Polarisation and Ambivalence
We often talk about polarisation as if it were a political problem, but it’s also a psychological one. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein gave us language for understanding why so many public debates collapse into binaries. Klein argued there are two fundamental psychological positions that we move between throughout life:
The paranoid-schizoid position. This is a state of mind dominated by splitting - things are either good or bad, safe or dangerous, for us or against us. It’s a way of managing anxiety by dividing the world into pure categories. Unwanted feelings are pushed outward so the ‘other’ becomes the container for what we cannot bear in ourselves.
The depressive position. This is a more integrated state of mind in which we can tolerate mixed feelings. We can recognise that people and ideas are complex and often contradictory. We can think, reflect, repair, and stay in contact with reality even when it is difficult and uncomfortable.
A simple way to understand this is through the infant’s early discovery that the same mother who soothes and comforts can also frustrate and deprive. Around the middle of the first year the baby begins to hold in mind that the loved figure and the disappointing figure are one and the same person. That capacity - to hold both experiences at once - is an enormous developmental leap. However, these positions are not stages we leave behind in infancy, but modes of experiencing that we move between depending on stress, safety, and the emotional climate around us.
The paranoid-schizoid position is fostered and even rewarded by these ubiquitous features of contemporary life:
the speed and volume of information
the pressure to take immediate positions and then defend them
identity becoming a public persona rather than a private aspect of self
algorithms that reward outrage and certainty
a background hum of collective anxiety
Across the most heated political and cultural issues of our time the same paranoid-schizoid structure repeats:
Splitting - one side entirely right and the other entirely wrong
Idealisation and devaluation - heroes and villains
Projection - unwanted feelings placed in the ‘other’
Threat based thinking - disagreement experienced as danger
When we get caught up in heated culture wars we are not only defending ideas, we are defending against internal states that feel overwhelming.
When the capacity to tolerate ambivalence collapses we lose:
the ability to hold two perspectives at once
the recognition that every position contains complexity
the capacity to reflect rather than react
the possibility of repair
the sense that the other is a person rather than an opponent
This matters for therapy because it’s the same state of mind we meet when someone is frightened, overwhelmed, or struggling to manage conflicting feelings. The task - both individually in therapy and as a society - is not to get rid of the paranoid-schizoid position, but to create enough safety, space, and steadiness that the depressive position becomes reachable again. Ambivalence is less a decision than a sign that the mind feels safe enough again to hold complexity, which is after all the nature of reality.