Overview
“Ressentiment” describes feelings of resentment towards the perceived source of one’s powerlessness.
History and Context
Friedrich Nietzsche used “ressentiment” to lay the groundwork for his concept of “slave morality” as a psychological defense against the implication of one’s inferiority. Specifically, Nietzsche argued that those without power resent those who do have power, and they react by creating a system of morality that elevates their weaknesses into virtues while condemning the strength and success of others as vices. For instance, a worker may resent the financial successes of their company’s CEO, so the narrative that wealthy people are made unhappy by their own corruption and greed while workers can find happiness in honest, simple labor can be appealing. It allows someone to operate within an alternative hierarchy to attain and demonstrate value when feeling rejected by another hierarchy.
Commentary
I would argue that many therapeutic modalities are focused on dismantling ressentiment at the level of the individual’s mindset rather than examining ways for the individual to compete into a position of power. The “radical acceptance” that is spoken of in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is positioned towards the end of accepting reality as it is without the judgment that prompts a reactive rationalization that becomes ressentiment. One is encouraged to make peace with the inequalities that cause them suffering to move out of a reactive state defined by craving something one lacks, which is why the ascetic ideals derived from Buddhist frameworks were inspirational in the development of DBT and other recent modalities.
The argument could be made that Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, DBT, ACT, etc. enable clients to actively pursue their values and goals without being bound to their immediate emotional reactions, harmful schemas, and negative core beliefs, and I could agree with that. The issue lies in the limitations of what therapy is: an institutional authority in a room whose limits of intervention are helping a patient unpack their internal relationship to their perception of reality through psychological mechanisms while retaining a normative set of beliefs about what healthy mechanisms ought to be. A therapist is highly limited in their ability to assess the external system a client operates within, so the model of reality that has to be constructed within a therapeutic setting is necessarily going to diverge from the model of reality outside the room.
Consider a client presenting with the belief “the world is fundamentally unsafe, so kill-or-be-killed is the mindset it takes to survive.” This client, in a pre-ressentiment phase, might have constructed a worldview in which their adaptation to the kill-or-be-killed mindset is virtuous.
A CBT practitioner might directly tackle this as a cognitive distortion or maladaptive coping mechanism. They might encourage the client to find evidence that contradicts the idea the world is always unsafe, such as examining their past for interactions or relationships that did feel safe to the client. This doesn’t actually engage with the client’s reality as much as it attempts to tune their model of reality towards one that, within the clinician’s assumptions of rational and helpful thinking, would produce less suffering. The clinician might reason that being able to identify safety would produce relief or restore executive functioning capacity for a client who might be facing chronic stress produced from a hypervigilant affect of a maladaptive defense mechanism, but what if the world truly is unsafe in the lived material reality that the client exists within? After all, even the relationship between the clinician and the client is generally contingent on the client’s capacity to pay for the clinician’s services, which are themselves regulated and formulated through institutional incentives unrelated to the client. The clinician’s model of reality necessarily diverges from the client’s actual reality under the Stoic premise that thoughts about events drive suffering rather than the events themselves. Rather than coming up with solutions that work through a “kill-or-be-killed” mindset and derive motivation to change reality out of rage or envy, the cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation it takes to not act are elevated as ideals, with the assumption that the client can make healthier decisions from this position. However, the metrics of a successful CBT intervention remain located in the client’s internal homeostasis rather than a true relationship to external reality. In this case, the metric becomes the client’s ability to challenge a belief in an unsafe world, even if validated by their external reality, in order to manufacture comfort by constructing evidence of safety. So long as the clinician and client are operating in the model of reality constructed within a room meant to exist outside of the client’s usual material reality, only the client’s self-reported interpretation of the world can be examined to determine whether there’s a pathological level of suffering and adjusted to reduce it. Within these bounds, we’re effectively rearranging deck chairs on the ship of ressentiment, guided by the clinician’s subjective assessment of the combination of “rational beliefs” that dispel the “cognitive distortions” until a reduction in pathological suffering is achieved.