Anxiety, Help, and Helplessness (article)

In the wave of recent global crises and the U.S. Democratic victories in 2020, questions of government assistance, help, and care—from vaccine distribution to loan-forgiveness, from affordable health care to stimulus packages—have returned to the forefront of public discourse. At the same time, we face an extraordinarily uncertain and anxious moment politically, economically, and culturally. If a brief reflection on anxiety and help is therefore appropriate, this paper maintains that helplessness, expressed in a multitude of languages, from the infant’s first cries to countless philosophical and psychological works on the subject, is at the heart of anxiety. “Help” refers to a relation between both persons and within a person or self. Double-sense reveals help’s central dilemma: The receipt of help risks the anxiety-piquing possibility that the recipient is not self-sufficient or has failed to overcome helplessness.

This specific anxiety is about the self’s basic worth and value: If the self has no basic worth or value, it may as well be dead. A helpless self may avoid such experiences of worthlessness when given adequate help at appropriate times, but for many, helplessness and its attendant anxiety become fixtures around which life and the world are organized.

Help is a non-clinical term, or, at least, is not typically restricted to clinical usage. Leading scholarly definitions of help are, unfortunately, overly restrictive in their reliance on altruism, ruling out forms of aid that may be offered, for instance, by those in helping professions or governmental agencies. The dominant social psychological theory highlighting the risks of help acknowledges that, while help may be provided in beneficial ways, it may also involve a threat to self-esteem and perceived control on the part of recipients and a widely acknowledged “hierarchical relation” between helper and helpee, which are, once again, at the root of a dilemma about helplessness around which much anxiety revolves (Dan Coates, Gary J. Renzaglia, and Marlowe C. Embree, “When Helping Backfires: Help and Helplessness,” in Jeffrey D. Fisher,

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Arie Nadler, and Bella M. DePaulo, eds., New Directions in Helping: Recipient Reactions to Aid, Volume 1, 1983, 251).

Help and the Internal Environment

As we know, in the early stages of life, reliable caregivers help the child cope with emotions that are too powerful for the child to manage. Such emotions are “contained” by the caregiver and returned to the child in detoxified forms, helping the child to build a benign internal world. Individuals must receive help in the course of their development in order to internalize the capacity to help themselves. Helping oneself implies that there are things within the self that are stronger than the self. These are internal helpers created in the image of a relatively consistent helping other, such as a parent or caregiver. The result is a helpful—as opposed to a harsh or unforgiving—internal environment. That internal environment must remain relatively non-threatening if the self will, later, be capable of accepting and benefiting from the help offered by others without excessive anxiety.

Failures of Help          

It is a truism of the evolutionary, developmental, and psychosocial sciences that human beings are creatures for whom help is central to development. Attachment theory has convincingly demonstrated that our emotional and intellectual development is shaped by our early dependence, which is to say our incapacity to help ourselves early in life and our reliance on caregivers to help us for a considerable period of time. Failures of help, as in neglect, abuse, or abandonment, have the power to forever alter the child’s internal environment and, thereby, the child’s relation to itself. For Donald W. Winnicott, trauma is one such “failure relative to dependence” because it ruins the idealization of the parent. Winnicott calls it a kind of “breaking of faith” in the caretaker/role model/other (object in the language of psychoanalysis) and its ability to provide help (Psychoanalytic Explorations, edited by Donald W. Winnicott, Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepard, and Madeleine Davis, 1989, 145).

Failures of help leave the child unable to internalize a benign internal world, instead populating his or her internal environment with harshness and cruelty. The breaking of faith to which Winnicott refers sponsors breaks within the self’s construction of a safe internal world. Indeed, it is beneficial here to call upon Wilfred Bion’s famous work on attacks on linking, in which disruptions in the process of containing, moderating, and returning the

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child’s intolerable emotions lead to hateful attacks on that which joins the internal and external worlds, including communication, thought, love, and life itself. In sum: The infant’s experience of helplessness turns into an experience of worthlessness if help is not received reliably, in time, and in good enough measure.

It hardly needs to be stated that failures of help, while potentially devastating, are both inevitable and necessary parts of development. If help were perfectly and completely given and received, children would never grow up. Nevertheless, in helpless moments, the child’s self is unable to obtain what it needs and finds its fantasy of primary narcissistic omnipotence disrupted by an unwelcome, even horrifying, sense of absence, abandonment, and desolation. If such moments are repeated often enough, they threaten to become permanent features of the growing child’s psyche.

If help is not provided at essential moments in the child’s development, then we might say that the child’s discovery of its own helplessness comes too early, suddenly, and fully in the form of traumatically-infused anxiety. It is traumatically-tinged because it leaves the self defenseless without one’s internal helpers, or, as Dori Laub might say, without the external and the internal “other,” the “thou” of every dialogic relationship, including, of course, the self’s (“Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization: A Death Instinct Derivative?”, in M. Gerard Fromm, ed., Lost in Transmission: Studies in Trauma across Generations, 2012, 41). Perhaps it is also worth noting that help, too, may traumatically impinge upon the recipient’s capacity to succeed or fail on his or her own, the result of which may be failure and self-attributions of helplessness and worthlessness.

In any case, there is a powerful need to defend against such experience and a most effective means appears to be a kind of grandiose survivalism, be it literal or figurative, about which I have written extensively. Such survivalism, in a circular fashion, makes the self even more insecure, as the world becomes a place where destruction looms large and survival is always in doubt. Images and depictions of this destroyed world may be readily found in contemporary popular and intellectual cultures. In the threatening and depleted world of the survivor, help is offered, if at all, only at the rarest moments and at considerable risk. Help is received with comparable paranoia, for receiving help may signify the self’s incompleteness or inadequacy at procuring its needs. Here, it becomes essential that help derives only from internal helpers and not

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external ones, for anxiety about one’s sufficiency and adequacy is too great.

Insecure attachments to caregivers are those in which, to one degree or another, the reliability of help is uncertain. This uncertainty is, empirically speaking, even more damaging than the certain knowledge of the unavailability of help. Much anxiety may be understood as a consequence of a tormented or tantalized orientation to help: a presentiment of and ambivalence about helplessness and all that attends it, including the wish for help, the uncertainty of help, the desire to be free of the need for help, the worry that one does not deserve help, the envious attack on the receipt of help, and more.

Anxiety expresses the torment of helplessness, even if it emerges in the face of evidence that external help may be (either consistently or inconsistently) available. Anxiety is infused with the dread that the self cannot survive without help but is also filled with envy and hate of external help and helpers. At the same time, anxiety expresses guilt for the hatred aimed toward would-be helpers.

The failed child and the inconsistently helped child develop splits in their psyches, schisms between the needs and hurt within the self that would benefit from help, and the very same hurt and needs abjected as shameful and intolerably bad aspects of the self, unworthy of help. The extraordinary agony of this situation leaves the self, using the language of Melanie Klein, in a paranoid-schizoid dilemma, not unlike the desolate and harsh internal world described above, wherein both the failure of help and the receipt of help signify the loss of all good in the self and the world.

The Hatred of Help

Although we have all faced, at one time or another to some degree, failures of help, a truly helpless world is one in which the self can neither find help nor help itself. If such helplessness is a significant feature of growing up, then a result of a lack of help in the home or family is that the world becomes organized around help’s absence. In other words, the world becomes a place where help and helpers are needed yet vilified, a place where persons and groups are marked by their (shameful) need for help or their (hateful, enviable) “privilege” in having received help.

In such a situation, a state of helplessness is actively maintained by attacking help and helpers, owing to envy and resentment,

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both psychically and interpersonally. Such attacks are designed to ensure that no help will be found and one’s helplessness will be shared by others, even as the attacks themselves may be understood as cries for help. In the end, they repeat the experience of needing help and failing to find it.

While most scholars have understood help as an expression of our need for “belongingness” and the aversion to helping as a marker of our drive for independence, what may be overlooked is the extent to which we may seek to belong to a group whose identity is closely aligned with helplessness itself. Such groups, which frequently include hate, victim, and survivor groups, take as their mission the rejection or destruction of helping agents. Beneficial help becomes a threat to the group’s fundamental fantasy that it inhabits a cruel and unhelpful world.

If the government is understood as a helping agent, individuals and groups may attack the government or its specific policies and projects, from affordable healthcare to foreign aid or affirmative action to local, State, or Federal public health measures. Indeed, it is a tragedy of political psychology that there are just as many opportunities to give or receive help as there are opportunities to play out the internal drama of helplessness, trauma, and hate in the external world by attacking helpful policies as well as institutions and organizations that offer much-needed help.

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