And so deprives his or her child of reality and, therefore, any chance of aliveness . This child will feel that independence of mind is loneliness. Submissive and acquiescent, this child will seek his or her parent s approval because in his or her mind, the parent is omnipotent. The struggle for recognition modifies omnipotence in both the parent and the child. Recently, political philosophers have begun to assess the psychological costs of injustice and inequality, the humiliation and shame that follows from being excluded.
Justice is more than the fair distribution of material goods.
It is a vital human need. To support this view, Honneth turns to object-relations theory, in general, and Winnicott, in particular. But what makes object-relations theory seem especially well suited to the purposes of a phenomenology of recognition relations is not the intersubjectivist extension of the psychoanalytic framework of explanation as such. Rather, it can convincingly portray love as a particular form of recognition only owing to the specific way in which it makes the success of affection bonds dependent on the capacity, acquired in early childhood, to strike a balance between symbiosis and self-assertion. The path to this central insight, in which the intuitions of the young Hegel are confirmed to a surprising degree, was prepared by the English psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott.