Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Teaching/Depression"
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To move from Silvan Tomkins's account of the depressive [person] to Melanie Klein's account of the depressive position is like moving from a minoritizing to a universalizing discourse. If Tomkins's depressive is a particular kind of individual who emerges from the contingency of a particular history with the strengths and weaknesses of a particular interpretive and performative strategy, Klein's depressive position, to the contrary, is a developmental phase - a developmental achievement - that is potentially available to everyone. Moreover, the depressive position is a uniquely spacious rubric. Despite its name it encompasses, for example, both the preconditions of severe depression and also the resources for surviving, repairing, and moving far beyond that depression.

For Klein, the depressive position is one of only two positions - two modes of relationality - available to human creatures. And while the depressive position marks a developmental achievement over its alternative, the fragile paranoid/schizoid position, it is not a permanent achievement but part of a fluid, back-and-forth process between the two positions. What defines the paranoid/schizoid position, in all its fragility, are three rather violent things: the ego's inability to tolerate anxiety or ambivalence; its consequent strategy of splitting both its objects and itself into fragments that can be seen as exclusively good or bad; and its aggressive expulsion of intolerable parts of itself onto - or in Klein's more graphic locution, into - the person who is taken as an object. Klein writes that these "bad parts of the self are meant not only to injure but also to control and to take possession of the object" (Klein, 8); she calls this mechanism "projective identification." Projective identification is related to Freudian projection but is more uncannily intrusive: for Freud, when I've projected my hostility onto you, I believe that you dislike me; for Klein, when I've projected my hostility into you, you do dislike me. Projective identification is thus a good way of understanding, for example, the terrifying contagion of paranoid modes of thought - and as we'll see, it certainly seems indispensable for a lot of political analysis and group dynamics. But it's also a helpful way of understanding things that can go so painfully wrong in the classroom. For instance, a professor who's unable to tolerate or contain the anxieties of competition may run a classroom in which all find themselves unusually anxious about power or disempowerment. A professor's disavowed issues about originality can turn into a maelstrom of plagiarism anxieties that circulate in all directions. Or a professor who is unable to provide a home to her own discomforts about sexuality can accumulate a group of students whose learning process is clogged with manipulative or resentful scenes of seduction. All this is not even to mention the projective identifications that originate with our students, who can be just as self-ignorant or as disruptively charismatic as ourselves, if not more so. Again both in and beyond the classroom many of us, I think, are familiar with situations where our own or other people's preemptive need to disown feelings of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and so forth - feelings that almost inevitably arise but are experienced as intolerable - is liable to propel circuits of interpersonal accusation that are explosive with the very forms of hatred that are under internal erasure.

Thus for Klein's infant or adult, the paranoid/schizoid position - marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety - is a position of terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious part-objects that one defensively projects into the world around one. The depressive position, by contrast, is an anxiety-mitigating achievement which the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting. What makes the depressive position "depressive"? The threshold to the depressive position is the foundational, authentically difficult understanding that good and bad tend to be inseparable at every level. "The infant," as one Kleinian summarizes this argument, "at some stage . . . is physically and emotionally mature enough to integrate his or her fragmented perceptions, bringing together the separately good and bad versions. . . . When such part-objects are brought together as a whole they threaten to form a contaminated, damaged, or dead whole object," whether internal, external, or both - what I take to be a description of the experience of depression per se (Hinshelwood 138, emphasis added).

"Depressive anxiety," this account continues, "is the crucial element of mature relationships, the source of generous and altruistic feelings that are devoted to the well-being of the object" (138). This, then, is the position from which it is possible to begin using one's own resources to assemble or "repair" the part-objects into something like a whole, albeit a compromised one. Once assembled, these more realistic, durable, and in that sense satisfying objects are available to be identified with, to offer one and to be offered nourishment and comfort in turn. Yet the pressures of that founding, depressive realization can also continually impel the ego back toward depression, toward manic escapism, or toward the violently projective defenses of the paranoid/schizoid position. We feel these depressive pressures in the forms of remorse, shame, confusion, depression itself, mourning for the lost ideal, and - often most relevant - a sad understanding of the inexorable laws of unintended consequences.

My own sense is that activist politics, even more than pedagogy, takes place - even at best - just at this difficult nexus between the paranoid/schizoid and the depressive positions. Suppose the paranoid/schizoid, entirely caught up in splitting and projection, to be always saying, like Harold Bloom or even George W. Bush, "Those others are all about ressentiment." Suppose the depressive to be able to say at least intermittently, "We, like those others, are subject to the imperious dynamics of ressentiment; now how can the dynamics themselves become different?" It would certainly be presumptuous for me to suppose that the women represented here today all understand or do activism in the same way, or at anything like the same depth, and I feel out of my own depth in generalizing in this way. But as I understand my own political history, it has often happened that the propulsive energy of justification, of being or feeling joined with others in a right cause, tends to be structured very much in a paranoid/schizoid fashion, driven by attributed motives, fearful contempt of opponents, collective fantasies of powerlessness and/or omnipotence, scapegoating, purism and schism - paranoid/schizoid, in short, even as the motives that underlie political commitment have much more to do with the complex, mature ethical dimension of the depressive position.

What to make of the turn to life narrative in the context of such split-natured and difficult activism and pedagogy? During the recent political season I've been struck by one unabashedly paranoid/schizoid kind of use of life narrative - as we've heard a phalanx of senators say that while they may loathe the actions or principles of Alberto Gonzales, for instance, it would be impossible to vote against his story. And we've heard similar language about Condoleezza Rice's "story" and Clarence Thomas's "story" and even John Edwards's "story," even if the latter of these did turn out to be possible to vote against. A life story in this sense, Gonzalez's story, is less a narrative than a compact consumer fetish, wholly instrumental, at once inspirational and subtly accusatory, its own history effaced, perfectly streamlined as a projectile to stop the mouths of his substantive critics, and lodged in public consciousness as the insidiously potent minimal unit of projective identification.