Attainment of human essence is not (re.) attainment of a “golden past” (though this humanly universal longing frequently is exploited) but does unavoidably contain or build upon a longing for such attainment. There is a strong desire to capture our individual and transhistorical essence and species-being for our social and historical essence. This perspective is transmuted from, respectively, psychoanalysis and Marxism.
Psychosocial Maturity
A closely linked further postulate is that psychoanalytic object relations thought suggests a model of psychological maturity that is both a prototype and a concordant condition for essence-recognition and achievement, and for societal problem amelioration as well. Briefly cast, psychosocial maturity is knowing and dealing with others, and with the extra-individual world, as fully objective; that is, existing in its/their own right, as substantially more than infantile-based self-reflections, self-projections, or instrumental means of self-gratification.
Psychosocial maturity is further regarded herein to be an attainment of what C. Fred Alford (1989), drawing on the work of Melanie Klein, calls “reparative morality” (p. 44). This mature moral state contrasts with the more primitive “talion morality.” The latter is, in short, an urge to take revenge or to institute punishments for some wrong(s), the former an urge to make repair for it/them (Alford, 1989).
Klein’s thought supports these notions, says Alford (1989), because she is a psychologist of the “passions.” The “master passions” are love and hate, and “other powerful emotions, such as envy, gratitude, guilt, grief, or mourning may be seen as versions and combinations of the two master passions” (p. 8). Alford argues that Klein shows concern about what he thinks is best called caritas: “Affection, love, or esteem” felt toward others by those having successfully attained attitudes of genuine reparation in the Kleinian depressive position.
[Caritas] connotes the value of the object loved rather than the intensity of desire” (p. 9). Alford summarizes: “In a word, [reparative] love is neither an aim-inhibited expression of libido nor merely an attempt to identify with a powerful other. Rather, it expresses concern–caritas–regarding the welfare of the other qua other” (p. 35l
One further postulate builds from arguments, like that of Alford, that intrinsically interlink individual subjective development and maturity with the development and maturity of wider society. Basic to social problem amelioration would be a subject-object 1elatio ship which may be significantly altered from the current, often-immature and regressive, patterns. It is repeatedly pointed out that a major regressive tenet and practice of capitalism is the mobilization and indulgence–that is, exploitation, in its Marxist sense–of developmentally early human aggressive and desirous tendencies.
In the main, aggressive tendencies are rewarded in capitalism’s productive sphere (and in extra-economic variations of this theme); desirous, needy tendencies are encouraged in the realm of consumption/commodities (and in the spinoffs of that realm). A postulate for which underpinning is developed is that, while the universal difficult legacies of primitive human development will never be absolutely transcended, individual and societal developmental possibilities that are more mature than those now enabled are feasible.
