DANGEROUS INTIMACIES: Resentment, Risk and PTSD Recovery in “Post-Racial” America

In American psychotherapeutic practice, resentment—dwelling on negative emotion—is thought to be harmful to emotional wellbeing. Conversely, re-sentiment—revisiting emotions that have been submerged or blocked in order to release them—is thought to heal. Reflecting a broader cultural belief that movement or circulation—of air, people, genes, capital, affects, etc.—is necessary to “health”, alleviating the burdens of resentment through the (supposedly) liberatory process of re-sentiment is often a central task of the therapeutic process. What this conceptualization elides is how different actors are positioned in relation to both affective burdens and liberation. Broadening the scope of affective circulation beyond the psychodynamic space, this paper reconsiders both resentment and re-sentiment as not simply intrapsychic phenomena, but as social practices that are sometimes intimately bound up with yet another linguistic cognate—the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment, the persistent indignation of the historically oppressed. This chapter examines these issues through the case of Robert, a Black man falsely accused of sexual assault. Robert’s case speaks to the overlaps among resentment/re-sentiment/ressentiment, bringing to the fore emerging anthropological engagements with affect that extend beyond the traditional borders of the psychological.