Here Lies Bitterness Healing from Resentment

The greatest threat to modern democracy comes from within and it has a name: resentment.  Stemming from feelings of inferiority in relation to others, resentment is a diffuse and obsessive loathing, coupled with delusions of victimhood, which clouds one’s judgment and perspective, so that an individual’s capacity to act and heal is paralyzed. Without the ability to heal, resentment can give rise to violent impulses, to the rejection of the rule of law, the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the urge to use violent means to try to regain control of one’s life.   

As individuals and as societies, we face the same challenge: how to diagnose resentment and its dark forces, and how to resist the temptation to allow it to become the motor of our individual and collective histories.

This bestselling and highly original account of the psychic forces shaping modern societies will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the crisis of democracy today and what we can do to address it.

Cynthia Fleury is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who holds the Chair of Humanities and Health at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris, is Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines and Professor of Philosophy at the University Hospital Group of Paris – Psychiatry and Neuroscience.

Part I


Bitterness: What the Man of Resentment Experiences

                        

1. Universal Bitterness
                                           
2. Individual and Society in the Face of Resentment: Rumbling and Rumination  

3. The Definition and the Manifestations of Resentment
                        
4. The Inertia of Resentment and the Resentment-Fetish
                      
5. Resentment and Egalitarianism: The End of Discernment
                       
6. Melancholy in a State of Abundance
                             
7. What Scheler Could Teach to the Ethics of Care
                              
8. A Femininity of Resentment?
                                          
9. The False Self
                                                  
10. The Membrane
                                                   
11. The Necessary Confrontation
                                   
12. The Taste of Bitterness
                                             
13. Melancholic Literature
                                        
14. The Crowd of Missed Beings
                                          
15. The Faculty of Forgetting
                                                
16. Expecting Something from the World
                                  
17. The Tragedy of the Thiasus
                                          
18. Great Health: Choosing the Open, Choosing the Numinous
                    
19. Continuing to Be Astonished by the World
                           
20. Happiness and Resentment
                                      
21. Defending the Strong Against the Weak
                                    
22. Pathologies of Resentment
                                           
23. Humanism or Misanthropy?
                                      
24. Fighting Resentment through Analysis
                                     
25. Giving Value Back to Time
                                           
26. In the Counter-Transference and the Analytic Cure
                        
27. To the Sources of Resentment, with Montaigne

                                

Part II


Fascism: The Psychological Sources of Collective Resentment
                  

1. Exile, Fascism, and Resentment: Adorno, 1
                           
2. Capitalism, Reification, and Resentment: Adorno, 2
                      
3. Knowledge and Resentment
                                       
4. Constellatory Writing and Stupor: Adorno, 3
                                
5. The Insincerity of Some, the Cleverness of Others
                      
6. Fascism as Emotional Plague: Wilhelm Reich, 1
                           
7. The Fascism within Me: Wilhelm Reich, 2
                              
8. Historians’ Readings, Contemporary Psyches
                           
9. Life as Creation: The Open is Salvation
                                   
10. The Hydra

                                                        



Part III


The Sea: A World Opened to Man
                                          

1. Disclosure, According to Fanon
                                       
2. The Universal at the Risk of the Impersonal
                                
3. Caring for the Colonized
                                             
4. The Decolonization of Being
                                          
5. Restoring Creativity
                                           
6. The Therapy of Decolonization
                                        
7. A Detour By Way of Cioran
                                      
8. Fanon the Therapist
                                                  
9. The Recognition of Singularity
                                       
10. Individual Health and Democracy
                                     
11. The Violation of Language
                                           
12. Recourse to Hatred
                                            
13. The Mundus Inversus: Conspiracy and Resentment
                        
14. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 1
                                 
15. What Separation Means
                                               
16. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 2: Democracy as an Open System
of Values
                                                    
17. The Man from Underground: Resisting the Abyss

                         

Notes