Why the return of humans to the Moon might be the most elegant way to avoid grief
Psychoanalysis × Geopolitics
1. The blue marble
On April 10, 2026, the Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific. Four astronauts — Wiseman, Glover, Koch, Hansen — had just passed behind the Moon and come back, without landing, without staying, just brushing the edge of what we thought was no longer possible. It was the first time since 1972 that human beings had traveled into deep space. The spacecraft was named Integrity.
The press called it Moon Joy. Social media flooded with flags and rocket emojis. Commander Reid Wiseman said the mission aimed to bring the world together.
Nobody asked the obvious question.
Bring the world together? Now?
We have spent months watching the international order decompose in real time. Tariffs multiplying. Alliances fracturing. A war in Europe that nobody knows how to end anymore. And in the middle of all that, we sent four people to loop around the Moon so they could tell us, from 250,000 miles away, that the Earth looks like a blue marble with no borders.
It is a beautiful image. Too beautiful. And that is what should concern us.
2. What the child already knew
Jean Piaget spent decades watching children think. He was not interested in what they knew but in how they knew it — the internal mechanism by which a developing mind takes in the world.
He found two movements. He called them assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation is calm. New information fits into what you already had. The world confirms your schemas. Everything flows. Accommodation is something else entirely. The new thing does not fit. The schema breaks. The mind has to reorganize itself from within just to keep functioning. Neither is better than the other. Both are necessary. But they hurt differently.
Now scale up.
In corporate process management, this oscillation goes by different names: continuous improvement and reengineering. There are moments for optimizing what works and moments for tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch. No system can live in continuous improvement forever. Eventually it runs out of road.
Scale up again.
Hegel framed it at a historical level: an order establishes itself, enters into contradiction with itself, collapses, and from the collapse something emerges that did not exist before. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. And the synthesis, the moment it stabilizes, is already the new thesis.
And Melanie Klein — a psychoanalyst who dared to take infant anxiety seriously at a time when nobody else would — described an analogous movement inside the human mind: the depressive position (integration, guilt, reparation, the capacity to see the other as a whole person) and the paranoid-schizoid position (fragmentation, good and bad, all or nothing).
These are distinct theories, written in distinct registers. But they all describe an alternation between integration and rupture that repeats at radically different scales. In the brain of a three-year-old and in a company of three thousand employees as much as in the history of civilization.
What is happening right now in the world has a name that nobody is using.
3. The biggest player at the table
Make America Great Again is not a slogan. It is an accommodation project at a planetary scale.
Nietzsche observed something that hurts to read: that morality is, among other things, the strategy of those who lack the power to prevent being crushed by those who have it. Brutal, debatable, but it contains something that applies here: when a small group negotiates with a large one, it invokes ethics. When a large group negotiates with a small one, it invokes its size.
Michael Porter, at Harvard, systematized something similar for the corporate world: bargaining power is proportional to size. The analogy is not perfect (states are not corporations, and the international order is not a market), but Porter’s intuition helps name something that liberal morality tends to conceal: size also negotiates.
China is already doing it.
For decades, the United States played a strange game: being the world’s foremost power and the moral guarantor of the international order. Funding NATO, sustaining free trade, exporting democracy (sometimes at gunpoint, but that is another essay). Smaller countries benefited from this arrangement. Some learned to live inside its costs without fully bearing them.
The uncomfortable question is: how long can the biggest player at the table keep absorbing the cost of being good?
Seen from there, Trump’s position is not a personality accident. He does not invent the structural pressure — he turns it into style, spectacle, and doctrine. It was a matter of time before the dominant power felt the temptation to stop playing moral guarantor and start playing what it is.
Which does not mean it is comfortable to watch. It means that staying inside an ideological comfort zone makes it impossible to think about what is happening. And not thinking about what is happening is exactly what this essay is trying to avoid.
4. Neither from here nor from there
When I was thirteen my family moved to Chile. Chileans called me cholo — a word for Peruvian, sometimes affectionate, sometimes not. When I came back to Lima three years later, my nickname became roto — slang for someone who had become too Chilean. Also said sometimes with warmth, sometimes with an edge.
I was never Chilean enough for Chileans or Peruvian enough for Peruvians.
I mention this because it illustrates something this essay is going to provoke. The political right will find it irritating because it does not celebrate the reorganization as a victory. The left will find it irritating because it does not condemn it as a catastrophe. Those who have already let themselves be colonized by an ideology (any ideology) will feel that no side is being taken.
No side is being taken.
Not out of cowardice. Out of clinical rigor.
Bolognini wrote something that changed the way many analysts listen in their consulting rooms. He said that psychoanalytic empathy is not empathy with «the patient» as a whole. It is empathy with the different parts of the patient, including the ones that are at war with each other. The analyst does not side with the superego against the id. The analyst empathizes with the entire conflict.
Taking sides is what happens when the anxiety generated by complexity becomes unbearable. And the complexity of this moment is that what is happening is, simultaneously, a structural consequence of the system and genuinely dangerous.
5. The flight upward
Donald Winnicott started out as a pediatrician in London. He ended up becoming one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. In 1935 he wrote an essay on a mechanism he called the manic defence, and his description of how it operates turns out to be disturbingly precise for what we are living through.
For Winnicott, manic defence is not simply omnipotence or denial. It is something more specific: the inability to give full significance to internal reality. When depressive anxiety becomes intolerable, the mind does not merely inflate. It flees. It flees outward — toward action, adventure, spectacle, external reality. Winnicott called it a flight to reality.
What the mind does in this flight is omnipotent, triumphant, contemptuous of what it lost. But the most important thing is what it cannot do: it cannot experience mourning. In manic defence, Winnicott wrote, mourning cannot be experienced. Grief is suspended, cancelled, replaced by motion.
Winnicott gave everyday examples. The radio left on all day. The city that never sleeps. Music-hall dancers trained for liveliness. Each one, in its own way, offers reassurance against an internal death that cannot be named. Normal uses of manic defence, he wrote. Mechanisms that everyone employs.
The public reception of Artemis — the way we need to read it as unity, as redemption, as shared destiny — operates in the same way. It is a manic defence on a civilizational scale. Not as an insult. As the diagnosis of a cultural scene.
Humanity lost something it has not yet named. The illusion of a cooperative world. The idea that we were moving, slowly, clumsily, hypocritically, toward some form of integration. The United Nations, the WTO, trade agreements, the notion that human rights were a shared project.
That order was never innocent. For many countries, global cooperation also meant subordination, debt, intervention, and moral lecturing from above. But even an unjust illusion can serve a psychic function: organizing expectations, containing violence, making a future feel possible.
Winnicott described something he called the transitional object. The teddy bear. The blanket the child drags everywhere. It is not the mother, but it represents something of her. It is not reality, but it allows the child to transit toward reality. The bear does not need to be real. It needs to work.
The illusion of a cooperative global order was our teddy bear. It was not the mother, nor reality, nor was it even fair to everyone. But it helped us sleep.
And something in it broke.
What happens when that breaks and nobody grieves is exactly what Winnicott described: the flight outward. The Overview Effect — the cognitive shift that astronauts report when seeing the Earth from space, the sensation of unity, of borders being a fiction — is an almost perfect manic fantasy. From 250,000 miles up there are no tariffs, no wars, no fragmentation, no splitting into good and bad. Just a blue sphere, beautiful and undivided.
An image too perfectly suited to keep us from looking at what is happening on the surface.
6. God help us
In 1990, after the disastrous government of Alan García, Alberto Fujimori, then a political outsider, came to power in Peru. His finance minister, Juan Carlos Hurtado Miller, announced a brutal adjustment program — the fujishock — and closed his televised address with a phrase that was seared into the country’s memory:
«God help us.»
Nearly all domestic industry vanished. Inflation stopped. The social cost was devastating. In the long run, many economists acknowledge that the change of model was necessary. But the fujishock was not just a correction. It was a demolition. And what emerged from the rubble was not just a new economy. It was a generation shaped by the violence of the transition.
Historical perspective prevents us from believing that every collapse of order is an anomaly or pure regression. Piaget and Hegel anticipate it from different angles; Klein names it. There are moments when the schema has to break so that something new can appear.
But the clinical perspective prevents us from romanticizing rupture. Not every destruction prepares a synthesis. Sometimes it just destroys.
And the manic defence — the flight toward external reality that Winnicott described — prevents us from calibrating exactly where we are. Whether we are in a reorganization that builds, or one that devastates.
7. What Houston lost
Psychoanalysis does not try to stop what it finds. It does not tell the patient: stop defending yourself. It says: look at what you are doing, and decide whether you want to keep doing it knowing what you now know.
This essay does not try to stop Artemis, or the new world order, or the alternation between integration and rupture that has been cycling since civilization began. That alternation will keep cycling long after all of us are dead.
What it does try to do is name the loss that this moment denies. Because as long as it is not named, the flight upward — the Moon, the rockets, the blue marble with no borders — will seem like the only available response.
And it is not.
There is another response, less comfortable, less photogenic, impossible to tweet. Grieve the world we had, with all its flaws and all its hypocrisies, and from there, from what remains when omnipotence withdraws, build what comes next.
Maybe that is what Houston lost: not a spacecraft, not a mission, not a flag, but the ability to tell the difference between hope and euphoria.
Hope looks at loss and works from there.
Euphoria lifts off.
This essay inaugurates a series on global events read as symptoms.
Want to go deeper?
On manic defence:
Winnicott, D.W. (1935). The Manic Defence. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 129-144). London: Hogarth Press.
Why read it: Winnicott describes manic defence not as simple omnipotence but as a flight toward external reality to avoid facing internal death. His example of the music-hall — dancers trained for liveliness as denial of deadness — is an image that stays with you.
On Klein’s positions:
Klein, M. (1935). A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 145-174.
Why read it: The theoretical framework that Winnicott develops. Klein describes how the mind oscillates between integration and fragmentation, and why loss drives both movements.
On psychoanalytic empathy:
Bolognini, S. (2004). Psychoanalytic Empathy. Free Association Books.
Why read it: Bolognini shows that empathizing is not «putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.» It is holding the conflicting parts of someone simultaneously, without taking sides.
On the transitional object:
Winnicott, D.W. (1953). Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 89-97.
Why read it: The teddy bear is not the mother, but it allows the child to move toward reality. Winnicott explains why certain illusions are necessary — and what happens when they are destroyed too soon.
On assimilation, accommodation, and cognitive development:
Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. International Universities Press.
Why read it: How the mind oscillates between incorporating the new and reorganizing when the new does not fit.
On competitive forces:
Porter, M. (1979). How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy. Harvard Business Review, 57(2), 137-145.
Why read it: Porter does not talk about geopolitics, but he helps think about how size alters any negotiation.
On offensive realism in international relations:
Mearsheimer, J. (2001). The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. W.W. Norton.
Why read it: Great powers do not cooperate out of goodness but out of calculation. When the calculation changes, cooperation withdraws.
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