Ressentiment and Grievance

Abstract

Using material from clinical practice and social research, this paper examines the many connections between the analysis of ressentiment provided by Nietzsche and Scheler and recent psychoanalytic analyses of grievance. Psychoanalysis has been particularly insightful regarding the process of ‘nursing’ grievance, something which illuminates both the righteousness of the anger involved and the yearning for an idealized past. It is argued that in their different ways both analyses explore blocked responses to perceived injustice and, whilst the emphasis in both cases is essentially upon how existential reality itself can be experienced as an injustice, Scheler's analysis also provides us with a way of understanding how ressentiment can be a response to real social injustices. Indeed social ressentiment is now widely regarded as the affective foundation of reactionary forms of populism.