Over the years I have become increasingly more sensitive to and curious about the fate of good experience early in life. Clinical experience suggests that at least in some circumstances “where catastrophe was, evil shall be.” Why should this be so? Bion explored the complexity of interactions between innate vulnerabilities (like intense intolerance of frustration, excess of envy, and hypersensitivity to pain) and environmental insults (like a projective identification rejecting object that is felt to be willfully misunderstanding and becomes internalized as ego destructive).
For some infants and children distress is never reliably transformed into comfort. Attention becomes captured by pain. Early omnipotent defenses arise to organize a fragile self that may come to live unconsciously inside a malignant grandiosity that functions as a barrier to intolerable anxiety. A cult of hardness and illusory invincibility functions as a substitute for learning to negotiate the complexity of relationship, dependence, limits, and intimacy. Life becomes ever more frustrating and alienating. Isolation is a cure and a curse.
Emotional contact is equated with emotional catastrophe and so is violently recoiled from. Narcissistic and psychotic solutions predominate and gain intensity and momentum. Some patients believe that evil is the strongest force in the universe. The Faustian bargain they make casts Evil as a Caretaker. I sell my soul in order to survive. Only after it is too late can I begin to calculate the consequences. Love is just a fragile rumor. To the extent it seems to exist, it ignites my envy.
Let's face it: destructiveness is fast. It is far easier to tear down than to build. And destruction can be exciting, contagious, and it is often glorified in many forms in our time. Among the many teenage boys I've seen in the last two decades, the figure of The Joker (from Batman) reigns
supreme as an idealized figure of unconstrained potency, pathos, and mayhem. For many people nihilism, as both an internal and an external experience, corrodes their picture of the world.
To really begin to investigate destructiveness we must treat it like a function. Bion's alpha function is a concept designed to help identify those factors that combine to create meaning. Destructiveness, too, can be viewed as a function. One element fo the analytic task can be to investigate the way numerous factors combine to create a spectrum of destructiveness.
There is no one answer for any patient's destructiveness. Psychoanalysis can help us appreciate the experience dependent realizations that make a destructive function flourish in the idiosyncratic life history of any patient. Our job is to observe, describe, and communicate, not to explain. As psychoanalysts we try to create a space where violent thoughts and emotions can have a voice, rather than become violent actions. A deeper appreciation of the complexity of violence, both in its psychic and external manifestations, is one of the paramount tasks for our next century. Bion's example provides a searchlight to make myriad paths forward into an echoing darkness.