The act of understanding someone is an act of political resistance. Within times of rampant mis/disinformation, epistemic laziness is a driving factor behind social-political misunderstanding, an often-under-studied phenomenon in relation to malicious misunderstanding. As such, a theory of understanding is necessary in order to outline a framework of epistemic achievement that accompanies the active task of understanding and thus recognizing another agent’s identity. This paper presents my concept of “identity-understanding,” a neutral framework of the process of understanding another agent’s identity. Following this, I will outline the ways that our social-political environments can create a failure in that process, and how that failure often goes unrecognized, often masked as simple disinterest or ignorance. In this work, I argue that in order for us to be moral political agents, we must not only grasp what it means to understand another agent’s identity, but we must also grasp how our failure to understand another agent’s identity is a distinct ethical-epistemic failure. To act with social justice in a time when identity is in the political crosshairs is to act with this understanding of identity not only of the individual, but of the social-historical pressures that sustain across time. Using the example of gender identity, I argue that there is the possibility of a disconnect between dominant concepts of gender and non-dominant concepts that may undermine the ability for agents to be recognized as valuable, rather than vulnerable.

In dark and destabilizing political times, theory itself becomes a container—an interpretive framework that helps reduce internal chaos by offering meaning, coherence, and context. Instead of viewing current sociopolitical events as isolated, this paper examines how they fit into longstanding patterns in the American story that reflect deeper emotional and psychological dynamics within our national psyche. When we fail to conceptualize the collective as a psyche with its own unconscious structures, we default to an individualist worldview that assigns responsibility—and blame—to individuals or discrete cultural groups. This collapse into individualism mirrors the wish of the collective psyche’s defense system to remain in shadow, as fuller awareness introduces both the possibility of healing and the perceived threat of annihilating vulnerability.

This paper expands on Donald Kalsched’s theory of trauma and the archetypal self-care system to explore how collective defenses continually emerge in times of stress, conflict, and uncertainty. It argues that imagination and the arts offer a crucial counterforce to these defenses. Artistic expression often functions as a trickster energy—moving around the defensive gaze of the archetypal self-care system and revealing truths that authoritarian structures seek to suppress. Art also compels us to confront vulnerable emotional material—anger, grief, and longing—that is essential for transformation post-trauma. In dark times, symbolic life becomes not only psychologically restorative but politically necessary, opening space for collective growth and new possibilities of becoming.

Dominant narratives about gender-based violence survivors perpetuate stigma and reduce complex lived experiences to singular, marginalizing stories. When survivors' narratives are controlled by external institutions and systems, survivors lose agency over their own meaning-making and intersectional inequities—particularly those linked to gender, race, immigration, and socioeconomic status—remain unexplored or hidden. It is through claiming narrative authority over their experiences of healing, resilience, and transformation that survivors contest hierarchical knowledge systems that have historically marginalized their voices with the aim of promoting social, racial, economic, and gender justice. Understanding gender-based violence requires frameworks that dismantle conventional knowledge creation and recognize theory as the foundation of inherent political resistance. Interdisciplinary, critically reflexive, and culturally-grounded approaches empower diverse survivors by prioritizing narrative agency while acknowledging that knowledge generated from lived experience holds transformative power.

Drawing on socio-cultural theory, development first occurs in social interaction and then becomes internalized; therefore, meaning emerges not from a predetermined or fixed set of values but from people's lived engagement with their material and symbolic environments (Vygotsky, 1978). Building on sociocultural-historical theory, an integrated ecological framework (Bronfenbrenner, 1978; Heise, 1998) situates this social injustice as a multidimensional phenomenon existing in the various interactions of personal, situational and sociocultural factors (e.g., risk and protective factors vary across different settings and communities). This theoretical stance becomes inherently political: it refuses to separate psychological experience from social relations of power and insists that any human phenomenon must be studied as a process embedded in historical and social contexts. Moreover, culture is defined as an active, dynamic, and collaborative process of meaning-making in everyday life as “an adaptive process that accumulates the partial solutions to frequently encountered problems” (Cole, 1996, p.329). This approach is critical for understanding gender-based violence, which operates within a social system and manifests differently across contexts while affecting people of all backgrounds and social classes. Additionally, narrating is not merely a process of documentation and passive reproduction, but a powerful symbolic process through which individuals actively construct meaning, relate to and navigate their environments, and exert control over their circumstances (Daiute, 2014); storytelling is used "to do things in the world – to figure out what is going on, to connect with others, and sometimes to imagine how life could be" (Daiute, 2016, pg. 9). For survivors of gender-based violence these discursive tools become a means of resistance and transformation within systems of power, inequality, and injustice. Engendering agency by prioritizing the voices of those with lived experience becomes possible through ownership of their individual narratives and collective meaning-making. Adopting such frameworks is not merely methodological—it is an act of resistance against epistemic injustice. Moreover, in recognizing that how we theorize directly shapes what counts as knowledge and who counts as a knower, such critical research becomes an instrument of power to prompt change and support survivors in (re)claiming their experiences, which are often sites of historically gendered and racialized power inequalities that systematically marginalize survivors and communities.

By recognizing and challenging existing frameworks and hierarchies, the arts—particularly documentary and narrative-based practices—serve as powerful vehicles for this kind of critical investigation. Their capacity to produce alternative narratives, to highlight what has been rendered invisible, and to question existing power structures allows for an active mode of theoretical inquiry in ways that traditional academic forms often do not. Collaborative projects conceived in the form of a documentary or a storytelling workshop function as critically-engaged research practices that deepen our understanding and strengthen efforts to combat gender-based violence. To illustrate this, two examples of such work are explored in this presentation–a documentary film (Owning Our Narrative: From Victim to Victors) and a workshop series (Survivor-led Entrepreneurship: Storytelling for Business and Community Engagement). Rather than treating storytelling as a supplementary activity, these projects recognize the value of lived experience and the process through which individuals (as well as communities) engage critically with systems of power, representation, and resistance. Theory then operates not merely as an intellectual tool but as a form of political engagement in line with bell hooks’ position recognizing theory as a “location for healing” and as a “liberatory practice” (hooks, 1991, 1994). Simultaneously, a documentary produced on survivors’ own terms becomes a political and epistemological tool. Through film, photography, sound, and narrative, it constitutes a mode of inquiry that not only records but also intervenes in the social sphere by asserting survivors’ narratives against the dominant representations that often objectify, misrepresent, diminish, or silence them. This artistic practice defies who is allowed to speak, whose suffering is visible, and whose knowledge counts as expertise. Their capacity to generate alternative narratives disrupts the hegemonic frameworks that sustain gender-based violence—whether through media stereotypes, institutional denial, or juridical abstraction–and offers a collective re-envisioning of a brighter (and more hopeful) future. In times of social crisis, such practice-based research offers not only new insights into the mechanisms of violence but also tangible forms of solidarity, visibility, transformation, leadership and justice.

Loneliness and ressentiment are not merely individual emotional disturbances but socially and politically charged affective formations that acquire heightened relevance in what Arendt called “dark times.” In contemporary individualized and globalized societies, loneliness reflects a withdrawal of social resonance, while ressentiment represents the moralized expression of unresolved injury, humiliation and perceived powerlessness. As Kersten, Neu und Vogel (2024) argue, ressentiment arises precisely when experiences of social injury cannot be directed toward their real causes. Instead, emotional wounds become internalized and transformed through projection, value falsification, reality distortion, victimization. These mechanisms convert a personal experience of injury into a worldview of pervasive bitterness and antagonism — a transformation that not only affects subjective experience but also threatens democratic coexistence.

Loneliness functions differently yet converges with ressentiment in crucial ways. It is not simply the absence of social contact but a state of emotional disconnection intensified by digital mediation, social fragmentation and the erosion of shared lifeworlds. Kersten et al. emphasize that loneliness and ressentiment form a “correlative, though not causal” relationship (Kersten et al., 2024, p. 87): loneliness sediments feelings of exclusion and insignificance, while ressentiment can emerge as a compensatory moral response — turning deprivation into indignation and antagonistic affect. In this sense, loneliness provides the ground upon which ressentiment can crystallize, particularly when social bonds weaken and individuals lack meaningful recognition.

Contemporary psychology often treats emotions as internal states to be regulated, controlled or optimized. Yet emotions must not be reduced to internal states to be regulated. Critical psychology — especially in Holzkamp’s (1983) subject-scientific tradition — conceptualizes emotions as meaningful articulations of a subject’s inner state (Befindlichkeit) as an evaluation of the environment/social situation. Difficult feelings are not failures of self-management; they are experiential indicators of restricted possibilities for action. This perspective reframes loneliness and ressentiment as expressions of structural contradictions rather than personal deficiencies. The central question thus becomes: What does it mean to rationally investigate one’s own difficult feelings under conditions of neoliberal individualization?

The psychodynamic tradition suggests that defense mechanisms transform unbearable feelings into socially acceptable rationalizations. The dynamic unconsciousness therefore does not simply suppress feelings — it reorganizes them, aligning private suffering with socially available narratives. Ressentiment thus becomes not merely an emotional reaction but an ideological form.

Hochschild’s research on the American Right illustrates this dynamic empirically. In Strangers in Their Own Land, she describes how “empathy walls” inhibit mutual understanding and how a “deep story” of betrayal, effort and moral deservedness organizes affective experience among white working-class conservatives (2016). Her informants express loneliness as abandonment by political elites and ressentiment toward those perceived as receiving unfair advantages. Crucially, this affective constellation persists even when objective evidence contradicts these beliefs — an observation mirroring Kersten et al.’s description of value falsification and projection. Hochschild notes that the emotional logic of ressentiment can override rational analysis and becomes a political identity anchored in shared grievance.

Schäfer und Zürn (2021) describe a similar dynamic in the context of democratic regression. They argue that affective polarization, loss of trust, and the perception of cultural displacement create fertile ground for anti-democratic tendencies. Loneliness appears here as a structural condition of atomized societies; ressentiment as its political crystallization. Both are intensified by global economic inequalities, cultural anxieties and rapid social transformations. These analyses underline that loneliness and ressentiment are not merely psychological; they are political emotions shaped by transformations in the social fabric.

Applebaum (2020) likewise shows how authoritarian movements mobilize ressentiment by framing social change as existential threat, and by converting diffuse anxiety into moralized blame. Authoritarian leaders promise relief from loneliness by offering belonging within a tightly bounded collective identity, and relief from ressentiment by providing symbolic enemies. In dark times, such affective strategies can be more powerful than rational argumentation.

Against this background, the psychological question deepens: How do subjects relate to their own difficult feelings — loneliness, resentment, fear, shame — when these feelings are embedded in structures they cannot easily change? This is where Holzkamp’s concept of action potency (Handlungsfähigkeit) becomes crucial (1983). The struggle for agency under conditions of uncertainty, overload and contradictory demands expresses itself as fear of contingency and the desire to maintain control. Freud would describe the transformation of these difficult emotions into cultural productivity as sublimation, though such productivity can also reinforce a split between thinking and feeling, leaving embodied affect unaddressed. Through their integration into social accepted action, they reproduce exactly the same oppressive societal structures that affect emotional suffering.

Meta-subjectivity, in Holzkamp’s (1983) formulation, denotes the capacity to take a reflective distance from one’s immediate experience. Osterkamp (2008) further conceptualizes this shift as a movement toward a “Metaperspectivity,” (Metastandpunkt) enabling subjects to understand emotions as socially mediated rather than purely personal reactions. This resonates with Husserl’s epoché, Heidegger’s ekstasis, and Foucault’s decentering of the subject, each marking a methodological suspension that allows experience to be seen anew. Translating meta-subjectivity into practice reframing difficult emotions—shame, anger, hurt, and fear—not as deficits but as potential starting points for agency. Within critical psychology, emotions articulate a subject’s evaluative relation to their world (Holzkamp, 1983), meaning that difficult feelings reflect constrained possibilities for action rather than individual shortcomings. When explored collectively, these emotions become epistemic resources that illuminate how people experience structural limitations and openings.

Meta-subjectivity allows to move from statements like “I am angry” to the decentered formulation: “There is anger present—what does this reveal about my position in this situation?” This shift initiates what Osterkamp and Huck (2006) describe as social self-clarification (soziale Selbstverständigung): a collective clarification of situations, meanings, and interests that enables shared agency. Such reflective distancing does not diminish the reality of difficult emotions; instead, it transforms them into resources for understanding one’s embeddedness in social relations and for expanding action horizons. Meta-subjectivity therefore functions as both a psychological and political practice—opening spaces in which emotions can support rather than hinder the struggle for greater action potency.

This decentering can transform emotions from reflexive reactions into shared objects of inquiry, opening a “standpoint of trans-determination” from which new forms of agency can emerge. In participatory settings, this ecstasy can take the form of utopian imagination and collective action — not escapism, but anticipatory politics. Empowerment here is not a technocratic tool for strengthening individuals; it is a process of understanding and transforming the structural constraints on action.

In dark times, when loneliness isolates and ressentiment polarizes, gaining meta-subjectivity can guide practices cultivate the emotional and epistemic conditions for democratic life and social change.