Not only is Christmas a major religious holiday but it’s also a commercial phenomenon, for good reason. Why is this? Because beyond the wish lists, the gifts and all the gatherings, Christmas speaks to some very core human needs which resonate deeply with everyone, whether you celebrate it or not! This month our resident psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Andy Cohen helps us think about two of these core human traits and how Christmas reflects beautifully complex questions alive in us all.
Who has been good or bad this year?
Many religions think about whether you are in someone’s good books or bad books. Judaism has Yom Kippur, which is all about atoning for your sins so you will remain in the Book of Health the following year. Christmas has Santa – where all year long boys and girls need to remain in Santa’s good books in order to receive the gift of their dreams, come Christmas Day. Psychoanalysis also thinks carefully about goodness and badness, and in fact, this dilemma – of who is good and who is bad – is an age-old question that we first grappled with as babies. A brilliant psychoanalyst Melanie Klein first discovered an important connection between how we see ourselves as “good” or “bad” and our early experiences, originating in the very early interactions with our first caregivers.
For Klein, in the earliest stages of development, babies unconsciously split their feelings into good and bad parts. For example, a baby might see the mother as “good” when she feeds or comforts them, but also as “bad” when she’s absent or doesn’t meet their needs. For a baby, the good mother and the bad mother feel like two different people. This splitting of good and bad leads to a kind of internal conflict, where the baby struggles to integrate these different experiences of the same person. This back-and-forth dynamic creates the emotional groundwork for the baby to eventually manage these difficult contrasting feelings. And over time the baby can develop a more integrated sense of self where they, and others are not just one thing: they are sometimes good, sometimes bad, and always human! This tension – which is never completely resolved – helps explain why we – as adults – sometimes feel a deep inner conflict over our moral worth or goodness. So the story of Santa, and how he rewards good little boys and girls with gifts, gently interplays with this very human tug-of-war that still lives inside us today.
Christmas is a time of giving and receiving
As we know, Christmas emphasises giving and receiving. The retail sector blossoms over this period because of it. It is a time of a lot of physical gift giving, but also of sharing important meals and family time. Psychoanalysis can explain this too: As babies, we first relied on a mother figure to survive. This delicate time required a lot of give and take – both physically and emotionally. In the earliest stages of life, the baby is dependent on the mother for both physical and emotional nourishment. The act of receiving from the mother—whether it’s food, affection, or comfort—creates a sense of security. But there’s also a need to give back, in a way, even as an infant, through behaviours like looking, smiling, or making sounds. The baby also needs to feel things deeply and hope that the mother will receive these feelings no matter their intensity! The interplay of giving to, and receiving from each other in these early interactions is core to developing a healthy sense of self, and these early exchanges create a bond that is critical for emotional development. Over time, we learn to give and receive in relationships, carrying forward this fundamental pattern from infancy.
The bottom line
As babies, we all grappled with big questions about goodness and badness, and we also had our very first foundational experiences of giving and receiving. It’s also interesting how Christmas is centred around the celebration of a baby’s birth, which marries well with these ideas. So no matter your orientation, Christmas is an important time that dominates calendars and whether you celebrate it or not, you know it’s happening. This is not only for cultural reasons but for very human ones too. Making Christmas a very special time of the year, indeed.