Sustaining What We Cannot Resolve: Ambivalence as a Meeting of Internal Solitudes in Fascist Times
47th Annual IAPSP International Conference: Montréal, Quebec
10/22/26-10/25/26
"We are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate we love, wherever we love we hate." —Adam Phillips
A patient arrives describing her week: rage at the news followed by three days in bed; her vital protest in sudden retreat and her hatred for complicity is swallowed by complete exhaustion. She is ashamed. Not of any particular feeling, but of the rhythm itself. She experiences this oscillation as failure, as proof she cannot sustain what this moment demands. What she has internalized is fascism's intolerance for ambivalence. Adam Phillips argues that "aliveness" depends on "the vitalizing effects of conflict." This, he believes, is the antidote to giving up. But what happens when conflict itself becomes unbearable? Christopher Bollas describes "the fascist state of mind" as one that tries to "empty the mind of all opposition" through "simplifying violence." The fascist cannot tolerate conflict's give-and-take but is enthralled by war's annihilation.
This paper presentation argues that our current political moment activates fascism both externally and internally and that the mechanism of transmission is identification with the aggressor's demand for constancy. Externally, we face political systems designed to empty opposition through exhaustion, overwhelm, and relentless shock. These systems reduce everything to binaries, eliminate nuance, and force choice. Unable to bear the sustained conflict the external world demands, we turn fascism's logic inward. We become our own simplifiers, our own annihilators. We cannot tolerate our own ambivalence. We demand of ourselves what fascism demands of the social body: Choose. Perpetual outrage or permanent collapse. As if the very act of choosing might finally bring relief. Clinically, this manifests as patients who apologize for their oscillation as if it were pathology. This shame is instructive though. The rhythm of back-and-forth and contradiction feels like betrayal, but betrayal of what? Betrayal of a fantasy that we might finally become legible to ourselves, singular, no longer at war with our multiplicity. The patient who collapses after rage has not failed at resistance. They have failed only at sustaining a fiction: that aliveness does not require this maddening oscillation. Phillips and Bollas illuminate this: aliveness requires conflict, the capacity to hold opposition rather than empty it.
The clinical and political question becomes: Can we refuse fascism's demand for simplicity, not through compromise but by sustaining the conflict that constitutes aliveness itself? Can we recognize that the rhythm patients bring, the one they have been taught to pathologize, might be the very form resistance takes when it refuses to be perfected into constancy? What we must give up is our intolerance for ambivalence not because ambivalence is bearable, but because it is the structure of aliveness itself. What we must hold onto is conflict: not the conflict that simplifies into war, but the conflict that vitalizes, that keeps us in motion, that refuses the murderous rest of certainty. The work is to refuse the shame that tells us oscillation is failure. To recognize that wherever we hate we love, wherever we love we hate; and that this unbearable doubleness is the only thing worth sustaining.
