Chapter 20. Tyranny*

This paper has undergone three stages of metamorphosis beginning in 1962 when a conjunction of several experiences—some clinical material, a piece of sculpture, and a jurist's memoirs—galvanised a paper read to the Imago Group. The second stage was the working out of a concept of terror and dread, which I consider a supplement to Dr Bion's theory of “nameless dread”. This paper was read at the 1967 Congress and appears above as Chapter 14. The present stage is an amalgam and development which both probes the social context of tyranny on the basis of psycho-analytical findings regarding internal tyranny in the perversion and addictions, but also aims to open the question of the social role of psycho-analysis, analysts and their societies in respect of these social phenomena.

Felix Frankfurter, the American jurist and Supreme Court justice, says in his talks with Harlen Phillips (“Felix Frankfurter Reminisces”, 1960, Reynal), “I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because, fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalised medium of reason, that is all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled undisciplined feeling”.

This statement seems to me to epitomise the confusion between the law as explicit statement of the social contract and law as the rules for excluding and punishing the pariah. I have met this conflict in patients again and again at the threshold of the depressive position when the coming of trust and dependence on good primal objects is still so confluent with possessive jealousy in regard to them that punishment, even extermination, of the split-off bad parts of the self, in their projected representations in the outside world, is demanded as a right, a reward of fealty, a precondition of continued trust.

As penetration into the depressive position deepens, the function of sitting-in-judgement is surrendered to the internal objects at infantile levels and with it, by in