The country has just emerged from an election campaign that created great divide, tension and animosity within the community, families and among friends.
“It’s us against them”… “Min mhux magħna kontra tagħna”… “We are all good; they all evil.” Before exploring the psychosocial implications of such attitudes and political strategies, two crucial psychological terms need to be defined: ‘splitting’ and ‘projection’.
Splitting refers to black-and-white or all-or-nothing thinking. It is a primitive defence mechanism by which individuals or communities fail to bring together the negative and positive into a cohesive whole, that is, we split the world or people into all good or all bad.
As a result, the person or group starts to think in extreme terms, for example that an individual’s behaviour or motives are all right or all wrong, leaving very little room for a more objective and realistic middle ground.
In actual fact, the good and the bad aspects of any person or political party exist within the same whole, but we are selectively blinded to only perceive that which our psyche preconditions us to.
Melanie Klein spoke of how infants instinctively decide whether their mother’s breast is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on the amount of pleasure/pain or satisfaction/dissatisfaction that is derived from it at any given moment. One negative experience of breastfeeding could lead the infant to psychologically conclude that the breast is, in fact, a ‘bad breast’.
This is said to happen because the infant is incapable of processing deeply, of thinking laterally or of understanding the phenomenological process of how things can potentially unfold, develop and shift in the future.
We are all inherently the integration of good and bad qualities, as are both our major political parties
This process of ‘splitting’ is not specific to infants but continues throughout life and causes us to idealise people or groups while denigrating others – ethnic groups, minority groups or political parties, at times for very irrational and illogical reasons. With a lack of awareness, we will unconsciously set out to distance ourselves from those we reject, placing them far away from us and separate to the self, which leads us then to feel we can ‘punish’ them safely, since we have disassociated ourselves from them. This is why it becomes an ‘us versus them’ mentality.
As humans, we are predisposed to compartmentalise our lives into different symbols, such that we find the need to identify the ‘bad man’– il-babaw – who does all evil. In doing so, we are helping ourselves feel more worthwhile and valuable, since it is easier for those traits to exist outside of ourselves than to acknowledge them within. Projective identification will be a major part of any campaign to create this external bad guy.
Usually when we are seeing the ‘all bad’ in others, we are actually rejecting unwanted or unacceptable parts of our own personality, since the reality is we are all capable of atrocities and wrongdoings, just as we are all capable of the common good.
Seeing the ‘all bad’ in others is what we call psychological projection. Such psychological mechanisms can turn bitter and become the root cause of attacks, hatred, harm and animosity towards others, as has been seen in many socio-political contexts, even locally. The biggest problem is that we end up accusing others of having our unwanted traits, while the others do the same: the pot-calling-the-kettle-black scenario, by which it is often difficult to identify the accuser from the accused or the perpetrator from victim. It becomes one big hodgepodge of subjective reality and distorted perceptions.
The truth is, we are all inherently the integration of good and bad qualities, as are both our major political parties.
Since splitting and projection are instinctual processes, I’m certain we all partook of such behaviours during this election campaign – where people felt justified to denigrate, ridicule, shame and threaten others – or when it became difficult to sit at the same table with family members who held different opinions. People, including members of our union, were even attacked through social media and other means. The streets were also rife with verbal abuse and conflicts.
These dynamics are dangerous and destructive to our overall wellbeing and to our community at large. Political leaders have a social responsibility to discourage such attitudes and behaviours. The ‘tribal’ mentality in Malta has long thrived, with a far-reaching history of splitting and projection. We seem to thrive on creating rivalry. We are either fervent Italian or English football supporters; either PL or PN; with one każin or the other.
We encourage our children to perpetuate this cycle by involving them in partisan politics, by painting their faces with our tribe’s colours and wrapping scarves around their necks; by indoctrinating them to believe that one side is all good, the other forever evil. We are fostering in these children a culture of division, anger, hostility and fear, without honing their capacity to think critically and deeply. This is not healthy. This is not ok.
It is time to move forward in this regard and develop as a nation – to develop the psychological maturity to integrate diversity, allow alternatives, listen to other perspectives, be open to other options and learn to give and take critical feedback.
Our leaders – our role models – and our parents need to set an example for our generations to come. So as we prepare ourselves for the next election, perhaps we can consider sitting down with our adult children and friends to read the political manifestos and together write up a list of the pros and cons of each party. To have an objective and rational discussion on what we feel each party can offer and what we fear they cannot, and allow everybody around us the right to choose, to weigh, to decide and to vote, without making them feel ‘ignorant’ or ashamed of their views or afraid to express who they are and what they stand for.
Cher V. Laurenti Engerer is the PRO of the Malta Chamber of Psychologists.