Resentment, Indignation, Entitlement The Transformation of Unconscious Wish into Need

An underlying premise of this paper is that human beings actively and purposefully impose meanings on their experiences of psychic injury and that these meanings then have important implications for character development. Specifically, the paper examines how individuals, in defensive reaction to psychic injury, may repress their “impossible-to-fulfill” wishes, only to find those wishes eventually reborn as needs. In this way, a person's oppressive cruelty to his own wishes gives rise to resentment, indignation, and entitlement, which, in turn, fuel the experience of need. While wish implicitly communicates a request to receive from another, need, with its vicissitudes of demand and urgency, may do violence to the free social discourse of giving and receiving. The interpersonal field of give-and-take may be so constrained by the circular compulsivity of mandated giving and entitled needfulness that it is emptied of any spontaneous desire. The differential impact of communicating needs and wishes on the wider social contract—of which psychotherapy is an influential constituent—is then addressed. The paper then discusses how need and entitlement may be manifested in the transference along a passivity-activity dimension and thus illuminate the theme of responsibility for the treatment. Finally, the view of need as an entitled demand for gratification is contrasted with a view of need as a fervent wish for recognition in conjunction with the process of mourning. Mourning is viewed as a process of reintegrating impossible-to-fulfill wishes for “what could have been” and relinquishing the necessity of their fulfillment.