The dialectic of bonds, between necessary rupture and continuity of self

There exists in human existence a perpetual oscillation, an ambivalent relationship to rupture that so many individuals maintain when faced with the possibility of leaving, breaking away, emancipating themselves. This tension reveals a fundamental structure of existence, that of our relationship to the bonds that constitute us as much as they hinder us. Many are those who live this torn feeling between the desire for freedom and the terror of separation, between the vital necessity of cutting certain bonds and the anguish of losing what seemed to define us. This dialectic of bonds touches the very heart of what Spinoza called the conatus, this force of perseverance in being. For here lies the paradox: certain bonds, under the guise of maintaining us in existence, actually drain us of our vital substance. They create what psychoanalysis calls a hold, where the other becomes not a horizon of fruitful otherness, but an energetic vampire feeding on our life force. How then to distinguish the bonds that constitute us from those that destroy us?

Rupture as ontological act

Emmanuel Levinas, in Totality and Infinity (1961), postulates that “the relation to the face is straightaway ethical”. But what to do when this face becomes that of Medusa, petrifying those who look upon it? When the relationship, instead of opening onto the infinity of otherness, becomes a closed system of domination and mutual destruction?

There exist relationships that operate what I would call a “murder of the symbolic.” They attack not only the individual in their flesh or emotions, but in their very capacity to symbolize, to give meaning, to inscribe themselves in an order of signification. These relationships create what Donald Winnicott described as a “false self,” a pathological adaptation where the individual, to survive the hold, sacrifices their deep authenticity.

The experience of being held reveals that there exist bonds whose rupture is not a betrayal but a vital necessity. As Gilles Deleuze wrote in Anti-Oedipus (1972), “it’s a matter of making flows pass through, of making them flee, of conjugating decoded flows”. Breaking away is sometimes the only way to rediscover the movement of life against mortifying fixation.

Time regained, the past-present dialectic

But here is where the question becomes more complex: if certain bonds must be cut for us to exist, others, on the contrary, must be rewoven for us to find ourselves again. Paul Ricœur, in Oneself as Another (1990), develops the concept of narrative identity: we are the story we tell of ourselves, and this story necessarily implies a relationship to the past.

The individual who has broken with toxic bonds finds themselves facing a new challenge: how to maintain a continuity of self without falling back into the repetition of the same? How, to use Ricœur’s words, to “remain the same while becoming other”? The temptation is great to want to completely erase the past, to make a clean slate. But this is an illusion: as psychoanalysis shows, the repressed always returns.

True liberation is not in forgetting but in what Freud called Durcharbeitung, working-through, this patient work of transforming psychic material. It’s not about denying the past but metabolizing it, transforming it into living substance. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885): “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

Attachment against love, a vital distinction

John Bowlby, father of attachment theory, showed how our first bonds shape our relationship to the world. But there exists a fundamental difference between attachment, which can become possession, dependence, alienation, and true love which, as Rainer Maria Rilke said, “consists of two solitudes that protect, touch, and greet each other”.

Pathological attachment creates what Melanie Klein called the “paranoid-schizoid position”: the other no longer exists as an autonomous subject but as an object to control, possess, incorporate. This confusion between love and attachment is at the heart of many toxic relationships. The other then becomes what Christopher Bollas calls a negative “transformational object” in The Shadow of the Object (1987), one from whom we expect salvation while being destroyed.

Authentic love, on the contrary, accepts separation as a condition of encounter. As Jacques Lacan wrote, “to love is to give what one doesn’t have to someone who doesn’t want it”. This enigmatic formula opens to the idea that true love is not in fusion but in the recognition of the other’s irreducible otherness.

Fear as guardian of the threshold

This fundamental ambivalence toward rupture is not simply cowardice or weakness. It also reveals anxiety in the face of emptiness, what Heidegger called Angst, not fear of a determined object, but anguish in the face of nothingness, in the face of the possibility of no longer being.

For cutting a bond, even a toxic one, is always dying a little. It’s accepting to lose a part of what seemed to constitute us. It’s what psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier called the “violence of interpretation”, that moment when one must choose between two deaths: the slow one, in the toxic bond, or the brutal but salvific one, of rupture.

The fear of cutting toxic bonds also reveals our ambiguous relationship to freedom. As Erich Fromm analyzed in Escape from Freedom (1941), we often flee our own freedom, preferring known chains to the uncertainty of emancipation. The toxic bond then becomes what Wilhelm Reich called a “character armor” in Character Analysis (1933), a rigid protection against anxiety, but which ends up suffocating life itself.

The paradox of continuity

Here is the central paradox: to remain oneself, one must sometimes accept becoming other. To maintain the continuity of our being, one must sometimes consent to rupture. This is what Deleuze and Guattari called the “line of flight,” not an escape, but a creation of new possibilities. Beware, however, for toxic relationships often begin with a proposal to break the old bonds that confine us, but this false emancipation will confine us even more, having cut the bonds that would have allowed us to evaluate, by comparison, the toxicity. There are also these simulacra of liberation, in which we actually repeat the same habits, which we know only too well, which reassure us by making us believe they emancipate us, when they often imprison us even more strongly. We believe ourselves enriched by an otherness, when we are in a symptomatic known.

The individual who has cut toxic bonds finds themselves in the paradoxical situation of having to both break with their past and reconnect with it differently. This is what Carl Gustav Jung called the process of individuation in Psychological Types (1921): not becoming an isolated individual, but integrating the different parts of oneself, including the darkest ones, into a living totality.

This reconnection is not a step backward but what Nietzsche called the “eternal return,” not the repetition of the same, but the joyful affirmation of all that has been, transformed by the new gaze we cast upon it. “Amor fati,” love of fate, does not mean resignation but active transformation of the past into creative force.

Solitude as a space for reconstruction

Breaking toxic bonds often opens onto a dizzying solitude. But this solitude is not empty: it is, as Winnicott said, the “capacity to be alone,” not isolation but presence to oneself. It is in this solitude that what Gaston Bachelard called “reverie” can operate, this work of imagination that reweaves the bonds with oneself.

Solitude then becomes a laboratory of transformation. As Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet (1929): “Only one thing is necessary: solitude. The great inner solitude. To go into oneself and not meet anyone for hours, that is what one must achieve.” This intimate solitude (not external) is the sign that we are not in a simulacrum of emancipation.

And this solitude is not a narcissistic withdrawal but the condition for true encounter. For it is only when we have learned to be alone that we can truly be with the other, without projection, without hold, without confusion. This is what psychoanalyst André Green called the “capacity to be alone in the presence of the other”, this ability to maintain one’s own psychic space while being in relationship.

The ethics of bonds, toward a relational ecology

How then to navigate this complexity? How to distinguish the bonds to cultivate from those to cut? There can be no simple answer or universal criterion. Each situation is singular, each relationship unique. But some markers can guide:

• A vital bond is one that increases our power to act, to use Spinozist vocabulary. It makes us more capable, more creative, more alive. Conversely, the toxic bond diminishes this power, makes us smaller, more fearful, less capable. Beware here too of the simulacrum, for sometimes through being taken care of in a new toxic bond, we may believe we have gained in power, but it comes from a dependence on the other, not from our autonomy.
• An authentic bond respects what Levinas called the “asymmetry” of the relationship: the other remains other, irreducible to our projections and expectations. The toxic bond, on the contrary, tends toward symbiosis, fusion, undifferentiation.
• A fruitful bond inscribes itself in what François Jullien calls the “gap,” this space between beings that allows movement, transformation, surprise. The mortifying bond suppresses this gap, creating a suffocating proximity where nothing more can happen, even if we are often led to believe the opposite.

The wisdom of the tightrope walker

To live is to walk on this ridgeline between rupture and continuity, between detachment and engagement, between solitude and relationship. This is what Nietzsche called the “wisdom of the tightrope walker,” this art of maintaining balance in imbalance itself.

The question is not to choose once and for all between cutting and maintaining bonds, but to learn this delicate art of discernment: knowing when fidelity becomes prison, when rupture becomes liberation, when turning inward allows opening to the other.

For ultimately, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Visible and the Invisible (1964), we are made of bonds: “We are in the world and the world is in us.” The question is not to be with or without bonds, but to transform these bonds from chains into wings, from prisons into horizons, from slow deaths into intense lives.

Perhaps this is the lesson: we are not condemned to endure the bonds that have been imposed upon us. We can, through an act of ontological courage, choose our bonds, transform them, reinvent them. Not in the illusion of absolute autonomy, but in the lucid recognition of our fundamental interdependence. For as Simone de Beauvoir reminded us in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947): “One is not born free, one becomes free.” And becoming free is perhaps first learning to cut the bonds that prevent us from being, to better reweave those that allow us to become.