Something goes wrong and the heat climbs — past annoyed, past angry, all the way to the top. For one second you want the whole world in pieces on the floor. And if you made a list of everything you want to smash, you would find yourself somewhere on it. Then, before you even notice, the rage can start to turn into a different feeling: that someone is out to hurt you.
What you actually want to break
Real rage is not tidy. It feels like your body might come apart at the seams. You want to take the room, the day, the person in front of you, and break all of it into small pieces. And you want to break yourself into pieces along with it.
Most people carry that quietly, because it sounds like something only a cruel person would feel. So you say nothing and wait for it to pass.
But it is not something only cruel people have. Every one of us is born with this destructiveness, you included.
What makes rage like this so frightening is what you find inside yourself. If that much destructiveness is really in you, it might not stop at breaking the room. It might break you too, until nothing of you is left. So what you fear most is not the damage around you. It is being wiped out yourself.
Because the rage feels dangerous inside you, you quickly start seeing the danger in somebody else. You hear contempt in your partner’s tired tone; you hear an attack in a colleague’s disagreement. Once the threat seems to be coming from them, your own urge to destroy feels like self-defence. This shift — from something dangerous is happening in me to you are dangerous to me — is not a lie you tell on purpose. It happens before you have even noticed your own feeling. Psychoanalysts call it projection: a feeling you cannot bear to accept as yours is felt as if it came from someone else.
The first thing a baby ever meets
A baby does not meet a whole person first. He meets the breast — one part of his mother, not the whole of her. Psychoanalysts call it a part-object. An “object”, in their language, is whatever our love and anger are aimed at — usually a person, and here only one part of a person. At the start the breast is simply good. It keeps him alive, keeps him warm and comforts him.
But the breast is not always there the moment he wants it. When he is left waiting, his hunger and frustration can become too much. He is flooded with his own rage, and that rage is too frightening to keep inside. So it is projected onto the breast, and now the breast itself seems to be attacking him. The breast that felt entirely good while it fed him now feels like a monster that could destroy him. He may turn away from the very breast he wanted a moment earlier, because to him the source of comfort has become the source of danger. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein saw this as one of the most basic ways the human mind works: the rage is pushed outside, and then it seems to come back as an attack. Adults still fall into it under pressure.
What Klein meant by the paranoid-schizoid position
Klein gave this state of mind a name: the paranoid-schizoid position. The words sound clinical, but what they describe is simple.
The “schizoid” part means split: the mind keeps good and bad strictly apart, and nothing is allowed to be both at once. For the baby, the breast is all good while it feeds him and all bad while he is left waiting. In adults, this splitting shows up as seeing someone as either an angel or an enemy. Then comes the “paranoid” part: all of the badness is out there, and I am the one being attacked.
Notice the word “position”. It is not a place you leave behind for good when you grow up. It is a place where anyone can be standing: a baby before he has any words for it, or you, this afternoon, in a meeting.
Listen to who your sentences are about
Here is what it looks like in adult life. You are already in a bad mood, and the person nearest to you gets the brunt of it. Think back to what actually comes out of your mouth on days like that.
“You’ve got no sense at all.” “Why can’t you ever see how people feel?” “Why can’t you think any further than that?” “You’re so selfish.”
Every sentence is about the other person, but the bad mood was already in you before they spoke. Some ordinary mistake of theirs gives the mood an explanation: I feel this bad because you are selfish, insensitive, or dismissive. Once the bad feeling has been pinned on them, you no longer have to notice what you brought into the room.
So when you are in the middle of blaming somebody, you are standing exactly where the baby stood when he turned away from the breast. It is the same paranoid-schizoid position, only now it has adult words: all the badness is over there, and I am the one under attack.
When someone brushes you off, where is the brush-off, exactly?
Let me ask you a single question, and I would like you to answer it slowly.
When you say “she brushed me off”, where is the brush-off? Point to it. Is it stuck to her face, or sitting somewhere in her tone of voice?
I think much of it is already in you. If you walked into the room already afraid of being overlooked, a distracted glance can feel like proof that you do not matter. You read the brush-off into her face, then react to her as though she put it there on purpose. What began as a fear inside you now feels like an attack from outside.
Admitting that is uncomfortable. That is why most of us would rather leave the brush-off where we see it: on her face. And as long as we leave it there, we spend one more day standing in the paranoid-schizoid position.
The other place you can stand
Some people do something different with the bad feeling. They do not push all of it onto the other person; they let part of it stay theirs. Klein called the place where they stand the depressive position.
The name does not mean clinical depression. In the depressive position you see that some of the badness is on your side too: you can be angry even with someone you love, and you have harmful sides as well as good ones. Facing that brings sadness and guilt, and that is where the word “depressive” comes from. It feels heavier than blaming someone else. Still, it is a more grown-up place to stand.
The difference between the two positions comes down to two sentences. One says: the badness is entirely theirs. The other says: some of it came from me. The person who can say the second sentence can bear knowing this about themselves.
Owning your part is not the same as attacking yourself
I want to be careful here, because this gets misread constantly. Remember the list at the start — everything you wanted to smash, with you somewhere on it. It is easy to hear “some of it is mine” and turn that into one more reason to attack yourself.
That is not what it means. It does not mean hating yourself for having the rage in the first place. It means you stop insisting that every bad thing lives out there, without piling every bad thing onto yourself instead. You apologise for the hurtful thing you said, and you set a boundary where the other person overstepped.
Try it on something small. A colleague answers you in a flat voice, and the heat starts. In the paranoid-schizoid position, you have decided before you say a word: she brushed me off, and that is simply what happened. In the depressive position, there is a pause first, and in that pause you can tell yourself: “Some of this is hers. Some of it is what I walked in carrying.”
Owning your part feels heavier because you can no longer solve the problem simply by proving the other person wrong. Yet it also gives you back some control. If all the danger belongs to them, you must keep watching and defending yourself. If part of the reaction came from what you carried in, you can soothe that part, check what actually happened, and respond to the person in front of you rather than only to the fear you brought in.
Before you argue, check which position you are in
The heat will come back — maybe tomorrow, maybe later this week. It will arrive with the same flat certainty: she brushed me off.
When it does, take your eyes off her face for a moment. Before you work out what to say to her, work out which position you are standing in.
There are two: the one where all the badness is hers, and the one where some of it is yours. Which one are you standing in right now?
References
- Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110. — the paranoid-schizoid position.
- Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145–174. — the depressive position.
Related
- Why That One Person Gets Under Your Skin
- Regression Isn’t a Breakdown. Your Mind Is Just Going Home.
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board