Monthly Spotlight - October

My spotlights are drafted with the assistance of AI. Using papers, concepts, and theories I have read or otherwise come across. Then reviewed, amended, and refined by hand to

reflect my own thinking, therapeutic approach, and voice.

Grievance: When the Past Refuses to Become the Past

I recently attended a book launch for the psychoanalyst John Steiner, where he discussed themes from his recent writings on mouring and melancholia. One phrase that stayed with me was “nursing a grievance." I found myself thinking about that word, nursing: tending to something, caring for it, keeping it alive. What might we be preserving when we return, again and again, to an injury? And what might it mean to loosen our hold on it? I have touched on grievance before, but hearing Steiner speak prompted me to explore it more fully in this month’s spotlight.There are some experiences that end in the external world but do not quite end inside us.

A relationship finishes. A parent dies. Someone betrays us. We are humiliated, overlooked, abandoned, treated unfairly or wounded in a way that feels impossible to forget. Years may pass and yet, internally, something about the experience remains curiously present.

This is one of the ways I have come to think about grievance.

Grievance is not simply anger. Nor do I think it is helpful to reduce it to bitterness, resentment or an inability to “move on”. Sometimes there is very bloody good reason to feel aggrieved. We can be genuinely badly treated by other people. Parents fail children. Partners betray one another. Employers behave unjustly, regularly. Institutions let people down. Harm is real, and therapy should never turn genuine injustice into a psychological problem belonging only to the person who has been injured.

But grievance can sometimes develop another life inside us.

It can become part of our internal world.

And once that happens, the grievance may begin to do much more than remind us that something painful occurred. It may preserve a relationship with the person who hurt us, protect us from other feelings, shape the way we see ourselves and influence how we experience new people and new situations.

I find this one of the most interesting areas of psychodynamic work because grievance sits somewhere between the past and the present. Something happened then, but emotionally it may still be happening now.

When something has not yet become memory

One of the things that interests me about mourning is the way it introduces time.

When an experience has been mourned, it does not disappear and nor do we stop caring about it. But eventually we may become able to say:

That happened to me.

There is a past tense.

Before this becomes possible, the experience can feel different. It may remain immediate, as though it is still unfolding.

This is particularly clear in traumatic experience, but I think it is also relevant to grievance.

A person may know intellectually that something happened twenty years ago, while emotionally the injury remains present. They are still arguing with the parent who failed them. Still waiting for the apology. Still imagining what they should have said. Still hoping that one day the other person will finally understand exactly what they did.

The event has happened, but internally the case remains open.

I sometimes think that grievance is one of the ways in which the human mind resists allowing the past to become fully past.

That does not mean forgetting.

In fact, quite the opposite.

The grievance may become a way of ensuring that the injury is never forgotten.

Nursing a grievance

There is an interesting expression in English: we talk about “nursing” a grievance.

To nurse something is to tend to it. Feed it. Keep it alive.

I think there is something psychologically accurate about that phrase.

A grievance can be revisited repeatedly. We return to the conversation, the betrayal, the humiliation or the injustice. We remember what was said. We imagine different outcomes. We rehearse what we might say if we ever had another opportunity.

Sometimes this happens almost automatically.

The mind circles around the injury.

This can appear self-defeating from the outside. Why keep returning to something that causes so much pain?

But psychologically it may be doing something important.

The grievance maintains a relationship with the person who injured us.

Hatred, after all, is still a form of relationship.

If I am continually angry with you, you remain psychologically present to me.

If I am waiting for you to apologise, you are still present.

If I am imagining revenge, you are still present.

If I am prosecuting you in my mind, you are still in the room.

And this begins to show why grievance can be so difficult to relinquish.

Sometimes the alternative to grievance is not peace.

Sometimes the alternative is loss.

Melanie Klein and the internal world

Melanie Klein's work is particularly useful to me when thinking about this.

Klein was deeply interested in the way our earliest relationships become part of our internal world. The people we depend upon are not simply external figures. Our experiences of being loved, frustrated, frightened, protected, neglected or cared for gradually become organised inside us.

Her ideas about splitting are especially relevant.

When anxiety becomes intense, we may find it easier to keep good and bad experiences separate.

The world can then become arranged in a very clear way:

I am the injured one.

You are the one who caused the injury.

Sometimes, of course, this is simply true.

But the psychological difficulty comes when that arrangement can no longer change.

The other person becomes fixed as the bad object, while the self remains fixed as the wronged one.

There is very little room for ambivalence.

And ambivalence, although uncomfortable, is psychologically important.

It allows me to say:

You hurt me, and I loved you.

You failed me, and I still miss you.

I was angry with you, and I depended upon you.

You behaved badly, but you were not only bad.

This does not excuse harmful behaviour. It does something much more psychologically difficult.

It allows complexity.

Klein called this capacity part of the depressive position. By “depressive” she did not simply mean feeling depressed. She was describing an emotional development in which we become more able to recognise that the person we love and the person we hate may be the same person.

That recognition produces sadness, guilt, concern and eventually the possibility of mourning.

Grievance can protect us from mourning

This is perhaps the part I find most important.

Grievance can be a defence against grief.

That sounds strange because grievance itself is often extremely painful.

But pain is not all the same.

Anger keeps us active.

Grief asks us to recognise that something cannot be undone.

Anger says:

Something must still happen.

Grief says:

Something has already happened.

There is a huge difference between those two positions.

In grievance, there may still be a demand:

You must apologise.

You must finally understand.

You must put this right.

You must suffer as I suffered.

Sometimes these things genuinely should happen.

But underneath them there can also be another wish: that if the right thing finally happens in the present, perhaps something about the past can be repaired.

This is where grievance can become extraordinarily difficult to relinquish.

Because mourning requires us to confront a painful truth:

some things cannot be repaired in the way we would like.

No apology can give somebody a different childhood.

No explanation can make betrayal never have occurred.

No punishment can return the years that were lost.

No amount of remorse can bring back someone who has died.

The past can acquire new meaning, but it cannot become a different past.

Reparation and the wish to put things right

Klein wrote extensively about reparation.

Once we become able to recognise our own aggression towards people we also love, guilt can emerge. So too can a wish to repair.

I think this is important because grievance can sometimes locate all responsibility for repair in the other person.

You damaged me, therefore you must repair me.

Again, there may be truth in this.

But there is also a psychological limit to what another person can repair for us.

At some point, something may need to become symbolic.

We may not be able to change the original relationship, but we can relate differently in the present.

We cannot undo childhood, but we can perhaps refuse to reproduce aspects of it in our own relationships.

We cannot restore someone who has died, but the relationship can continue internally in another form.

This is where I find Hans Loewald's image of turning “ghosts into ancestors” particularly evocative.

A ghost haunts.

It is present but not fully alive and not fully past.

An ancestor is different.

An ancestor belongs to the past, but remains meaningful.

We can remember them, think about them, argue with them internally, love them, criticise them and recognise their influence without being possessed by them.

Perhaps part of mourning involves this transformation.

The ghost becomes an ancestor.

Grievance and identity

There is another aspect of grievance that can make it difficult to relinquish.

It can tell us who we are.

A person may become:

the child who was neglected,

the partner who was betrayed,

the sibling who was overlooked,

the employee who was unfairly treated,

the person who was never properly recognised.

These descriptions may begin with real experiences.

But over time they can become identities.

And if the grievance disappears, another question appears:

Who am I without it?

This is one reason why the loss of a grievance can itself require mourning.

Sometimes a person is not simply giving up anger.

They are giving up a familiar way of understanding themselves.

Even painful identities can feel safer than uncertainty.

Fairbairn and attachment to painful objects

W.R.D. Fairbairn's work also helps me here.

Fairbairn believed that human beings are fundamentally object-seeking. We seek relationship.

This includes relationships that hurt us.

One of the difficulties of childhood is that a child cannot simply decide that an unreliable or rejecting parent no longer matters. The child needs the relationship and may therefore preserve it internally.

This can help us understand something about grievance in adulthood.

We sometimes remain more attached to people through resentment than we recognise.

Consciously we may say:

“I never want to see them again.”

But internally we may be speaking to them every day.

The grievance becomes a continuing relationship.

Letting go can therefore produce an unexpected emptiness.

The person we hated was also occupying a great deal of psychic space.

Humiliation and the vertical relationship

John Steiner's recent work on grievance adds another dimension that I find particularly useful.

He describes what he calls horizontal and vertical relationships.

A horizontal relationship involves a sense of mutuality.

A vertical one is organised around superiority and inferiority.

Many grievances contain humiliation.

Someone has made us feel small.

Dismissed us.

Looked down on us.

Rejected us.

Made us feel unimportant.

And grievance can sometimes reverse that position.

The person who was humiliated becomes the moral judge.

You may have looked down on me, but now I know that I am right and you are wrong.

This can be protective.

It restores dignity.

But the vertical relationship has not disappeared.

Only the positions have changed.

The person who was underneath is now psychologically above.

I think this is one of the reasons some grievances can become very rigid. Moral certainty protects against the earlier experience of humiliation.

Karen Horney and vindictive triumph

The neo-Freudian analyst Karen Horney wrote about something she called vindictive triumph.

She described how humiliation and injuries to self-esteem can sometimes create a powerful wish to rise above, defeat or humiliate the other.

Again, this does not mean that every grievance is vindictive.

But it does remind us that underneath some grievances there may be a struggle around dignity.

The person may unconsciously be trying to move from:

You made me feel worthless

to:

I will prove that you are worthless.

When this happens, revenge may not simply be about punishment.

It may be an attempt to repair a damaged sense of self.

The superego and the internal courtroom

I sometimes think of grievance as creating an internal courtroom.

There is a prosecutor.

A defendant.

A judge.

Evidence.

A verdict.

The difficulty is that the trial may never end.

Or perhaps the trial has already ended, but the sentence continues indefinitely.

This links grievance to the superego.

Freud described the superego as an internal authority capable of judging the self. In some people it can become extremely harsh.

Ron Britton later wrote about the importance of the ego becoming more independent from such internal authority.

I find this clinically useful.

If an internal voice says:

You are worthless.

The task is not always to make the voice disappear.

Sometimes another part of the mind needs to become strong enough to reply:

You may say that, but is it true?

The same can happen with grievance.

The mind says:

Because this happened before, it will happen again.

Reflection introduces another possibility:

Is this person actually doing what the earlier person did, or am I also encountering something from my past?

That is not self-blame.

It is the capacity to distinguish past from present.

How the internal world enters our relationships

This is where grievance moves from the internal world into the external one.

We do not leave our internal relationships at home when we meet other people.

We bring them with us.

If I expect humiliation, I may become especially alert to signs that someone is looking down on me.

If I expect abandonment, I may become highly sensitive to distance.

If I expect betrayal, ambiguity may feel dangerous.

And then something interesting happens.

I may withdraw.

Become defensive.

Attack.

Demand reassurance.

Test the other person.

The other person responds.

Perhaps they become defensive too.

And suddenly the external world begins to resemble my internal expectation.

I knew you wouldn't understand me.

This does not mean the individual has invented the interaction.

Relationships are co-created.

Harry Stack Sullivan was particularly interested in this interpersonal dimension. Betty Joseph later described the transference as a “total situation”: the patient's internal world becomes alive within the therapeutic relationship itself.

As a therapist, I may find myself feeling unusually guilty, accused, inadequate, rescuing, irritated or defensive.

These feelings matter.

They may tell us something about the kind of internal relationship that is being recreated between us.

But I also have to remain aware that therapists are real people.

We misunderstand.

We make mistakes.

We fail.

Not everything belongs to the patient's projection.

This is where relational thinking remains important to me.

Grievance in groups and society

I also think these ideas have relevance beyond the consulting room.

We need to be cautious here. A society is not simply a large patient and psychoanalytic ideas should not be carelessly imposed upon political or social conflicts.

But groups can also organise themselves around grievance.

A shared injury can create identity.

We know who we are because we know what was done to us.

Wilfred Bion showed how groups under anxiety can become less able to think and more organised around basic assumptions such as fight-flight.

Vamik Volkan has written about how historical injuries can become part of large-group identity and can be transmitted between generations.

This does not mean historical grievances are imaginary.

Quite the opposite.

But the psychological question remains:

what happens when an old injury becomes the primary lens through which present reality is understood?

Past and present begin to collapse together.

The internal world shapes the external world, and the responses of the external world reinforce the internal one.

A cycle develops.

Injury creates grievance.

Grievance shapes identity.

Identity shapes perception.

Perception shapes action.

Action affects others.

Their response may then confirm the original expectation.

We see versions of this in families, couples, workplaces, communities and sometimes much larger social groups.

From grievance to grief

I do not think the therapeutic aim should be to remove grievance.

And I certainly do not think the answer is simply forgiveness.

Sometimes forgiveness is neither possible nor desirable.

For me, the more useful question is:

What is the grievance doing for this person?

Is it preserving a relationship?

Protecting against helplessness?

Maintaining dignity?

Defending against guilt?

Protecting the person from mourning?

Holding together a sense of identity?

Keeping alive the hope that the past can somehow still be put right?

If we understand what the grievance protects, then something may gradually begin to change.

The shift I am interested in is not necessarily from grievance to forgiveness.

It is from grievance to grief.

Grievance says:

You harmed me, and my internal world remains organised around what you must now do.

Grief says:

You harmed me. It mattered. I may always carry something of it. But I cannot make the past become different.

That is painful.

But it also introduces freedom.

The person who injured me may still matter.

The memory may remain.

The anger may return.

But the experience no longer has to occupy the present in quite the same way.

Perhaps this is what mourning ultimately makes possible.

Something that has lived inside us as a ghost can gradually become an ancestor.

The past remains part of us.

But it becomes the past.

And with that, some space opens for something new.

References

Bion, W.R. (1961) Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. London: Tavistock.

Britton, R. (2003) Sex, Death and the Superego: Experiences in Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.

Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV. London: Hogarth Press.

Horney, K. (1950) Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization. New York: W.W. Norton.

Joseph, B. (1985) ‘Transference: the total situation’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 66, pp. 447–454.

Klein, M. (1935) ‘A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, pp. 145–174.

Klein, M. (1940) ‘Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, pp. 125–153.

Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, pp. 99–110.

Klein, M. (1957) Envy and Gratitude. London: Hogarth Press.

Loewald, H.W. (1960) ‘On the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, pp. 16–33.

Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats. London: Routledge.

Steiner, J. (2023) ‘Mourning in Hamlet: Turning ancestral ghosts into ancestors’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 104(6), pp. 1025–1041.

Steiner, J. (2025) ‘Injury, grievance, and revenge, in the wrath of Achilles’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 106(4), pp. 784–798.

Steiner, J. (2025) ‘Before and after the fall: Horizontal and vertical object orientations in the analysis of a patient with grievances’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 106(5), pp. 873–891.

Sullivan, H.S. (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W.W. Norton.

Volkan, V.D. (2001) ‘Transgenerational transmissions and chosen traumas: An aspect of large-group identity’, Group Analysis, 34(1), pp. 79–97.

Winnicott, D.W. (1949) ‘Hate in the counter-transference’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30, pp. 69–74.