Polarities of Experience: The Psychology of the Real

By Richard Rubens

This is a book about choices—the choices we make that shape our Experience, Expression, and Intimacy. These choices determine the nature of what our life is and what it will be. Based on decades of clinical practice, teaching, and writing, The Polarities of Experience is a series of deeply personal philo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Popolano Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780999007419

Richard Rubens

Richard L. Rubens is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. He is a supervising analyst and on the teaching faculty of the William Alanson White Institute, and for decades had been on the faculty of Columbia University as an Adjunct Professor in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at Teachers College. For the past 12 years he has also been working with major cities around the world as part of the Urban Age program at the London School of Economics. Education: Dr. Rubens has a BA from Yale University in History of Art, a BHL from Hebrew Union College in Rabbinic Studies, a PhD from Columbia in Clinical Psychology, an internship at Harvard Medical School, and a certificate in Psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute.

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Introduction

About fifteen years ago, I almost decided to write a book entitled The Psychology of the Real. It would have been roughly based on the ideas that are the foundation for the first two chapters of this current book, and it would have been rooted in the concept of what is developed here as the Primary Polarity. That book most certainly would have gone on to examine many of the same topics that are included in this present book.

I have not often decided to write formally for publication,¹ although all of my friends know I generate an almost unending stream of informal writing online—personal commentaries, mostly on art, theater, music, architecture, city planning, and politics. (Distributed under my Monty-Python-inspired nom de cyberespace, Dead Parrot, these internet pieces are referred to by some of my friends as Parrot Droppings.) The only times I have actually sat down to write for publication have been when I have felt the internal pressure to express some issue that has been absorbing my thoughts so intensely that I have experienced the need more formally to express my ideas about it.

At that moment fifteen years ago, what was propelling me toward writing that earlier book was a strong reaction I had had to a colleague’s presentation at a conference in New York. I do not, in general, attend psychoanalytic conferences; but this one was on the theories of W. R. D. Fairbairn, a Scottish psychoanalyst about whom I teach and have written extensively; and the conference was being organized by Steve Mitchell, a dear old friend from my undergraduate days (at a time before either of us had been studying psychology) and a colleague on the faculty of our psychoanalytic institute (William Alanson White), who had asked me to present a paper at the conference—so I felt I could not refuse.

Another colleague and friend, who I thought should have understood Fairbairn’s thinking far better than he apparently did, gave a paper at this conference that went into an all-too-common critique of Fairbairn centered on the contention that he did not give enough importance to the internalization of good objects. I was annoyed by his making this often-raised criticism because it misunderstood so many essential aspects of Fairbairn’s thinking.²

Most importantly, it bothered me because it failed to recognize that the whole concept of a good object—that is, a person (or the internal representation of a person, or an internal structure created on the basis of a person) who is completely good—is profoundly unrealistic! Not only is the concept unrealistic, it is unhealthy.

In reality, people are not good; neither are they bad. People are complicated mixtures of good elements and bad elements, and neutral elements as well. The criteria for assessing goodness and badness are complex, ambiguous, and relativistic. Whatever the criteria, the notion of pure goodness of people—or of things—is, at best, an intellectual abstraction, and, at worst, a pathological distortion of reality.

Motivated by my reaction to this misreading of Fairbairn, I decided this would be the premise of that original book: reality involves a complex mixture of elements and characteristics, and any attempt to reduce it to being either good or bad is a pathological avoidance of its actual complexity. What we need as a human being are real objects in our life, not good ones. Rarified and exaggerated goodness in this sense is as pathological a distortion as badness. And thinking psychoanalytically about psychological functioning on the basis of its goodness is distorting and misleading. What I believe is called for instead is the consideration of psychological functioning on the basis of what is realistic, in all of its mixture, novelty, and messiness—ergo, The Psychology of the Real.

As in the case of this current book’s Primary Polarity, I envisioned a continual succession of choices we make about how close we can remain to the mixed nature of immediate reality or how far we need to withdraw from it into idealization or denigration. I believe that these choices create a range of positions we can occupy along a continuum from, at one end, being close to the richness and mixture of immediate reality, to, at the other, distorting and avoiding the immediacy of reality in order to establish distance from it by attempting to simplify it into being all good or all bad.

At the time—as I continue to do to this day—I described this continuum of choices physically by making a hand gesture: indicating at the one end, with my palms together and extended toward the other person (and the outer world), the choice to stay close to the ambiguous, novel, mixture of what reality is actually like; and then pulling my hands back inward toward myself and progressively separating them to indicate the movement away from the immediacy of reality and into the directions of the increasingly exaggerated paired distortions of idealization on the one hand (quite literally), and denigration on the other hand.

This notion of the difficulty we all have staying close to reality in its novelty, specificity, and, most importantly, its mixed and often ambiguous nature is one that I continue to believe is profoundly important in all of our functioning. I find it clinically useful to be aware that we tend at times to avoid the immediacy of experience by withdrawing into distortions and exaggerations in the direction of idealization or denigration. This pulling back from the immediacy of complex, real experience is a maneuver to which we all resort in order to protect ourself when we feel too insecure or too threatened to endure the challenges of more direct experience. Consequently, we all can locate ourself at some place on this continuum at any particular time.

Although these ideas remained deeply important to me, somehow back then the urge to write about them dissipated, subsided, and ultimately disappeared. Although I continued to use these ideas extensively in my clinical practice, in my teaching, and in my personal thinking, I never even began to write that book.

A year before it again occurred to me to consider writing, I began to realize that many other ideas that I have long valued and found philosophically and clinically important could be understood as conforming to the same general pattern and structure as the idea that had been the basis of that earlier book. In some fundamental, structural way, I began to view many important issues of human life as taking the form of polarities: continua of possibilities of either staying close to some aspect of immediate reality or of withdrawing from the challenges of confronting that reality in the direction of some protective defense against that reality.

The first issue that struck me as conforming to this pattern was that of depression. Depression is perhaps the most ubiquitous of neurotic reactions, and I had long written and taught about it as being an avoidance of the acceptance of loss. In this way, depression is the opposite of the mourning process, which is essentially characterized by the sadness we feel when we accept the reality of a loss. (This, of course, is my personal twist on an established Freudian notion about depression.) It struck me that this was like the structure of what I would name the Primary Polarity: a spectrum of degrees to which we engaged in the anxiety- and insecurity-driven retreat from the immediacy of some challenging aspect of reality.

I began to think about the dynamics of depression in a new structural way, in accordance with the following premises: growth and change are the defining realities of all living organisms; and all change invariably results in loss, since the achievement of any new state unavoidably requires the abandonment of some prior state. This is true regardless of the direction of the change: if we get married, we are no longer single, and if we get divorced, we are no longer married; if we leave a job, there is the loss of the prior job, regardless of whether we have been fired from a job we loved or have voluntarily left a job we hated for a wonderful new one. This is general and fundamental: if we become more of an adult, we are less of a child. And this ultimately is a universal verity: being alive means we will ultimately die; and therefore entering into a relationship means ultimately that one or both parties will lose the other.

The other structural feature I noticed in relation to what was to become the Primary Polarity was that these continua of withdrawal have bifurcations in paired opposite directions, which become more extreme the further we pull back from the reality end of the possibilities. In the case of the Primary Polarity, the bifurcation is idealization on one hand, and denigration on the other.

I realized in thinking about depression in this structural form that, in moving away from the acceptance of the reality of loss, our becoming depressed could be in either of two bifurcated directions: we could move either toward a depressive, melancholic state or toward an elated, manic one. Depression and mania have always been understood psychoanalytically to represent opposite directions of expressing the same underlying dynamic. My hand gesture in describing the retreat from the acceptance of loss into these paired divergent directions was the same as that describing the retreat involved in the Primary Polarity.

As I thought more in these terms and recognized that a number of basic issues follow this same structural pattern, I began to think of each of these fundamental issues as constituting a polarity. Thus the spectrum of possible choices between accepting the reality of loss on the one end and avoiding it in the direction of depression on the other eventually became my Second Polarity.

Another defining characteristic of living organisms is that life expresses itself. All life expresses itself. An amoeba does its amoeba thing: it expresses its being by moving around, finding and ingesting nutrients, converting them into energy, and ultimately reproducing itself. As a human being, we need to express ourself in a rather more complex way: in addition to all of the physiological forms of expressing needs that we have in common with lower-life forms, we need to find ways positively and creatively to express our selfhood. When we cannot tolerate the reality of our need for these aspects of the positive assertion of our selfhood, we restrict our self-expression, we draw back from it, and instead become angry, hurtful, and aggressive. This concept of the dichotomous choice between self-expression or aggression is one to which I was first introduced in the writings of Erich Fromm, and it has remained a cornerstone of my psychoanalytic thinking throughout my career. It dawned on me that this, too, represents a continuum of choices between the poles of self-assertion and aggression, and that the aggression end has a bifurcation into more passive or active directions—directed either outward or inward. This continuum became my Third Polarity.

It became clear to me that there was a whole class of these continua, and I began thinking of them as the Polarities of Experience.

When I turned my thoughts to issues of relationships, I realized that intimacy posed a similarly attractive, but also frightening reality, and one from which we in our insecurities and fear need at times to distance ourself in various ways. In place of the loving closeness of truly intimate relationships, we are tempted to substitute alternatives that diminish or prevent that intimacy. The unifying dimension of the retreats from intimacy involves the introduction of various forms of inequality in place of what should be the full human equality of intimate relationships. In place of intimacy, we can choose to base our relationships on power, abuse, dependence, or deceit—and in each case the continuum bifurcates into essentially passive or active directions (e.g., being the one in control or being the one controlled, being the abuser or being the abused, etc.) as we withdraw further from intimacy. These subtypes become the four Polarities of Intimacy, which, as a group, are a particular subset of the Polarities of Experience.

In a return to Erich Fromm, I began to see another spectrum of possible choices ranging from the recognition of our freedom and the owning of our responsibility for our choices, to the retreat into authoritarianism. This became my Eighth Polarity, with a leader/follower bifurcation at its authoritarianism end. In retrospect, I realize the enormous current importance of this Eighth Polarity: I wrote the chapter about it in the spring of 2016, and political developments in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world made the ideas associated with the attraction of authoritarianism crucial to understanding many of the forces at work in the world today—much as Fromm in his 1941 Escape from Freedom attempted to provide an understanding of the rise of authoritarianism in his era.

I became progressively absorbed in the polarity-structure-based-version of many of these central ideas. One might say I became obsessed with them, in that I found myself thinking and talking about them at every opportunity; yet the intensity of my interest in exploring these possibilities never felt to me anything other than positive, productive, and healthy.

The implications of these Polarities of Experience began directly and persistently to enter into my discussions with my patients, as I found some of the conceptualizations particularly useful and compelling.

At some point I realized that I was so involved in the ideas that I felt the need to express them more systematically and formally. I began thinking of these ideas as the book I may or may not be writing.

I knew from the beginning of writing that I would choose to do it in a form that was not directed specifically toward psychoanalysts, or to any other particular professionals. While I believe that the ideas are helpful to professionals in my field—and perhaps to those in other professions, as well—I have always wanted it to be readable by anyone interested in considering thoughtfully and deeply the issues of human experience, self-expression, and relationship. I decided to keep the issues of specific psychoanalytic concern for a separate section at the end, although I believe that these chapters are fully approachable by any thoughtful reader.

Consequently, I decided to keep one of the more psychoanalytic aspects of the Primary Polarity separate from my general discussion of it. I note in the initial exploration of that polarity that one of the main aspects of immediate experience that our fears and insecurities leads us to avoid is its novelty; nevertheless, I return to that quality of novelty more explicitly in the section on Psychoanalytic Polarities, where it appears as a polarity in its own right. Much of unconscious psychological functioning is based on our defensive tendency to avoid openness to the novelty of immediate experience by substituting a closed-system approach to new people and situations that insists on experiencing them and treating them as if they were people or situations with which we are already familiar from our past. The continuum of possibilities from the open-system functioning that embraces the novelty and specificity of new experience to the closed-system functioning that imposes old templates onto new experience in order defensively to simplify them and to render them less challenging thus became my Ninth Polarity.

My thinking about this structural form of polarities led me back to one of the central ideas in my psychoanalytic thinking—one I had developed at the beginning of studying this field. Early in my graduate school career, I developed the notion that there were two dimensions necessary meaningfully to describe an individual’s psychological functioning: a vertical axis of progressively higher levels of psychological health (based on progressively higher organizations of the differentiations of self and other); and a horizontal, non-hierarchical spectrum of personality styles (ranging from obsessive to hysterical). These clearly were two continua not unrelated to the other continua I had been exploring in my Polarities of Experience.

It was only during the latter stages of writing this book that I realized that the vertical continuum is, in fact, precisely one of my polarities. The upper, healthiest end of this spectrum of self-other differentiation is the abstract ideal of perfect adult, reality-based, healthy psychological functioning: it represents what it would mean for us to be completely able to exist as a separate, autonomous being, expressing our selfhood and our subjective experience, yet recognizing its relativity, while at the same time recognizing and appreciating the others in our life as equally valid centers of their separate selfhood and individuality, with their own subjective experience, and to be able to have loving, intimate relations with them in an equal and mature way. The lower, more pathological end represents an inability to deal directly and immediately with the realities of self and other. The continuum between these poles thus became my Tenth Polarity.

The final recognition was that the horizontal axis of that two-dimensional grid—the range of possible personality styles from obsessive to hysterical—could be considered to be the bifurcation at the reality-distant end of the Tenth Polarity’s continuum.

Over the course of the next year and a half I wrote down the ideas, and it has now become the book I have written.

There is one grammatical choice I have made in writing this book that I need to comment on in advance—although examples of it have already occurred in this Introduction. Because I am addressing issues that are relevant to all of us, I decided wherever possible to write about them in the first-person plural, we. Nevertheless, because I feel that these issues are so important on a deeply individual and quintessentially personal level, I have often chosen to treat that we as if it were singular. I have not gone so far as to use singular verbal forms with it; but I do use ourself rather than ourselves, and I do use constructions like, we, as an individual. I hope this choice will not be too bothersome or distracting to you. I ask that you accept it as my way of emphasizing the personal character of everything I am writing about—and my way of insisting that it applies to each of us as an individual.

This is the journey that has brought me to The Polarities of Experience. It is the interpretation of these ideas using the structure of polarities that gave form and momentum to the journey for me; and the book’s subtitle, The Psychology of the Real, is a nod to the original starting point of this journey.

It has been a satisfying, useful, and enjoyable journey for me. I hope it is a journey that will be useful and enjoyable for you, as well.

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¹ The entirety of my meager published output can be viewed online on my website at www.RLRubens.com/publications.html.

² The ideas involved come up in various places in this book; but they are treated more directly and deeply in my papers on Fairbairn’s structural theories (Rubens, 1984 and 1994).

PART ONE

Experience

1

The Terrible Ambiguity of Immediate Experience

There is a fundamental choice that shapes all of human experience. It is the decision we make about how close we allow ourself to be to the immediate reality of experience.

We humans are constitutionally drawn to explore, to interact—to live. We want to meet new people, see new places, confront new ideas, discover new activities. We are also drawn to discover increasingly new depth and richness in the people, places, ideas, and activities we already know. One of the joys of listening to music—even to the most familiar performances of our most beloved, frequently listened-to pieces—is the experience of discovering something new or feeling something fresh in its familiarity; and, of course, the experience of hearing music performed live presents an even richer possibility for novelty and complexity in our enjoyment. One of the joys of intimate relationships is the increasing depth of our knowledge of those with whom we share them—and the increasing depth of our knowledge of ourself that is generated in the process.

And yet, as humans, we also tend to impose our preconceptions on experience, choosing precisely to avoid the potential novelty and complexity in favor of the less-challenging sameness and simplicity of the familiar. There is a powerful pull to pressgang experience into familiar forms and remove the challenge of its complexity by substituting an artificial simplification.

In order to render our experience in the world less daunting, we feel a tremendous tendency to draw back from the immediacy of our experience—with all the challenges presented by its complexity, ambiguity, and novelty—and instead to transform that experience in some direction that simplifies it. The ever-present temptation is to substitute some reductivist form of an experience that removes the complex mixtures that are invariably present in that experience when we allow ourself to be close to its immediate actuality. Whether it be by emphasizing and exaggerating some single attribute of that mix and experiencing it as if that aspect of it were the totality of the experience, or whether it be by imposing onto the uniqueness of the experience some paradigmatic format that creates a comfortable sense of familiarity rather than deal with the specific novelty of the current reality, we regularly try to insulate ourself from the discomfort we feel about experience in its raw, more direct forms. The problem is that this process of distancing from the immediacy of an experience invariably distorts the unique actuality of that experience and, to the extent it is happening, undermines the level of its reality.

This dynamic stands behind the commonly observed tendency for humans to think stereotypically. Rather than accept the rich, mixed nature of things, we feel the temptation to reduce them to simpler, good or bad stereotypes. And rather than accept the individual differences within a class of things—or people—we are tempted to impose a characteristic or set of characteristics that is viewed as applying uniformly to all members of that class, ignoring individual differences among its members.

The immediacy of experience intimidates us. As rewarding as are the fruits of allowing ourself to experience directly and fully, we often find it too difficult to feel secure enough to allow ourself the richness of what is potentially there for us.

In his Terry Lectures at Yale University, Carl Jung used the phrase the terrible ambiguity of an immediate experience (Jung, 1938, p. 55), and the phrase has always profoundly resonated with me as the most descriptive characterization of what people fear in their direct contact with the world. I first encountered Jung’s phrase in an undergraduate course Richard Sewall taught at Yale on Tragedy. I had much to say on this subject in my paper Psychoanalysis and the Tragic Sense of Life. (Rubens, 1992). Mr. Sewall would leave the article out of his citing of that phrase in a way I find more powerful than Jung’s original formulation; so I have chosen to replicate his emendation in my own use of it, as in the title of this chapter. While Jung meant something very different by it, he used the terrible ambiguity of . . . immediate experience to describe what it was that people were defending against when they developed an explanation or belief—be it neurotic, religious, or even scientific—as a way of simplifying matters (idem) by creating an understanding of their experience that sets [their] mind at rest immediately, almost as well as ‘Roma locuta causa finita.’¹ (ibid., p. 56)

We do not inhabit a world of pure Platonic forms (or of papal infallibilities); we exist rather in a world of mixed, ambiguous, actual experiences. The objects we deal with and even possess are imperfect: I love my prewar apartment in New York City, with its high ceilings, fireplace, and many windows with views of Riverside Park and the Hudson River; but when it rains heavily, there are occasionally leaks through the ceiling from the roof above, the heat is not always so good, and those beautiful old windows admit a cold draft when the northwest winter winds blow off the Hudson. More importantly, the people who inhabit our world—even those whom we love most dearly—are also imperfect: they are mixtures of marvelously good elements and some features that are far less good.

It is open to us to embrace the reality of the novelty and mixture we find in our world, to see the good with the bad, to accept the wonderful imperfection—with its unique mix of positives and negatives—and to revel in our embrace of it. Real living organisms are, by their very nature, imperfect; and even physical objects are, in their materiality, imperfect. It is only abstraction that admits of perfection, and life is not an abstraction.

To accept and deal with the terrible ambiguity of immediate experience—to remain close to the actual mixed realities and uncertainties of experience—requires that we tolerate that things are not exactly what we might want—or even feel we need—them to be. What if the direction I have chosen does not fully meet my expectations that led me to embark on it? What if that spouse with whom I have joined my life does not come through with the support I need at a specific moment in time?

When we feel we cannot tolerate the uncertainty or ambiguity in what is actually out there, we pull back from the immediacy of it. As we distance from the complexity and imperfection of reality, we impose upon that reality a distortion based on our internal fears and desires that renders our experience of the external more in accordance with our inner expectations—at the expense of its realness, unfortunately.

Nevertheless, the possibility is always there to choose to embrace the complex, multifaceted mixture present in direct experience. Experiencing as fully and directly as possible is one of the most fundamental urges in human life—and one of its most deeply rewarding; and yet so much of human activity is shaped by the fearful avoidance of the power and richness of what is possible in experience. There is a frightfully strong tendency for us to pull back from the novelty and complexity the world presents, to distance ourself from it, and instead to substitute some simplified, preconceived—or, at least, pre-structured—version of it.

Perhaps the most fundamental version of pulling back from the mixed, ambiguous nature of immediate experience is the exaggeration of some focused-upon element of that experience; and the attribute of experience most commonly focused on in the process of this distancing tends to be the goodness or badness of that experience. This particular form of distantiation leads us to a spectrum of choice ranging from, on the one extreme, the acceptance and embracing of the terrible ambiguity of immediate experience, to, on the other, the distancing ourself from it by means of an unrealistic process of idealizing and denigrating experience. I term this spectrum of choice the Primary Polarity of human experience, and it will be the topic of the next chapter.

There are, however, other Polarities of Experience. All of them share the same general form of this Primary Polarity. Their one pole is always something experience-close—something that is immediate and real. Each polarity emphasizes a different aspect of what is immediate and real in human experience; and always the dealing with that aspect of the reality of experience requires courage and a sense of security. Each polarity has an opposite pole which represents the direction into which we can choose to withdraw and retreat when the frightening difficulties inherent in each polarity feel too threatening, too impossible to endure. And thus each of these polarities I shall define and elucidate in subsequent chapters represents a specific spectrum of human choice.

How we go about making these choices—what is at stake in each, and what are the consequences of each—is what this book is about.

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¹ Usually translated as Rome has spoken; the cause is finished or, more colloquially, Rome has spoken; the case is closed, this statement is generally said to be derived from a fifth century sermon by St. Augustine (Sermon 131:10); but, at most, it is a paraphrasing of Augustine’s actual statement—nowhere does he actually say that.

2

Reality v. Idealization and Denigration

THE PRIMARY POLARITY

We can either choose to stay close to our experience or choose to move away from it; and, in the moving away, we invariably distort that experience. As we distance from the immediate mixed reality, we tend most basically to create an exaggeration of some aspect of the experience. As was noted in the previous chapter, the most commonly focused-upon attribute of an experience we tend to exaggerate is its goodness or badness. Rather than accept the mixture of positives and negatives, we focus our reaction on the good aspects of the experience, intensifying and exaggerating their goodness, and create an idealized version of the experience; or we focus on the bad aspects and similarly create a denigrated version. The further we need to retreat from the real version, the more extreme and total become these distortions.¹

It is obvious that we tend to feel more comfortable and safe with a simplified version of reality in which things are either good or bad, rather than having to deal with the challengingly ambivalent mixture that life more realistically presents. There is reassurance in the belief that what we have chosen—our friends, jobs, homes, smartphones, whatever—is simply good, rather than having to deal with the complexity of the imperfect mixture that its reality more fully presents; and there is similar reassurance to be found in the belief that what we have not chosen—or have chosen but would like to disown—is simply bad. It just feels less intimidating to us to experience our decisions as a clear choice between a more purified good or bad, since removing the ambiguity from the relative goodness and badness of things offers an apparent simplification of the process of getting our needs met.

The fundamental problem with the process of simplifying experience in this way is that it invariably distorts the underlying reality of that experience. At very least, it strips the richness, complexity, and uniqueness from the experience. More importantly, it also diminishes the validity and utility of any decisions we make based on these distorted simplifications, since the choices we make in the process are based on a perception of the situation that has been rendered less specifically accurate and less actually rooted in its underlying reality. In effect, we are sacrificing accuracy for comfort: in order to reduce our anxieties about the complexity of situations, we have simplified the situation in a way that compromises our ability to make meaningful choices about the real complexity of that situation.²

The more extremely we need to pull back from the complexity and ambiguity of experience, the more distorted and removed from reality the experience becomes, and the more ultimately impoverished our world becomes. At worst, the very meaning of the reality becomes lost in the distortions generated by the attempt to simplify it. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this is a central danger in the mechanism of stereotyping which is so rooted in this process.

The more uncomfortable we are with accepting imperfection, ambivalent mixture, and ambiguity—shades of gray, rather than black and white—the stronger this reductivist temptation toward simplification of experience will be, and the more extreme will be its resulting distortion of experience. Similarly, the less strong our sense of self—the more insecure we feel in the world—the stronger will be this distorting dynamic.

Naturally, this polarity does not represent an all-or-nothing choice: rather it presents us with a continuum of possible choices. We each have different levels of psychological resources which allow us to remain close to or require us to withdraw further from immediate experience. Moreover, we all have areas of experience that are more or less challenging to each of us personally. Also, at certain moments in our lives and development we feel stronger or weaker than at other moments. Each of us has a complex range of functioning abilities across the spectrum of possibilities. Nevertheless, at every moment we are presented with a continuous array of choices we must make about how close we can remain to experience or how far we defensively feel the need to withdraw from it. In this Primary Polarity, these choices translate into the degree to which we can deal with the actual mixture of good and bad we find in experience if we remain in touch with the immediacy of it, or how extreme will be our need to distort it into something better or worse than it is.

There exist, in fact, some individuals who are virtually incapable of tolerating any admixture of good and bad in their experience. These unfortunate people are so extreme in their reductivist approach that their experience of the outer world is virtually completely transmogrified: all shades of gray disappear, leaving them with an extremely intense, but pitifully oversimplified, black-and-white experience of reality. Their retreat from the terrible ambiguity of immediate experience leaves them in a world in which others are either deified or demonized, and experiences are felt as either rapturously and absolutely fulfilling or life-threateningly dangerous and hostile. (I shall deal with the psychopathological versions of these dynamics later in chapter 14.)

It is a surprising but striking truth that, in the movement away from the complexity of the real, both an artificially idealized good version and an artificially denigrated bad version invariably are both engendered simultaneously. If we cannot stay with the actuality of experience, we move back away from it; and, in distancing ourself from it, we simultaneously idealize the experience and denigrate it. Always the exaggeration is in these two directions simultaneously: we create both an idealized and a denigrated version, each reductively simplified in its purity, and each intensified in its impact. The dual nature of the distortion is inherent in the very process of drawing back from the immediacy of the reality: the creation of the twofold distortion is automatic and unavoidable as soon as we loosen our connection to the direct experience. While we remain closely attached to the immediacy of experience, reality keeps us aware of the admixture of desirable and undesirable elements contained within it. Untethered from the attachment to the complexity of actual reality, our experience becomes simplified and exaggerated; and the positive exaggeration in the direction of idealization always contains within itself an implicit denigration, while the negative exaggeration in the direction of denigration always implicitly involves the creation of an idealization. It is the result—or, perhaps, the cause—of the psychological phenomenon of splitting.

The dual nature of this process is often far from obvious. Almost invariably, we are rather completely focused on one or the other of the extremes: we concentrate our attention on an idealized version of the experience, or we focus on a denigrated version. Nevertheless, the opposite direction of the exaggeration is always at least implicitly present.

The simple truth is that behind every idealization there always is an implicit denigration. The impetus to claim that something is unrealistically better that it actually is must be understood to be the result of an inability to accept some imperfection in its actuality. If our experience of something or someone is that it is adequate—whatever criteria of adequacy are being applied to make the determination—we can simply accept it as being what it is. It is only when we find something intolerably deficient in some way different from what we feel we need or want it to be that we feel impelled to idealize it order to make it somehow better. There is no need to idealize something we already experience as good enough. In fact, there is no need artificially to increase the goodness of anything—even something that is actually negative—if we are able to tolerate the actuality of what it is. It is only when confronted by something we feel unable to accept the imperfection of that we feel the need to idealize it.

The reality of this process was driven home to me in an interaction that occurred during my psychoanalytic training. In a small seminar, one of my mentors, Erwin Singer, reacted to another postdoctoral candidate’s making some idealizing comment about him by pounding the table with his fist and asking in mock anger, What is it that you find so terribly wrong with how I actually am that you feel the need to make me better? Granted, it was not a nice thing for him to have done (and, as one might expect, it unconscionably startled and upset the recipient of his outburst); but the idea made an indelible impression on me. Of course the need to idealize someone implies some inability to be satisfied with the actual mixture of good and bad in the reality of who that person is.

The very same is true of denigrations: the impetus somehow to transform our view and to claim something is unrealistically worse than it actually is must be derived from an inability to accept the reality of some positive aspect in the experiencing of its actual mixture in reality—most commonly, the denial of the positive functions in order to avoid any feeling of unbearable disappointment. If there might possibly be something we could want or need from someone, and if the level of that person’s goodness does not appear to us adequate to support any temptation we might feel to want something from him or her—not to mention adequate safely to risk depending on that person for the thing we might need from him or her—we may feel the pressing urgency to denigrate that person so as to avoid any possibility that we might choose to be seduced in that direction. In any event, whenever we fear we cannot tolerate something about the complexity of the mixture of good and bad, we can resort to the reductivist technique of highlighting and exaggerating the negative aspects and construct a denigrated simplification of the reality. Behind the exaggerated negativity invariably is an implicit exaggeratedly positive expectation: the denigration always is predicated on an implicit idealized view of what the person or thing ought to be—or needs to be—for us. The strength of the negativity of the denigration is proportional to the degree of our inability to tolerate what we experience as the potential disappointment of the experience: the more we have unrealistic positive needs or expectations of something, the more negative will be our view of it in light of its failure to meet those needs and