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KMID : 0385320030140010072
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Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
2003 Volume.14 No. 1 p.72 ~ p.90
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Everyday Life of Malice and is Politics
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Lee Man-Woo
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Abstract
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This article is a psychoanalytic cultural study of the negative constituents of individuals and culture. It deals with the pathological effect of malice in two levels of individuals and culture. It is possible to know, albeit harder to accept, the shadowy side of ourselves, the essential darkness that breeds ill will. Envy, greed, and jealousy are the fundamental components of malice. They are presented as a basic force in our emotional lives, motivated by unconscious power operation. Their counterparts are gratitude, generosity, and compassion. None of these exists in isolation. The interplay of these forces of love and hate creates the structure of our lives, and on an individual level is called "character" and on the social level is called "culture". The focus of this work is on the object-relational dynamics of these forces (impulses), directed emotional patterns felt by a person, the agent, the subject, toward another person, the target, the object. Therefore they have to be considered from the perspective of interpersonal subjects. However, the subject or object, the envier or envied, for example, need not be an individual. Envious malice can be expressed by or can be directed to a larger group of people, up to and including a whole culture. When culture is the envier, we can speak about institutionalized envy, malevolence and spite embodied in and expressed by the representatives of major social, economic, and political institutions toward individual citizens, or the envied. The politics of malice is the transformation of envy, greed, and jealousy from personal events into social relations and cultural processes. I refer to the myriad ways people seek to amplify and conceal their animosities and desires through social, economic and political policies as well as accompanying rituals, customs, laws, and organizational practices. In presenting the tyranny derived from the politics of malice and its everyday pathologies, I have largely divided the article into two parts. The first part explores the influence of malice on individuals and cultural forms. In this part I have discussed the damage done by the state and its policies against the individual, and conversely I have traced the effects of malicious persons against the cultural forms. And then as a combination of both levels, I have conceptualized a specific personality, i. e. "Persecuting Agencies". The second part looks at the resolution of malice and completes the basic body of this article. The proposed solutions are two basic strategies: 1) to annihilate and ignore malice, and 2) to overcome the life-subverting elements of malice by enhancing life-sustaining feelings. The first strategy concerns egalitarianism and populist policies, or the attempt to get rid of ill will and bad conscience by deriding desire and destroying the objects of such desire, which are not only money and goods, but intangible qualities and unique experiences as well. The second strategy for dealing with malice is radically different. It does not try to depose the negative side of experience, as with egalitarianism, but seeks to enhance positive feelings. This redresses the emotional balance between omnipotent destructive forces and life-sustaining ones and makes it possible to accept the central role that envy, greed, and jealousy play in human affairs. I have strongly upheld the second strategy of resolving malice, and finally, put great emphasis on the significance of reparation ("re-pairation") which guides therapeutic transformation by bringing together warring factions (in individuals, groups, and states) and restoring the balance between love and hate.
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KEYWORD
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Malice, Envy, Greed, Jealousy, Projection, Manic state, The combined-persecuting, agencies, Therapeutie transfornation
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