ABSTRACT
The core issue is the recognition that what we see as – and call – “environment” is not only the support of our projections but essentially a part of our human psyche not identified as such. Only then can the question of human destructiveness be fully appreciated in my “soft genocide” dimension and clearly linked to its other expressions: human genocides and wars; exclusion of a large majority of humans from social welfare, health and techniques and consumerist and managerial alienation. An important consequence, in a psychoanalytic perspective centred on non-differentiation, is to enable us to define a difference between primary and secondary destructiveness. Primary destructiveness results from a lack of transformation of cruel primary love and requires containment of the rage and its adequate socialization. Secondary (projective) destructiveness can be approached through recognition of the damage, the experience of guilt and the process of reparation. Destructiveness is closely related to the transformation of omnipotence. Winnicott’s description of the process of progressive disillusionment from the primary “double dependence” insists on the need to retain omnipotent areas, such as play, fantasies, formlessness and places to “rest”, which allow subjective appropriation of one’s own real life.
