Those who cannot claim their anger either turn cruel or lose themselves to their conscience.

DR. Meral AYDIN

A person who is unjust to themselves disrupts justice at its very origin. In contexts where the unscrupulous are powerful and dominant, being conscientious may become the greatest injustice one can inflict upon oneself. This is because individuals who cannot be fair to themselves often hold themselves responsible for preserving goodness in the external world. Through this responsibility, they blame only themselves and may even define their right to exist as contingent upon doing everything correctly, maintaining harmony with everyone, or even establishing world peace. In doing so, they create infinite sources of obligation to burden themselves with.

Everything in life has a cost; most importantly, the cost of existing by asserting one’s own being is infinite. Human existence cannot be conceived in isolation from others, and the cost of existence extends not only toward oneself but also toward others in one’s life. It even reaches nature itself—everything we encounter, the water we drink, the air we breathe and so on… By contrast, the cost of renouncing one’s existence by hiding within various concepts may encompass an irreversibly lost lifetime. This raises a fundamental question: can a person demonstrate a true form of existence that is free of cost and beneficial for everyone?

Conscience always operates from within the individual, emerging from the self. For this reason, although a basic level of conscientiousness may be expected from everyone, it is inherently personal and specific to the individual. In forming moral criteria, individuals are shaped by their subjective sense of self and their life experiences. The way conscience is positioned within one’s life is grounded in personality organization and the inner emotional world. Self-perception and the processes of positioning the self in relation to others determine whether the conscience functions in a supportive or a judgmental manner towards the self.

For individuals who were neglected or abused in childhood—whose emotions were neither seen, heard, nor spoken about, and who lacked appropriate social experiences—existence itself becomes a matter of conscience. Such individuals do not know a safe way to assert themselves. They have been deprived of emotional attunement, of being adequately held by life, and of guidance that would help them navigate their developmental path. During one therapy session, a client asked whether they could sit on the floor. I agreed. They sat cross-legged and said, “Now it feels right. I feel like a small child here. You are taller and more adult. It is as if I was lost and came to you. I can tell you what I have experienced, and you can listen kindly, without judgment or punishment. Not like a parent, but like a grandmother. You would say, ‘It’s okay, my dear,’ no matter what I have done, and you would smile. I would not be afraid where I am lost, and somehow you would help me find my way and move forward.” This client had been so profoundly deprived of basic caregiving needs, emotional support, and relational engagement in early childhood—and had been forced to endure the unpredictability of an inconsistent mother entirely alone—that they were estranged from discovering pathways for social connection and bonding. As a result, they constructed a solitary world within their own highly capable mind, and initiating contact with others has become an enormous struggle.

In the earliest phases of life, our processing and memory functions are not yet sufficiently developed to perceive anxiety in its emotional depth and to verbally process and express it. Nevertheless, the traces of these experiences are recorded in subcortical regions of the brain as unprocessed affective building blocks and persist throughout life as part of natural amygdala functioning, continually seeking expression. Thus, what is lost in the past continues to seize us in the present. To emerge from this state and become a psychologically healthy adult, the need for another who mediates our connection to life and to ourselves, just as in infancy, remains ongoing. The infant, driven by an unconscious awareness of their dependence on another person for survival and development and of the need to be accepted and loved, tends to blame themselves in matters related to the caregiver and seeks ways to preserve the caregiver as good. At this point, the infant’s anger is withdrawn from the external world and redirected inward, and internal mechanisms are constructed to prevent its outward expression as much as possible.

The capacity to both love and attribute negative qualities to the same person requires the development of healthy object constancy. Deficiencies in object constancy—such as inconsistency, ambivalence, harshness, persecutory qualities, or demands that exceed tolerable limits of the object constitute fundamental sources of struggle for the infant. When object constancy is impaired, the capacities for mourning, tolerating ambivalence, and maintaining appropriate distance in relationships are disrupted. Stable, balanced, secure, and containing objects are essential for the infant’s development of such capacities. At this stage, the infant develops the perception that they can distance themselves from the caregiver, separate, and even be alone, without the caregiver annihilating them as a result. That is, the infant acquires the trust that if they reject the caregiver or perceive them as bad, the caregiver will not destroy them or sever the relationship entirely. When this balance is not achieved, deficits in internal cohesion may be recorded as structures that later manifest as paranoia, erotomania, and a longing for regressive smoothing. The functioning of these structures reflects the degree of neurotic health. A healthy developmental trajectory allows the infant to express anger toward the caregiver and to oppose them. An individual who cannot express anger in a healthy manner cannot truly love. The most fundamental requirement of intimacy lies in the ability to oppose the other and to openly express and demand what belongs to oneself.

Winnicott emphasizes that the mother initially senses the infant’s needs and meets them with nearly perfect attunement. This not only creates the illusion that the mother’s breast is part of the infant’s own body but also fosters the belief that it can be magically controlled. Omnipotence is conveyed to the child through good care and feeding. As Winnicott states, “When the infant needs the breast, the breast is repeatedly created by the infant. The mother places the real breast into the infant’s mouth at precisely the moment the infant creates it mentally” (Winnicott, 2007). Therefore, the mother’s absence or inadequate feeding repeatedly confronts the person's omnipotence and limitations from an early age. What is this, one may ask? It is reality. “I may not be omnipotent, and I may not possess the necessary power to fulfill all my drives, physical needs, and other desires. I need another and may even be at the mercy of the other.” Thus, by relinquishing the wish for omnipotence, ambivalent processes gradually begin. Through the frustration of drives, reality is recognized, and objects start to take form for the infant. The object is no longer an extension of the self. Over time, the mother becomes unable to meet the infant’s needs with near-perfect attunement. Consequently, the infant encounters frustration, which plays a crucial role in attempts to test reality. Winnicott states: “If all goes well, the infant who experiences frustration comes to understand that objects which fail to adapt sufficiently to their needs are real, and that an object can be both loved and hated” (Winnicott, 2007), provided that this process is facilitated in an adequate manner and that the balance is securely maintained.

In her article “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” Melanie Klein describes the issue as follows: idealization is an essential component of the manic position and is closely linked to another important element of that position, namely denial (Klein, 2008). For instance, when a person falls in love, they idealize the loved object to such an extent that this love provides the individual with a manic sense of power. While idealizing the loved object, the person becomes like it; they become trapped in a mental space entirely occupied with thinking about the object and forming expectations in relation to it, rendering them dysfunctional in their own authentic life and unable to move forward in it. When confirmation is not received from the object, the individual falls into a profound depression. To obtain constant confirmation, the person submits to the object and becomes its slave. According to Klein, “When the depressive position reaches its peak, the ego can only tolerate the catastrophe it believes threatens it by partially and temporarily denying psychic reality. Omnipotence, denial, and idealization, which are closely linked to ambivalence, enable the early ego to resist persecutory objects to a certain extent and prevent blind attachment to love objects” (Klein, 2008). This, in turn, allows development to proceed in a healthy manner. The individual can gradually reclaim omnipotence for themselves without completely attributing it to the other, adopting thoughts such as “I can handle this myself. I can do this without needing them.” At the same time, by encountering various forms of wounding and rupture within experiential spaces shaped by their own imperfections and deficiencies, the individual can come to recognize that they are not omnipotent and move toward a healthier position. For this to happen, idealization must be relinquished. This process will lead to the acceptance of separation and mourning. Many of us, throughout our lives, unconsciously wish to deny the non-fulfillment of our desire to receive the best possible care and to be loved in the most appropriate way. Rather than accepting our parents’ deficiencies and mourning our loss, we persist in fantasies of making them good, thereby committing various injustices against ourselves and becoming trapped in a depressive mode of existence.

According to Melanie Klein, “At the root of a person’s inability to overcome the childhood depressive position lies the ego’s attempt to escape the pain and sorrow of that position by retreating either to internal good objects or to external objects” (Klein, 2008). Although individuals differ in how they make use of these methods, the aim is to escape the pain and sorrow brought about by the depressive position. One may flee to an omnipotent external object and negate the self, or retreat to an omnipotent internal object and negate the object; however, in both cases, there is an effort to avoid allowing a real separation, a real acknowledgment of imperfection, and the experience of sadness that accompanies the acceptance of ambivalence. The life and statements of Schopenhauer seem to me to express abandonment depression particularly well. Schopenhauer states: “I propose the will as the sufficient reason for our actions and behavior” (as cited in Ataman, 2004). What he refers to here is the will as something entirely separate from all internalized object representations and their associated self-representations. In fact, the will functions as that which belongs to the self—“This is what I want,” “I will do this,” “I choose this”—a point of choice that can be spoken and enacted before calculating other connections. As he puts it: “The will is the final cause, no longer in need of any further reason in order to exist” (as cited in Ataman, 2004). This is a place we all tend to avoid so intensely in life. Because whenever we want something, think something, or move toward something, we want someone to be there—to see it, to share it with us, to hear us, to understand us, to do it together with us. For a human being who exists within such a relational design, using one will be painful. To use the will means to accept loneliness. There is no other will present in the world at that moment alongside your own. Your choice is something that belongs to you, originates from you, is entirely dependent on you, and disappears when you are no longer there. Thus, Schopenhauer states: “The will leads the individual toward loneliness and depression, and the person who follows their will will move toward the desolate peaks of a lonely mountain at the end of a path filled with pain and solitude” (as cited in Ataman, 2004).

Paranoid thinking, in fact, lacks a grounding in consensus reality; it represents a distorted reality directed outward—expectations of being attacked, harmed, threatened, or encountering something malevolent. In some structures, however, this is directed inward. It can lead to suicidal behavior, self-harm and even losing all hope in oneself. Inwardly directed paranoid thoughts may in fact reflect internalized negative object and self-representations; they can function as a way of perceiving the inner world as a threat, in an effort to suppress fears and anxieties about harming or destroying an external object with which the person might otherwise form a relationship, by imagining ways to eradicate the perceived evil within, and by seeking to distance oneself from, or protect oneself against, that inner threat. Here, the essential issue is that the external world is perceived as a distorted reality oriented toward external objects. This is because some of the negative and aggressive elements perceived outside have, in fact, been internalized; aspects belonging to the object and perceived in the object become internalized within our self-representation. When we then read ourselves through this lens, and when our parents were highly demanding or harmful, we may be unable to cope with that reality of seeing them as entirely bad. Instead, we may take the object’s malevolent aspects into ourselves, perceive ourselves as bad, and protect the object within a world of denial. All aggressive impulses are thus directed toward the self, to prevent the destruction of the object which would lead to the destruction of the self.

A client of mine imagined lethally stabbing someone in fantasy, repeatedly enacting this act. This was sometimes accompanied by self-cutting behavior. This individual, who has been neglected and abused in their childhood, has revealed an indescribable inner anger as we worked on matters related to their early childhood. This was rightful anger that had been buried within as a child. When he was neglected as a child he did not speak up and was quite powerless, unable to make sense of it. At present, the individual is beginning to understand what they were exposed to in childhood and is attempting to encounter their anger and to find ways of expressing it. They now perceive themselves as possessing the capacity to respond in kind to an external object that could harm or destroy them. This can be understood as an effort to create space for a healthy expression of anger. Their previously concealed internal anger was so intense that, unable to express it outwardly, it was directed toward the self. Now, however, they can redirect this fantasy imaginatively toward an external other.

Freud conceptualizes anxiety under three main categories: 1. Objective Anxiety, which arises from fear of real dangers in the external world. 2. Neurotic Anxiety, which stems from the recognition of the potential danger inherent in instinctual gratification. 3. Moral Anxiety, which involves feelings of guilt or shame when one acts—or even thinks of acting—against the moral values of the conscience.

As an addition to this classification, I would particularly like to emphasize the following point: for an individual, the highest form of moral anxiety arises from witnessing actions that contradict one’s own conscience and remaining silent in the face of them.

We all grow up attempting to preserve what we have by repressing—almost as if we had never perceived them at all—experiences that would later cause us distress if fully recognized. Even so, without voicing complaint, and often to remain lovable, we construct various ways of adapting to the other, gradually distancing ourselves from our own core self. At this point, repression becomes the primary defense through which we seek to soothe our personal conscience. That is, we deny or ignore how we were treated. Instead, we blame ourselves and experience guilt for wanting something we could never obtain. We silence our own voice as much as possible, become increasingly mute toward ourselves, and seek elements through which we can view ourselves as guilty. For some individuals, this situation becomes so extreme that they experience anxiety even about being visible or expressing themselves in areas where they are competent and successful. Without putting themselves forward, they attempt to create a world free of conflict by fulfilling everyone else’s desires as much as possible. On the one hand, they long intensely to be understood without having to speak; on the other hand, they avoid opportunities and spaces for self-expression because these evoke intense anxiety. Underlying this anxiety is the recognition of the internal anger that emerges when they find the power to express their existence. Rather than allowing this anger to surface and potentially destroy everything or become an overbearing claimant of rights, they position themselves as both judge and executioner to themselves, being confined to a role in which they exist solely as servants to others’ processes. They distance themselves, out of fear, from anything that would create space for their individual expression, existence, or self-serving needs.

Individuals with this structure experience great hesitation even in taking the smallest step for themselves, to avoid making any mistake. They do not entertain the idea of wanting something for themselves and even question whether they have the right to anything at all—even to live. With an infinite internal error detector, they constantly monitor themselves and focus on what is wrong or lacking in whatever they do. They expect to be punished or exiled from life for even their smallest mistakes. While they become relentless advocates for others’ rights, they are never able to defend their own. With the hope (accompanied by a paradoxical sense of hopelessness) that someone else will defend their rights and open a path for them, they build transparent glass walls around themselves in marginal hiding places at the edge of life.

Raskolnikov, the law student protagonist of Crime and Punishment, one of Dostoyevsky’s most important works, seems to represent precisely the kind of internal structure described in this text. In the novel, after being deceived by the pawnbroker to whom he had sold family heirlooms due to financial hardship, he moves away from the model of the “ordinary man” and toward becoming a “superman,” directing punishment toward those who stand in his way. After committing murder and killing an innocent man who witnessed him murdering the pawnbroker, he collapses into bed with a new sense of guilt. Throughout the novel, the phrase “everything has a price” is frequently repeated. If we were to listen to Raskolnikov’s inner psychic world prior to becoming a murderer, it would align closely with the model of the person described in this text—someone who completely represses anger and annihilates themselves through their conscience.

Undoubtedly, the world is not a just place, and it never will be. Silencing one’s anger in a world deprived of justice will never be sufficient to silence one’s conscience. Human beings are not designed to submit to forces that contradict them, but rather to transmit their own essential existence and nature into the world. For this reason, we all struggle with various forms of internal anxiety throughout life, and indeed, a certain degree of anxiety will accompany any effort toward self-activation and self-expression.