When we stop seeing each other as individuals

The psychic life of categorisation

We live in a moment saturated with the language of categories. Societal hierarchies sort humans into columns of belonging and threat. Political discourse strips complex differences, lives, experiences and humanity into slogans. Social media rewards the most reductive version of any argument. In each of these arenas, something is happening that psychoanalytic thinking would observe as problematic, perverse, pathological: the other is being reduced to a function; a fear, a projection, a need, and their subjectivity quietly annihilated.

This is not merely a political problem. It is a psychic one, with roots that run deep into how human beings manage anxiety, aggression, and the discomfort of genuine encounter, intersubjectivity’s potential for existence.

Binding and unbinding: Freud’s metapsychology revisited

In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), Freud introduced a distinction that remains among the most contested ideas in psychoanalytic tradition. He proposed that the psyche’s drive operate along two opposing axes: boundness, in which energy is organised, contained, and woven into the relational and symbolic fabric of life; and unboundness, in which energy works toward dissolution, disaggregation, and the dismantling of connection. Eros binds; it builds, links, and holds together. Thanos, the ‘death Instinct’ unbinds; it divides, disperses, negates, and reduces. For Freud, these formed something like a metapsychological cosmology: two great forces operating within and between us at every level of psychic life.

In these troubled times, this highly contested theory raises a question clinically and culturally that we might consider: does the reduction of another person to a function constitute an unbinding operation? Is this the motivation of a death instinct? 

The destruction of the other as subject

When we cease to encounter someone as a subject and begin relating to them as an instrument of our needs, something in the intersubjective field is destroyed. Not merely damaged, but destroyed. Jessica Benjamin, in ‘The Bonds of Love’ (1988), names and describes this as the breakdown of recognition. For Benjamin, genuine human encounter requires that each person hold the other as a centre of their own experience; a separate, subjective object, not a mirror, not a foil, not a vessel for projection. When this mutual recognition collapses, what replaces it is a structure of domination and submission, in which one subjectivity consumes and destroys another. The other survives, but only as a function.

Benjamin draws our attention to how this dynamic operates not only in intimate relationships but across the broader social and political order. The logic of domination, the insistence that the other exist only in relation to one’s own needs, is not confined to the consulting room. It organises cultures, nations, and political movements. It is visible in the rhetoric that reduces migrants to numbers, that turns neighbours into categories of threat or resource, and that demands compliance as the price of belonging. These are not metaphors for psychic processes; they are psychic processes enacted at scale.

Surviving the other: Winnicott and the limits of control

What is lost in each of these reductions is what Winnicott, in his late paper ‘The Use of an Object’ (1969), called the capacity to use the other, which, counterintuitively, requires first recognising that the other exists outside one’s omnipotent control. For Winnicott, genuine relationship becomes possible only when we survive our own aggression toward the other, and discover that they remain; real, separate, and irreducible. Without this, we are left with relating to a projection rather than a person. The other is not related to; they are consumed.

I think about this frequently, both in clinical work and in my own experience of living between cultures, languages, and ways of understanding the world. Growing up half-Arabic and half-English, I have known the particular disorientation of being sorted before being seen: too much of one thing, not enough of another, categorised in ways that left no room for the complexity that every life contains. That experience has made me acutely attentive to what it costs, both intrapsychically and relationally, when reduction replaces recognition.

Psychotherapy as a site of resistance

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy, at its best, offers a specific counter to this. It is a space in which the pressure to be manageable is suspended, where contradiction is not a problem but a signal, and where what is most difficult to articulate is precisely what is most worth attending to. It is, in Benjamin’s terms, a practice of mutual recognition: the analyst neither dissolves into the patient’s world nor remains rigidly outside it, but holds the tension of genuine encounter. In a cultural moment increasingly organised around the annihilation of complexity, this feels less like a clinical luxury and more like a necessary form of resistance.