Ruthlessness, Decolonization, and Psychoanalysis in South Africa

Ruthless Winnicott: The Role of Ruthlessness in Psychoanalysis and Political Protest is a collection of essays by psychoanalytic psychotherapist and University of Cape Town professor, Sally Swartz, structured around Winnicott’s word “ruthless.” The first three chapters focus on the idea of ruthlessness in psychic development, and the next four on the idea of ruthlessness of student political protests in South Africa, specifically at the University of Cape Town (UCT) during the years 2015–2016. The final chapter turns to the question of decolonizing psychoanalysis in South Africa. Grounded in a relational psychoanalytic perspective engaging contemporary U.S. thinkers such as with Lew Aron, Jessica Benjamin, Christopher Bollas, Thomas Ogden, Donna Orange, and Joyce Slochower, Ruthless Winnicott does not engage a relational critique of Winnicott¹ but rather provides a sophisticated and nuanced reading of some of Winnicott’s paradoxes. For Winnicott, the infant is dependent and demanding, and the mother’s needs are disregarded; when the infant gets what she wants she “throws the mother away like an orange peel” (as cited in Swartz, 2019, p. 9). The mother is a slave but a slave who must protect the infant from the mother’s own hate. Here Winnicott’s ideas have often been understood in terms of a biological necessity. The infant’s will to survive requires that the infant sees the mother as simply an extension of itself. When the baby is hungry, the mother magically appears on demand. For Winnicott, there is also development as the infant begins to move to object use from object relating, in other words, becoming separate from the mother (note the counter-intuitive use of the term—object relating reflects the way the baby experiences the mother as having no separate existence whereas object usage is relational). Swartz wants us to complicate this understanding as she thinks of Winnicott’s idea of ruthlessness. Of course, Swartz warns that the infant’s development is by no means guaranteed. But above all Swartz also wants to highlight the apparent paradoxes and nuances of Winnicott’s ideas.

Swartz’s opening chapter connects the mother’s “wish to be eaten” by the infant to the analyst’s own position. There is no masochism in mother’s wish. Both sides are ruthless. The mother’s position is intentional, to provide food for growth. Survival in other words “opens the way to relatedness” (p. 7) and “creates the quality of ‘ruth’” (p. 8), which is defined as being compassionate and feeling sorrow for another. For Swartz, Winnicott’s ideas of ruthlessness become a useful diagnostic clinical tool. In Chapter Two, Swartz explicates the patient’s “ruthless idealization” as a method of preventing the therapeutic space from being used. But idealization is not simply understood as defensive, rather Swartz understands it to be an ordinary part of human relations, a crucial part of the mother’s love for the infant, as well as part of the trust associated with launching a love affair or, as we shall see, supporting a protest movement.

An essential element of development, suggests Winnicott, is a gradual de-idealization of the mother (for Winnicott idealization is in the dependency stage and is not real object usage). As the infant begins to sustain itself, the mother’s ability to anticipate every need is de-idealized. Nevertheless, “when magical thinking or hallucination predominate, object usage is impossible” (p. 31). Here ruthless idealization is rigid and coercive. Swartz discusses how this is also expressed in the patient’s idealization of the therapist and highlights this in a number of case studies. “As therapists, we are given the unenviable task of persuading patients that their protected worlds of idealization and self-aggrandizement might be traded for a life [which is] [. . .] ‘shabby’[. . .] scuffed and scuffy” (p. 43). The question for Swartz, and the patients she discusses, is how to move from ruthless rigidity, defensiveness, and denial. In Chapter Three she describes the patient who is “a false self,” who engages the therapist but turns away...