new arena” when main-stream political settings for communicating with the powerful blocked the strug-gles of his movement (see Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals [New York: Vintage Books, 1972], 142.)

49. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized,109.50. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 18 (my emphasis).51. Winnicott, “Psycho-analysis and the Sense of Guilt,” in The Maturational

Processes, 15.52. Winnicott, “The Meaning of the Word ‘Democracy,” in Home Is Where We Start

From, 247 (emphasis in text). Winnicott makes a similar claim with respect to the personal identity needed for political participation, arguing that it “can only become fact in each individual case because of good-enough mothering and environmental provision of the holding variety at the stages of immaturity.” Winnicott: “Cure,” p. 119 (emphasis in text).

53. Eng and Han: “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” 352. As the anonymous reviewers reminded me, Gould and Stout also connect the cultivation of demo-cratic resilience with the participation in a political collectivity rather than the relationships in early childhood that Winnicott sees as most crucial.

54. Erika Effler, Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes: Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

55. Effler’s case study illustrates nicely that techniques for building up the capac-ity for mourning, dissent and the invention of new techniques for interaction in practice tend to overlap.

56. Ibid., 117. Stout also discusses the role of leaders in focusing anger on injustices. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 64–69.

57. Effler, Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes, 65.58. Ibid., 116.59. Ibid., 134.60. Winnicott, “Freedom,” 237.



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61. Though Winnicott himself does not connect his reading of rigidity with demo-cratic agency, I think it is warranted to derive these implications from his account in light of what I mentioned earlier above, namely, Winnicott’s treatment of the family as the most significant breeding ground for developing democratic agency.

62. Effler, Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes, 190.63. Michael Farrel, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001).64. Ibid., 282.

Author BiographyIrena Rosenthal currently works at VU University Amsterdam, where she received her PhD. In 2014-2015, she will join the new programme for Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics (PPLE) at the University of Amsterdam, as an assistant professor (where she can be reached at [email protected]). Her research interests include con-temporary political and legal theory, the affective and bodily dimensions of civic engagement, psychoanalysis, agonistic democracy, Foucault’s political thought, human rights and religious freedom.



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political theory · of aggression and play of donald winnicott. drawing on winnicott, i argue ......

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