Loving the World on Fire
On Perverse Dependency
hannah baer
Danger and DependenceIf a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasize the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this:that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of thelove would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards.
—G. K. CHESTERTON, Saint Francis of Assisi
Container, contained. These words denote something specific to students of psychoanalytic thought. Colloquially, we say,if you know, you know (IYKYK) to indicate references that may or may not be universally apprehended. Wilfred Bion, who elaborated these terms (container, contained), was also vigilant about the way language becomes brittle and uninspired, the way the terms anyone coins to describe these massive, undulating constellations of meaning “suffered debasement through the popularization of psychoanalysis.” If you think you know what the words mean, it limits your thinking (IYKYDK). He liked to use new words, he liked the word “penumbra” to describe what a word could do, the way meaning cascaded from the shadows cast by language.
I want a different penumbra than “container” and “contained” so I will say mama and baby. Mama is container, authority, nourishment, control, limits, maintenance, preservation. Baby is dependency, hunger, unboundedness and unlimitedness, messiness, precarity, vulnerability. The mama wraps around the baby, and the baby can be hungry or angry or needy or affectionate and the mama is there. Maybe in some way, wrapping around the baby is also developmental for the mama, gives shape and meaning to the mama experience. After Bion, again, we can think about the mama as the analyst and the baby as the patient (or analysand or client).
In the framework of the clinical encounter, the baby needs something, maybe needs someone to think with them about their life and their problems, reflect back to them insights, maybe help them understand something about their feelings about mamas in general or their historical, familial mama-feelings, their internalized relational paradigms about mamas. Maybe the baby just needs someone to be with them, to be in relation with them.
Recently I was with a group of colleagues discussing the idea of difficult individuals in groups and groups collapsing around difficult individuals. I offered that the ability of a difficult individual to destroy a group revealed less about the difficulty of the individual and more about the failure of the group to provide containment. One of the colleagues asked, beautifully, “What is containment?” And the group then talked about this question and decided we needed to get clearer about it. The question stayed in my mind, weighed down by the particular problem of trying to describe containment (trying to describe mama) for those of us with political sympathies toward radicalism. One way to think about it is that much of what is supposed to be mama to us as residents of a first-world nation state (the police, the military, borders, the judicial system, etc.) we disavow. We in fact measure each other’s political credibility, often enough, by our ability to refuse the need to be baby to such hegemonic mamas as these entities. After 2020, even liberal normies knew it was cringe to call the cops. The communists may dream of a new mama state and the anarchists may say that only we can be mama to each other, that no state apparatus will do, but we likely agree that we have a problem finding mama.
I believe you have a felt experience of this mass problem in your body—a problem that I joke with myself is “a crisis of authority.”[1] There isn’t really mama anymore. There is urgent care, Zoom therapy, ChatGPT. You know that there isn’t mama anymore if you’ve ever had to decide whether or not to call the police for any reason, whether or not you decided to do it; that sinking feeling of trying to decide to vote; the question of using technology provided by companies that contract with the military and sell the logs of your text messages where you talk to your friends about how much you hate the state. Even these ethical dilemmas are almost too grandiose. You know the problem of a world without mama if you have ever been to a grocery store where you stand in the fluorescent lights flanked by reach-in refrigerators, wondering which non-dairy “milks” have glyphosates in them; if you have tried to call a bureaucratic entity about refinancing your student loan debt; if you have wondered about whether to lie to your doctor in your annual physical about your sex life or your drug use; if you’ve been in jail and tried to decide if you should eat the peanut butter sandwiches they bring you. The problem of baby and mama in our time is one you feel in your body every day, whether or not you are paying attention to it. The manual for the iPhone says never to put it within ten inches of your head because it produces too much radiation, and once you know this, you will think about it now when you talk on the phone. Whether or not you decide to make a “safer” choice is beside the point. We have left the realm of conscious consumption and are now in a realm where the things we consume appear to be devouring(or irradiating or carcinogenating) us.
“The problem at root with a world where there is no mama—or, worse, where despite there being some kind of “authority structure” (wire mama?), the structure does not nourish or love any of us—is that under these conditions, it becomes challenging to love the world.”
St. Francis dreams of Assisi upside down. The basic premise, which makes me cry when I think about it, is simply that Francis had a place he was from and that he loved that place. The problem at root with a world where there is no mama—or, worse, where despite there being some kind of “authority structure” (wire mama?), the structure does not nourish or love any of us—is that under these conditions, it becomes challenging to love the world. It is worse because whatever it is we love (nature, our children, the organizations we are part of, our towns, our neighborhoods, our political projects) is all so precarious; to love it is also to be tortured by its impending death. A Buddhist (or perhaps a Judeo-Christian fond of Ecclesiastes) might affectionately remind us that impermanence is the constant, that people and families and tribes have never not grieved their fantasied imminent annihilation, yet there is something about the hyper-impermanence of the next twenty years of history, the hyper-impermanence of a world without mama, that produces anguish.
(It is worth noting that many people have lived and continue to live under conditions where the dominant authority structure persecutes and vampirizes them—really, any subordinate group in most class and caste structures. What I believe is different in this time is the total attack on interdependence that Americans in particular face, a lack of faith communities, a “loneliness epidemic,” skyrocketing suicides and mass shootings. We are not the first to become a mass exploitable class but we are perhaps the least resilient population to be subjected to such conditions, because we have been taught—and ultimately live in a material reality which reinforces—that nothing matters but ourselves. We have no liberation theology.)
Indra’s NetworkI worked in a coffee shop in my twenties (incidentally, while I was studying organizational psychology). This was the first time I had worked at a plainly transactional job (my summer jobs before that had been working at a summer camp and as a receptionist at a family physician’s small private practice; in both cases I was working in the context of deep, multiyear relationships). I was struck by the way the parts of the coffee shop which were invisible to the consumer were less appealing. The front of the shop had reclaimed wood paneling and glossy black hanging fixtures with tuberous Edison bulbs producing soft light. The back room was linoleum with a drop ceiling. Then, through a fireproof door that locked behind you if you weren’t careful, was aback hallway that led to a loading dock (as far away as you could get from the customers) with concrete, bird-shit, dumpsters, and sodium halogen lights in cages.
In this era of consumerism, information about “how the sausage gets made” is at our fingertips. If you want to know how clothes you’re wearing were dyed using thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals, crafted by the hands of functionally enslaved laborers, and/or are degrading into carcinogenic microplastics as you read this, you can easily find a pithy video about it. Consumers’ anxiety around what’s hidden behind the counter or in the back room of consumerism is widespread enough to be counteracted by sigils on goods inthe supermarket, little butterflies that say things like NON-GMO or RAINFOREST ALLIANCE CERTIFIED, as though any inexpensive product in plastic packaging shipped across continents on a fossil fuel-dependent supply chain could somehow become “ethical,” “sustainable,” or innocent of violence because of a bureaucratic accrediting body that deems some narrow segment of said products “organic.” These kinds of reassurances are part of wire mama.
Spiritual (and arguably also honest) views of the world take into account not merely what most people see in the day-to-day and what happens in their homes and workplaces, but also what happens in all the places we don’t and can’t see—industrial waste sites, prisons, the insides of marine mammals, the tunnels under cities, the places where trash goes.
I have heard various versions of the anecdotes that fast food CEOs make their children eat organic, tech execs don’t let their kids near screens, and advertising moguls only allow their kids wooden toys, et cetera.These stories represent an idea that the people who really know how the sausage gets made would never let their most vulnerable or suggestive kin be in the world in the way most of us must.
Of course, the boundaries are permeable, temporary, illusory. At the coffee shop I worked at, we touted organic single-origin coffees, but our regular customers were consuming tiny amounts of bulk-purchased industrial dish detergent every time they ordered coffee “for here” in a ceramic mug. Military technologies and crowd-control techniques tested in other countries always get deployed on protestors in the US in the decades that follow. We know this on some level—hence the trope in apocalypse films wherein the contagion or zombies or whatever comes and finds the survivalist homesteaders, however complete and pure their efforts at isolation or containment. It’s not that there is no separation anywhere (the landfill is not in your kitchen) but rather that separations are often temporary, overstated, or otherwise less than solid (the runoff from the landfill gets in your drinking water and so makes its way back into your kitchen).
There is an idea between systems psychodynamics and many Buddhist traditions that all systems, nested within one another and overlapping, hang together like a web. In such a framework, a mild claim might be that our feelings about geopolitics affect our feelings about our friends; a more eccentric one may be that as the global temperature rises, so does our emotional temperature. Even more outlandishly, one might claim that the robust architecture of Assisi fortified the vision of G-d in the minds of the people who dwelled there and that it’s actually harder to be connected to G-d if you live in a building that’s built with particle board, asbestos insulation, fiberglass, plastic, and other poisons, and then go to a hospital with a Christian name(like St. Peter or St. Francis) where no one can help you with the medical problems caused by the asbestos and the plastic, which form the only container you can afford to live in. The idea, the extent of which one can debate, is that crude materiality and the most spectral abstractions interlock at different levels of scale, ad infinitum.
In other words, to some greater or lesser extent, depending on your imagination (and perhaps your openness to the bizarre or spiritual), elements in systems and subsystems echo, recreate, or adumbrate one another. The hanging together of the extant world is probably most plainly captured by disciplines like sociology, where the effects of poverty, for example, are studied, and we see that environmental pollutants, psychological messages, and material deprivation form a kind of self-reinforcing whirlpool resulting in myriad effects on health and wellbeing. It is also plainly captured by theology.
Indra’s Net is a concept in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. It’s the idea of everything that arose dependently, all things, hanging together and depending on one another, with no true ontological essence. Each of the jewels of Indra’s Net is said to contain the entirety, fractal, and there is no unfurling or separation of the parts from one another. One story tells of a courtesan wearing a jeweled net that covers her whole body, which she tells a drunken man can be unpinned, if he just finds the one pin that releases the garment. She serves him more and more libations and he fiddles with her outfit, trying to remove it, searching for the pinwhich causes the net to unravel. He eventually falls asleep and she takes his money. Even before cryptocurrency or hypertext, a longing to separate or unthread the totality of everything was seen as laughable.
Our Indra’s Net is a network, and it’s actually hard to think about. You can hold it in mind if you think about the proliferation of microplastics in seabirds and amniotic fluid; you can try to hold in your mind the enormity of large language models performing the world-historical biggest chop-and-screw of as much existing language as they can devour; you can bring to mind how PFAS are now in all the rainwater on the planet or reflect on the collapse of the Gulf Stream, the military and debt and chemical weapons and the rise and fall of religions and nations and borders and economies, the full, resplendent continuum, from the material to the abstract, every physical, psychological, ecological, spiritual model, interlocking and reverberating like every instrument in an eight-billion-plus-section orchestra all side chained together, signals interlocking, heaving and whimpering and clanging and sighing.
Who Abandoned Who
This idea that systems hang together is a kind of basic ontological idea of dependency; the quality of the hanging or the interlocking nature of such so-called systems may give way to the psychoanalytic idea of dependency, a term often used to invoke the relationship between mama and baby (or vice versa, I guess). In Indra’s Network, all parts produce all other parts as they also pervert, modify, and poison them, the world’s population and climate emissions swelling as we face the largest loss of biodiversity since we began measuring it. The dependency relationship between mama and baby has to do with directionality, the kind that can be inverted were a city to be suspended upside down.
Mama produces baby the way parents and schools and teachers produce children, the way the therapist in her manner and her office decorations and website text produces the patient who sits with her, and the way law enforcement and the judicial system produce criminals and prisoners. “And vice versa.” The vice versa here is actually everything, because the question, who depends on whom, is the mystery at the root of any kind of conundrum related to interconnection. “Who depends on who” becomes perverse in our age.
In perverse dependency, the who-rescued-who bumper sticker (rendered as a dog’s paw, perhaps to invoke a forgiving stance toward the mark a messy pet [baby] makes in one’s [mama] space) gives way to the who-betrayed-who bumper sticker, or a who-abandoned-who sticker, no longer in the shape of a paw, now perhaps in the shape of an oil derrick, a chainlink fence, a bomb, a microchip.
I return to St. Francis loving Assisi. The question of whether it is possible to love a world that is inflamed when your nervous system and immune system and gastrointestinal system are all likely also inflamed, if the“permanent” towers and walls of Assisi, seen through a cracked phone screen, appear to be much more mov-able now than before. Chesterton said of St. Francis, “Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped.” Can we feel thankful for not being dropped when we are precipitously close and when the organ of pride has become so contaminated as to be unusable?
What is mama even supposed to do that she no longer does? In a fantasy of police that actually help, you might know the person who comes when you call, and they might be a really skillful elder who can deescalate conflict and who would never carry a gun even if they were authorized to. Bion’s idea of container and contained involves conceptual language he invented; he uses the term “beta-elements” to describe raw fragments of mentation—not quite thinkable, often sensory, often unpleasant, functionally psychotic, perhaps at times murderous—transformed into something more usable by the containment of the mama. He argues that both parents and psychoanalysts perform such a function through their presence and their attention, letting the angry infant or child (or citizen) put horrible sensations into and onto us and then transforming them. This is one answer to my colleague’s beautiful question above, the question of what containment is.
In his book The Third Side, conflict scholar William Ury describes a violence prevention method in an Aboriginal group where one man was held down by his friends and family while he screamed and cried and wailed about how much he wanted to murder one of his neighbors. I wonder if you can call to mind anyone whom you trust to do this for you—to be present while you go into, as some might say, a full regression, and just be with you and know that you are in that moment baby, and they are mama, and though you reciprocally constitute each other, you are not being asked to contain anything; you can flail, and they can hold it, and it moves through you.
If we are to hold the world in mind as an Indra’s Network, with ourselves each as part of the constellation, I have this question about what is happening in our minds. If the weather and our internal weather are fractal with one another, how does our polluted, precarious world affect our object relations? My hypothesis is that the fear, hostility, and precarity all produce a who-abandoned-who proclivity, that we are living through a time where there is an increased pull (a behaviorist might say where it is “adaptive”) to be a bit more “Cluster B,” that is, self-focused, vindictive, myopic, afraid of betrayal, tending to locate the problem in the other or the environment, and hostile to offers of solidarity.[2]
I say “hostile to offers of solidarity” because of a study I read in psychology graduate school, in which oxytocin was administered to members of a group before they participated in social exercises. The people with oxytocin administered felt much closer and more connected. This scenario was recreated, but some members of the group were people who had Cluster B personality disorder diagnoses. When these members were given the oxytocin, they failed to experience any connection during the social exercise; instead, and in jarring opposition to those around them, they were less trusting and less cooperative.[3] This hostile response to the possibility of solidarity is part of how I see the dilemma of dependency in the present crisis and part of the obstacle to loving the world as it collapses.
“Cluster B” as a category and symbol can elicit an evocative penumbra of associations, and I believe anyone is capable of regression to a Cluster B level of functioning and relating, so I invoke the diagnosis not to cordon people off into a particular pathology, but more as a way of lighting up a set of dynamics that we can all be pulled toward in this time. Perhaps one less confrontational way of trying to describe this tendency is to say that the quality of the world—of mama, of danger and dependency in a world where our city is so much less stalwart than Assisi—is brutally regressive. Containing one another in the regression, learning to love the regression as St. Francis loved Assisi perhaps more in its precarity, is part of our task at this time.
Part of the reason for the invocation of Cluster B, inflammatory as it might be, is that it highlights the dis-comfort of owning the trouble within each of us.[4] When I think of a world ravaged by extraction and collapsing in violence and then try to think about how these dynamics might live in my mind (because Indra); it’s a bit like trying to think about your lover’s toxic ex and experiencing the slow realization that you might have more in common with the ex than you first thought. Part of a Cluster B presentation can involve a pattern of locating the trouble in the other person or the environment, rather than claiming one’s part in painful situations. To fully acknowledge the extent of danger and dependence means claiming the ways it is in us, too, as ugly as it might render us to ourselves. In other words, it’s not comfortable to claim the ways each of us psychologically internalize the violent world-historical moment. To fully countenance dependency challenges our efforts to differentiate ourselves from the contamination and atrocity we decry.
‘‘ Thankful it had not yet been dropped”A different person, a different author, a different girl would have attempted to argue, perhaps, for some kind of defense of dependency, as though dependency needs to be defended because it’s in danger of being gotten rid of, done away with, undervalued. There are some—perhaps called capitalists or individualists—who dowant to do away with dependency, who don’t want to act in deference, in each moment, to the way the world hangs together inexplicably and yet exactly, the way a city turned upside down would nonetheless be held suspended, and the way this hanging together means that dynamics repeat at every level of scale, from the intrapsychic to the geopolitical.
I do not find myself drawn to defending dependency, because dependency is irrefutable, and because dependency is also both good and bad. If you listen, you can’t help but hear it in the blaring alarm of the crisis of the climate, the low hum of the proliferation of microplastics, the necessity of the mama for the survival of the baby who cries and cries, and the necessity of the baby for the mama to persist in spite of everything. Our reliance on each other cannot be meaningfully argued against even as the world whips cyclonically, in tighter and tighter gyrations, toward more individualistic and vindictive interpersonal paradigms. We get closer and closer together, more entwined, and are incited to attack more and more viciously, as if by attacking one another we can become autonomous again, like the conjoined beings from the myth Aristophanes recounts in Plato’s Symposium if they were trying to murder their other half before they got separated.
Sometimes when I am sitting with a patient in therapy, I have this kind of reverie where I zoom out. I think about the therapist in the office next to mine, a friend, and the therapist in the office on the floor above me, whom I know less well. I do not visualize them exactly, but I imagine myself smaller, less atomized in my dyad, but understanding that I am part of a larger project, a larger tendency, a network of practitioners, working toward transformation. I can worry that psychotherapy is self-indulgent and maybe even depoliticizing; in the face of these worries, I aim toward a clinical politic (linked to other internal practices like meditation and prayer) that works at or through the dynamics in our minds that make us hostile to solidarity and/or too afraid of dependency and danger to love the world and be grateful for it, even in its precarity. To take up these dynamics involves facing a dilemma, namely that the world we want to inherit politically will be adumbrated by what we can tolerate and relate to psychologically. We must become less Cluster B—or get more containment for our regression—to instantiate the world we want and to bear the process of moving toward it, whether in small cadres or large groups or polities.
I believe that to do this requires one to love the world as it is burning, to love one another as we lose our minds from the heat and the fear, to understand that while we are not indistinct from another, we arise and fall in profound dependence and so, when we attack the other, we attack ourselves. We have, collectively, reversed victim and offender so many times we made a braid and then formed it into a noose, and so we dangle precariously with the world. In these reversals and inversions, perhaps, we may search for the gratitude that Klein (Bion’s intellectual forebear) believed was required for creativity and development, to hang onto our love of the world. I take from the hallucination about Assisi an invitation—especially when power begins to seem so directional that it crushes—to imagine the way things also hang upside down.
[1] A joke because the phrase was popularized by neoconservatives following the 1960s and ’70s. Peter Steinfels, writing in1979, described an apparent “crisis of authority” this way: “Governing institutions have lost their legitimacy; the confidenceof lead-ing elites has been sapped. Social stability and the legacy of liberal civilization are threatened.”
[2] In the DSM taxonomy of personality disorders, Cluster B includes antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic disorders.To understand why these are clustered together may be more or less intuitive. In The Basic Fault, Michael Balint also writes about a B Cluster of patients. I am under the impression that the DSM cluster and Balint’s cluster sharing names is entirely coincidental, yet the consilience is illuminating; Balint writes of the B Cluster of patients:
since the mutually trusting relationship is highly precariously balanced, the arglos [German word meaning innocent or guileless], unsuspecting, atmosphere breaks down repeatedly, and frequently symptoms of desperate clinging develop as safeguards and reassurance against another possible breakdown; a malignant form of regression, several unsuccessful attempts at reaching a new beginning, a constant threat of an unending spiral of demands or needs, and of development of addiction-like states; the regression is aimed at gratification by external action; suspiciously high intensity of demands, expectations, or “needs”;presence of signs of severe hysteria in the clinical picture, and of genital-orgastic elements both in the normal and in the regressed form of transference.
I use the term Cluster B here to indicate the DSM meaning with the Balintian penumbra.
[3] This image is offered anecdotally, as it lives in my mind, rather than scientifically; for an up-to-date literature review of the quite mixed oxytocin/borderline personality literature see Ester di Giacomo et al., “The Interplay Between Borderline Personality Disorder and Oxytocin: A Systematic Narrative Review on Possible Contribution and Treatment Options,” Frontiers in Psychiatry 15 (2024), doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1439615. A study similar to, if not the same as, the one I recalled in grad school is Jennifer Bartz, et al., “Oxytocin Can Hinder Trust and Cooperation in Borderline Personality Disorder,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 6, no.5 (2010): 556-63, doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsq085.
[4] For non-clinicians, it might be worth offering the context that in graduate school I was taught that many psychologists won’t work with Cluster B patients because they are afraid of being yelled at, sued, or otherwise mistreated.