Someone mentions a name at dinner, and your body reacts before you have decided what you think. Your chest tightens, your face goes still, and you stop following the conversation. Everyone else has moved on, but you are still arguing with that person in your head.
Later, someone asks what the person actually did to you. You search for an incident and cannot find one large enough to explain the reaction. So you say, Nothing, really. I just don’t like them. The answer feels incomplete, because the strength of your reaction does not come only from this person. It also comes from an older hurt that this person has touched.
Or perhaps what happens to you looks like a different problem altogether. You had decided you were done with something — the drinking, checking your phone at two in the morning, the person you keep going back to. By Thursday you are doing it again, and when someone asks why, you give the same kind of answer: I don’t know. I just do.
These two reactions look unrelated, but both come from the same place: an experience you have not yet been able to put into words. The usual explanation for the dislike is that it is just an old grudge, something you should dig up and let go of. I would put it differently: the dislike is doing a job now. It gives your pain a target, and it keeps you from feeling the grief underneath it — grief over something you needed and never got.
What you cannot name keeps driving what you do
You know you are in a bad mood, but you cannot say what it is about. Something is clearly stirring inside you, and you have no word for it.
When an experience has no name, you cannot recognise it early enough to choose what to do with it. You only notice the result: you become cold toward someone, reach for a drink, check your phone at two in the morning, or return to the relationship you meant to leave. Afterwards you say, I don’t know why I did it. The pattern repeats because the feeling that starts it has never become something you can identify and think about.
The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion explains why this happens, and his explanation is the one I keep coming back to. Some experiences are too much to take in when they happen, and there may be nobody there to help you with them. This can happen in childhood, but also later in life. You cannot digest such an experience, so you swallow it whole, and it stays inside you whole.
Bion said the mind normally digests experience: it turns what happened into something you can feel, put into words and think about. He called this digesting work alpha-function. An experience that could not be digested stays in you as a raw lump, and he called such lumps beta-elements. Think of the difference between a bad thing you can tell somebody about and a bad thing that is still inside you exactly as it was when it happened, with no words for it. The first has been digested. The second has not. Giving an experience a name, which is what the rest of this article is about, is how that digesting happens.
“Oh, so that’s what it was”
Then one day the words for it come, usually partway through a sentence, usually while you are talking to somebody: Oh. So that’s what it was.
Naming does not repair the past, but it changes where the swallowed experience sits. Until now it had been pushing you from behind. Now it sits in front of you, where you can look at it. I hate that person may become I feel dismissed around that person because their tone brings back how invisible I felt at home. The pain is still heavy, but now you can see what set it off. Instead of being driven by a reaction you cannot explain, you are holding an experience you can look at and think about.
Bion saw this as the point where thinking begins. Until what happened to you has been digested into something you can think about, you cannot learn anything from it. You just keep repeating the same reactions.
What comes up once you name the experience is not relief
This is the part I most want to get across. You would think that finally naming it would feel like setting down something heavy. What comes up instead is a deep sadness, and with it regret over what can no longer be undone.
Both come up because you now know what the experience was about: what you needed and did not get, at the age when it would have counted. And in the same moment you learn the harder part: it is not coming. Not later, not from this person, not from anybody. Naming is not a release. It is the moment a loss becomes a fact.
The sadness is usually not about the person whose name came up at dinner. It goes back much further. Mourning means letting something go, and what has to be let go of is the past: the very beginning, when your parents were your whole world, and what you needed from them then and never got.
Hatred is easier to hold than grief
Now go back to the dislike from the beginning, the one you could not explain. Whether you call it dislike or hatred, it is standing exactly where the grief would otherwise be, blocking the way to it.
While you are hating somebody, you do not have to be sad. Hatred has a target and a direction, and there is force in it you can use — rehearsing the argument, composing the sentence that would finish them. Grief has none of that. It simply settles on you, and while it does, there is nothing you can do. Hatred is far easier to bear. When a person keeps a grudge alive for years, it is not because they have a bad character. It is because they cannot yet face what lies underneath the grudge.
And when the person you hate is a parent, the hatred does one more thing: it keeps a hope alive. As long as you go on hating them, you are still waiting for the day they admit what they did wrong and give you the love you should have had. To meet the sadness underneath, you have to give up that hope. That is why meeting it is so hard.
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein offers a way to understand why hatred is held so tightly. In a 1940 paper she linked mourning with what she called manic states: ways the mind keeps a loss at arm’s length so that it does not have to be felt. They are called manic because they are full of energy and action, and that is exactly what hatred offers in place of the helplessness of grief. Seen this way, holding on to hatred is what a person does while the loss is still more than they can survive.
Only when the hatred stops for a moment — late at night, or when it has tired itself out — does what lies underneath show. The hatred has not gone away. It has stepped aside just long enough for you to see what it was covering: the grief.
Naming rarely happens when you are alone
Another psychoanalyst, Ronald Fairbairn, saw this naming as something that happens inside a relationship. What you could not digest gets its name in front of somebody who can take it in. You bring out something raw and shapeless. The other person stays with it, without pushing it away, until it is no longer unbearable, and then gives it back to you in a form you can keep hold of. Bion called this containing, because for a while the listener holds what you cannot yet hold by yourself.
This is why hours of thinking alone can leave you going round in circles over the same scenes. When you talk to someone who listens without recoiling, they can put your experience into words and hand it back to you: You sound angry, but also deeply disappointed that nobody came for you. Hearing that, you may recognise for the first time what you have been feeling.
It does not have to happen in a therapist’s office. What matters is that the listener does not deny the feeling, does not get frightened by it, and does not hurry you toward feeling better before you have understood what hurts.
Not getting rid of the feeling, but bringing it out where you can see it
None of this is advice to sort out your feelings and be done with them. It is the opposite. What you try to get rid of does not leave. It only moves somewhere else — into a tight chest, a habit you cannot stop, a coldness toward someone — and goes on working on you from there.
What can be done is smaller and harder. Bring the feeling out, put a name on it, discover that grief comes with the name, and stay with that grief. The grief is not a sign that something went wrong. It is what naming produces: you are sad because you have finally found out what you never got.
On the day the dislike loosens and you find sadness where you were sure there was only hatred, nothing has failed. You have reached the grief the hating was holding back.
References
- Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann. — alpha-function and beta-elements.
- Bion, W. R. (1962). The Psycho-Analytic Study of Thinking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, 306–310. — containing. Reprinted in Second Thoughts (1967) as “A Theory of Thinking”.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications. — on seeing our experience of other people within relationships.
- Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 125–153.
Related
- Mourning the Parent You Never Had
- Why One Person Gets Under Your Skin
- The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head
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
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