Weltschmerz à Gogo (@ThatWeltschmerz@kolektiva.social)
For a culture struggling with extreme political polarization, moving toward a depressive position would mean fostering a collective capacity to see political opponents as complex, nuanced individuals rather than entirely negative or hostile figures.
Opinion | I’m a Couples Therapist. We Can Address Our Political Divide.
To protect this brittle and distorted version of reality, we resort to extreme defensiveness. We frame opposing arguments as a threat to our identity and values. In psychoanalytic terms we call this the paranoid-schizoid position. We all tend to drop into this state of mind when we’re under extreme threat. In certain circumstances, it can allow for... See more
Opinion | I’m a Couples Therapist. We Can Address Our Political Divide.
I am on record in this fractured political era as a proponent of maintaining connection across gulfs of understanding, with the caveat that this civic burden falls to people whose social privileges allow them to engage safely with the other side. But seeking to understand dangerous behaviors and beliefs is quite different from permitting them.
Sarah Smarsh • Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class
It also risks reducing care to giving, protecting, and fixing, rather than treating it as a negotiation of needs that involves assuming strength in the other, resisting the temptation to provide all the answers, inevitable failure and disappointment, allowing for the fact that our desires for others may chafe against what those others want for them
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