“This is the paradox: To call a thing unbearable is to admit that it must be borne.”
Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
Dread
Intransitive verbThe American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- To be in terror of; fear intensely.
- To anticipate with alarm, distaste, or reluctance.
- To hold in awe or reverence.
Rising authoritarianism, an historically unpopular federal power center[1], and a painfully divided populace—hallmarks of our present American social reality. Hovering in the background are the twin demons of environmental crisis and an AI-disrupted economy. No wonder dread is ubiquitous. I hear the echoes of dread when friends and colleagues tell me, “I can’t stand to look at the headlines,” and when my immigrant relatives ask me if they should be carrying their citizenship papers. I see it in the eyes of my children as they wonder about their futures and their safety. A woman I admire tells me she is cancelling a dinner event because the possibility of having to talk about the latest political crisis floods her with anxious refusal. As critical theorist David Theo Goldberg puts it: “Dread…has emerged as the driving sensibility of our time.”[2]
Getting clear about dread as a public and political affect feels urgent. Without an acknowledgment of its power and an analysis of its effects, our ability to build a better world is hindered. As citizens and as educators, we must take dread seriously.
Dread Itself
Dread feels intensely personal. A catalogue of my own dreads is intwined with my psychic history and the vicissitudes of my childhood: chess, election night, Nazis, the dentist, refried beans, a certain kind of magic trick called “the book test,” waking up from anesthetic. Your list is likely equally idiosyncratic. Together with our specific loves, our dreads tell a story of who we are.
Why is dread so intertwined with selfhood? If psychoanalysis offers a foundational lesson, it might be this: Our sense of autonomous selfhood is a tenuous achievement borne from our struggle to overcome our helpless beginnings. Thrust into a linguistic and symbolic world we do not understand, ambivalent in our nascent desires to both separate from and merge with the maternal substrate that literally holds our life in its hands, we craft ourselves in fits and starts. This contingent history means that the ego is fragile, always on the lookout for threats to its powers and even its very existence. Nothing unites us as human beings more than our shared anxieties of annihilation.
And yet, our dreads can also be uniquely specific, attached to signifiers and experiences from infancy and childhood. The specific twists and turns of our developmental story combined with our inborn temperament leave their mark on us in the form of the specificity of our loves and dreads. If the things we most love make us feel alive, our dread is fueled by the things that threaten our sense of autonomous existence.
Crucially, those threats are divided in two, bearing the shadow of our earliest relationship in the time of our emerging self. Abandonment is an immediate threat to the life of an infant. Nature has prepared us well to stave it off. Left alone, a baby will protest mightily, emitting vocalizations that create urgency in anyone with ears attuned. Internally, abandonment is experienced as a dissolving loss. A loss so intense the fragile emerging structure of the ego can’t maintain its continuity. Abandonment means annihilation.
But abandonment’s opposite is equally dangerous. If our earliest caregiver can’t leave a space for our separation, the ego can’t fully persist. Losing itself in the overpowering envelopment of this first Other, the emerging sense of self is vulnerable to annihilation by smothering. Here too we are equipped with powerful tools of resistance as anyone knows who has tried to force an unwilling infant to feed. The baby will turn her head away, passively refuse the breast, wriggle and push. That this helpless human infant, in dire need of maternal care, is nonetheless able to say “no” to unwanted intrusion, gives us insight into just how important autonomy is for human existence.
The trace of these twin primal fears—annihilation through abandonment and annihilation through merging—carry on into our childhood and our adult life. Throughout our lives, existential dread will come at us from two directions: the fear of abandonment and the fear of being consumed. We dread both too little and too much closeness, and our relationships remain a dance of encounter and separation as we strive to find the “just right” of connection.[3] Throughout our lives, dread arises as an unbearable affect when the fragile balance is pushed toward one pole or the other. We will do anything to avoid its grip.
The Politics of Dread
Dread is thus both deeply personal and inevitably universal. When elicited by shared political and cultural events it becomes a political mood. Dread describes the burst of bad feeling so many of us notice we prepare to read the day’s headlines. Our low-level anxiety as we wait for the next miscarriage of justice or story of high-level corruption. The creeping revulsion as our basic safety nets—the rule of law, a stable economy, consumer and medical protections, bedrock civil rights—erode. The background horror that we experience as we both accept and ignore a variety of inchoate threats: the climate is degrading, AI is coming for our jobs and our pleasures, our institutions are rotting.
Authoritarian governments intentionally create a social climate of dread. The combination of intense surveillance (too close) and refusal to acknowledge the full autonomy of its citizens (abandonment) are fertile ground for widespread dread.[4] Moreover, authoritarian governments—depending as they do on the whims of a single leader—are inherently chaotic. Dread thrives when future threats are vague and unpredictable. Ongoing subjection to arbitrary coercive power inspires pervasive, ongoing dread.
Because dread is the somatic residue of an experience of annihilation, it exerts a deadening force. A person in the grip of dread instinctively shrinks back and pulls inward. As her mind and body are flooded with primal agony, her concerns narrow. Unlike the energizing jolt toward action that can accompany ordinary fear (Fight! Flee!), dread inhibits movement. A society in the grip of dread is passive, and therefore deceptively accepting.
An authoritarian regime does not limit dread to those it deems its outcasts. Loyalists, too, are subjected to dreadful stimuli. But in this case—since dread is meant to inspire actions (such as supporting the autocrat or turning in one’s neighbors)—it has to be intimated rather than explicitly aroused. If the enemy, for example, is presented as too strong and too immediately a threat, the loyalist audience may be overcome with paralysis. Effective propaganda is more subtle, hinting at a future rather than a current threat while portraying the supposed enemy as both powerful and ridiculous or impotent. Presenting the “people” with a horizon of dread rather than its full expression elicits various psychic defenses that can be channeled for political purposes.
The Jew, the Trans Woman, the Welfare Queen, the Migrant…these are figures conjured up and carefully calibrated to spark scapegoating, projection, and displacement as ways of limiting the nascent dread toward which they are intended to gesture. Moreover, they are inherently contradictory figures: powerful and impotent, sneaky and immediately identifiable, active and passive, etc. This makes them especially useful since they can at one moment inspire the dread of annihilation through closeness (e.g., by marrying your daughter or contaminating your water supply or a public bathroom) and at the next moment inspire dread of abandonment (e.g., “Jews will not replace us!”, “They are stealing our jobs.”).
In sum, authoritarian regimes send the message that “we” must work to keep our dread at bay by punishing or excluding these others, while “they” must be made to feel the incapacitating weight of dread our hate inspires.
Political Resistance in the Face of Dread
The anesthetizing effect of dread—its ability to drain us of the power to act in resistance to authority—makes it an especially effective tool of authoritarian regimes. Those who would challenge authoritarianism need to find strategies that inspire action in the face of dread. A tall order to be sure. But there are lessons from both psychoanalysis and history that offer possibilities.
It’s helpful here to distinguish between political resistance and psychoanalytic resistance. In political contexts, resistance describes strategies that prevent the imposition of an idea or a policy. Resistance is a way that individuals—on their own and in concert—can place a limit on the power of the state. Within psychoanalysis, the same term, “resistance,” has a very different meaning. Here it signals the various strategies that individuals unconsciously employ in order to limit painful experiences. These are also sometimes called “psychological defenses.” They include, for example, projection (treating something that is inside oneself as though it inhered in someone external), splitting (inability to see nuance or ambiguity), and denial (refusing to consciously acknowledge something one nonetheless knows to be true). Confusingly, while authoritarian governments drain our capacity for political resistance, they spark our capacity for psychological resistance. This is how the same action—say, the leader calling a group of citizens “scum”—can spark incapacitating dread in those so named and at the same time can encourage others to project negative feelings onto these people.
So, one psychoanalytic lesson is that attempts to simply suppress, avoid, or repress dread are unlikely to succeed. Dread is a natural response when our core sense of self is under threat. The unbearable weight of dread is a measure of how much our sanity and survival depend on a healthy self-identity. If it is repressed, it will only return in the form of negative projection. Dread has to be faced and worked with if we are to maintain our capacities for creative and political action.
As I struggle to work through my own experiences of dread, I have found three strategies especially useful.
A first strategy is to return dread to its original past. Dread is deceptive in that it feels as though it is about the future: something unbearable is about to happen. But as we learn from psychoanalytic theory, dread is really a trace of the past. We feel dread when we are reminded of our earliest experiences of loss of selfhood. Our bodies retain the awful somatic experience of selfhood slipping away. Yet, as terrible as the experiences of abandonment and smothering were, we actually did survive them. Each of us was strong enough to regroup and rebuild our sense of self. Our very existence today as persons is a testament to the strength we had even as infants.
There may be much to fear in what lies ahead—loss of status, income, safety, life—but we can face those fears confident that we will retain our hard-won independence of identity and thought. We can remain internally free beings even in the midst of political disaster. We need not pre-comply or yield our reason, our identity, or our values. Creativity and love are indeed stronger than death.[5] For me, this is more than cold comfort. It’s a steadfast foundation from which I can assess and respond even when I am frightened. It’s a way of loosening the hold that dread has on me and opening up possibilities for action and political engagement.
A second strategy is to expand our ability to tolerate dreadful events through acting in the local and the immediate. Political theorist Jeffrey C. Goldfarb argues for the importance of “free zones,” i.e., private spaces where individuals can come together outside of the reach of authoritarian governments. Drawing on analyses of the fall of the Soviet Union, Goldfarb points to the important role of spaces such as community theater, underground salons, and kitchen table and neighborhood conversations. He notes that “when people talk to each other, defining a situation on their own terms and developing a capacity to act in concert, they constitute a democratic alternative to terror and hegemonic force.”[6] These seemingly small, private interactions expanded individual freedom of thought, sustained bonds of trust, and laid the groundwork for larger political responses and activities.
We too can nurture those spaces where we can engage with neighbors, friends, and colleagues in authentic ways. Honing our creativity, supporting informal discussions and debates, sharing what we learn—these activities keep us alive to possibilities. We can strive to keep the classroom a free zone. And in moments when this is not possible—when the power of the authoritarian state inhibits formal academic freedom—we can make classrooms in our living rooms and in our communities.
A third strategy for working with our dread is to isolate and expand its surprising connection to awe. We recognize this link when we talk about “fear of the Lord,” identifying the strange mixture of dreadful overwhelm and reverence that sometimes we experience in religious contexts. Kierkegaard famously thought that dread was the outcome of our loss of faith in an ultimate source of meaning. We stand in awe of the universe when we believe it is governed by a stable G-d. Our loss of faith transforms that awe to dread. But awe need not have either a theistic or a certain ground. Dacher Keltner’s research reveals that awe is sparked by our encounters with vastness of many types.[7] This can mean the intensity of sensation, stories of life and death, and most often by encounters with what he calls “moral beauty,” that is, the ways that human beings rise above their circumstances and demonstrate great humanity, care, and moral purpose.
To me, this means that even within the moral swamp that is authoritarian rule—the widespread narcissism, cowardice, fawning, and greed—we can focus on real life examples of light and inspiration. There are those who continue to speak truth to power, who leave their jobs rather than submit to unethical orders, who support the most vulnerable, who take the risk of resistance. Each example is a potential source of awe. So too is our recognition of the ways that our present, local moment shares in the long human history of the struggle for justice. Meditating on these examples and identifying with the heroic actions of others in the present and the past returns some of our dread to awe. Awe warms us and inspires us to act from our courage and values.
Returning dread to its past, sustaining moments of shared freedom in the present, and regularly touching awe. Each of these strategies disrupts the blanket of dread with which authoritarian power seeks to cover us. Each of these is within our immediate reach and the reach of those around us. They are not the end of what is demanded of us, but they are a beginning. A ground from which we can nourish our capacity for creativity and action as we conspire together to repair a broken world.
Marjorie Hass
mhass@cic.edu
[1] E.g., https://news.gallup.com/poll/692879/independents-drive-trump-approval-second-term-low.aspx , https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin.
[2] Goldberg, David Theo. Dread: Facing Futureless Futures (Polity, 2021). See also Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety (The Experiment Press, 2023).
[3] Compare Moses asking to see G-d’s face and being told that he cannot live through the intensity of that encounter. As a safer compromise, G-d shows His back instead. Shemot (Exodus) 33:18-23.
[4] As Arendt pointed out, the withdrawal or refusal of citizenship is the ultimate abandonment by the state, removing even the “right to have rights.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Brace, 1973).
[5] Shir Ha Shirim (Song of Songs), 8:6
[6] Goldfarb, Jeffrey C. The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
[7] Keltner Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life (Penguin Press, 2023).