Feeling Disappointed: a psychoanalytic perspective
In last week’s note I said experiencing disappointment is a mark of psychological maturity. I also said that psychotherapists (among others) ought to support people's capacity to feel disappointed. To neglect this is to enable the irrational hope that life won’t disappoint us. But it will! Brian Mapes went straight to the point in the comments section: “For me disappointment’s the final abyss, the negative feeling I expect to be the worst, come deathbed time.” Exactly. Death is the ultimate disappointment. Talk about a buzz kill.
Before digging further into disappointment, let’s recall what it is: the unhappiness or discouragement felt when hopes or expectations have not been satisfied. As the definitions suggests, disappointment is a complex emotional experience. It involves counterfactual thinking—the mental comparison between what happened and what could have happened. Making such comparisons is profoundly adaptive. Tracking the difference between our hopes and reality can inform our worldview and help us adjust our actions going forward. If someone disappoints us repeatedly, we learn not to trust them.
Another reason disappointment is a complex, mature feeling has to do with what we’re not doing when we’re disappointed. In psychoanalytic terms, we’re not splitting.
You were perfect for the job; you deserved it, and you nearly got it. You’re angry you didn’t. Now, if you blame them for not hiring you, you’re probably (no offense!) in what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called the “paranoid-schizoid” position. It’s a place most of us hang out in from time to time. We’re there when we find ourselves splitting (the root meaning of the Greek schizo) the world into us and them, good and bad, right and wrong, etc.
The next morning, however, you’re feeling more philosophical. You recognize and accept—depressing as it is—that they did nothing wrong. You didn’t get the job you hoped for, but you also see you didn’t have the right to it. As you sink feelingly into this awareness, you’re now inhabiting what Melanie Klein called the “depressive position”—that place we’re in when we’ve healed the split and have a more complex, integrated view of the situation. Temporarily at least! As Klein’s naming suggests, these are positions, or modes, of the psyche. You were in the paranoid-schizoid position initially—angry with them (I was robbed!) or blaming yourself (I’m no good!). But your position changed as you arrived at the melancholy acceptance that others and ourselves are complex, imperfect, a blend of the good and not-so-good!
In the psychoanalytic context, disappointment is the mature alternative to splitting and projection, which are classic psychological defenses. Because it felt too vulnerable to know what my part was in not getting the job, I split off from this and projected all the blame onto the employer. Or, contrariwise, because it was too vulnerable to know just how much of what I want is outside my control, I’d rather blame myself for falling short than relinquish my illusion of control.
The alternative to defensiveness in these cases is to feel disappointment. The intensity of that disappointment correlates strongly with both the importance of the desired outcome and the (perceived) probability of its occurrence. That’s why almost getting something (they told you it was between you and one other person) can feel more disappointing than clear failures. For the closer we come, the more vivid the alternate reality (of that perfect job) looms in our mind, and the greater our disappointment.
Finally, disappointment is also an alternative to resignation—which often is another form of splitting. Resignation as a retreat from hoping, defending against feeling whatever it is we will feel when we don’t get what we dared hope for. But we don’t have to give up hope, if we can allow ourselves to feel disappointed.