THE FEELING of CERTAINTY FEELING the Studies in the Psychosocial

STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL AND R.D. HINSHELWOOD AND R.D. EDITED BY NIKOLAY MINTCHEV MINTCHEV NIKOLAY EDITED BY ON IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE ON IDENTITY PSYCHOSOCIAL PERSPECTIVES PERSPECTIVES PSYCHOSOCIAL THE FEELING OF CERTAINTY FEELING THE Studies in the Psychosocial

Series Editors Stephen Frosh Dept of Psychosocial Studies Birkbeck, University of London London, United Kingdom

Peter Redman Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Wendy Hollway Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes, United Kingdom Studies in the Psychosocial seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process. As such it can be understood as an interdisci- plinary field in search of transdisciplinary objects of knowledge. Studies in the Psychosocial is also distinguished by its emphasis on affect, the irrational and unconscious processes, often, but not necessarily, understood psychoanalytically. Studies in the Psychosocial aims to foster the development of this field by publishing high quality and innovative monographs and edited collections. The series welcomes submissions from a range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary orientations, including sociology, social and critical psychology, political science, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, queer studies, management and organization studies, cultural and media studies and psychoanalysis. However, in keeping with the inter- or transdisciplinary character of psychosocial analysis, books in the series will generally pass beyond their points of origin to generate concepts, understandings and forms of investigation that are distinctively psychosocial in character.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/series/14464 Nikolay Mintchev • R.D. Hinshelwood Editors The Feeling of Certainty Psychosocial Perspectives on Identity and Difference Editors Nikolay Mintchev R.D. Hinshelwood Institute for Global Prosperity Department of Psychosocial University College London and Psychoanalytic Studies London, UK University of Essex Colchester, Essex, UK

Studies in the Psychosocial ISBN 978-3-319-57716-6 ISBN 978-3-319-57717-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57717-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953907

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Karl Figlio About the Book

This book is the result of a conference held at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies (now Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies), University of Essex, to recognize the work and career of Professor Karl Figlio, who founded the Centre with colleagues in 1994. The conference topic—the feeling of certainty—was one close to Karl’s heart and philosophical interests. This topic has the virtue of bridging a spectrum of different academic disciplines, making it particularly apt for the Centre, which has the purpose of creating dialogue between multiple perspectives in the academic world of the University. The editors would like to thank Karl for his intellectual contribution to psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies, as well as his personal contribution to the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies.

vii Contents

Introduction: The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial Approach 1 Nikolay Mintchev and R.D. Hinshelwood

The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search for Truth 11 Karl Figlio

What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically? Understanding the Feeling of Certainty Through Psychoanalysis and Ethnography 31 Nikolay Mintchev

Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 49 Stephen Frosh

Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 69 M. Fakhry Davids

ix x Contents

Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation of the Personality 93 R.D. Hinshelwood

‘Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try to Screw You’: The Feeling of Certainty and the Mexican-Origin Border Patrol Agents 115 Natalia Hernández Jiménez

The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties and Defences in Times of Trauma and Uncertainty 129 Christina Wieland

Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime Sexual Violence 149 Tamaki Noro

Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 165 Barry Richards

Index 187 Introduction: The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial Approach

Nikolay Mintchev and R.D. Hinshelwood

The concept of certainty is widely used in everyday language to designate a state of mind or experience which is rarely seen as politically charged or controversial. However, as ordinary as it may seem, a feeling of certainty can play a key role in shaping identity formation, social exclusion, prejudice and commitment to political causes. This raises a number of important questions: what does it mean for the subject to feel certainty about her or his role in society and relationship to others? From where does the feeling of certainty originate, and how does it differ from modes of thought that are open to scepticism about the order of things? What are the consequences and effects of certainty on politics, social relations and subjectivity?

N. Mintchev (*) Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, London, UK R.D. Hinshelwood Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

A good place to begin addressing these questions is by exploring the various meanings of the term. The concept of certainty can refer to both social conditions and, as suggested above, subjective experience. In the former case—when referring to the social world—the term is almost invariably used with the negative prefix un-. As a number of sociologists argue, we live in uncertain times—the economic, political and social institutions of today’s world are no longer as stable as before—they are changing as quickly as ever and we can no longer rely on them to support and define our life trajectories (Beck 2009; Bauman 2007; Zinn 2008). On the other hand, certainty is a state of mind; it is a conviction that something is right or wrong, whether it is a piece of scientific research, a political discourse, a philosophical outlook, a logical conclusion, an ethical imperative or a vision of one’s self in the past, present and future. The experience of certainty as Sodré puts it, ‘is dominated by inflexibility, rigidity, as if one tyrannical thought is constantly keeping out all other points of view’ (1994: 379). At this subjective level, the opposite term of certainty is not only uncertainty, but also doubt. The latter, as psychoanalysts since Freud have shown, can take extreme and obsessional forms, which actively disrupt the subject’s thought patterns and actions. Doubt is ‘dominated by constant oscillations, it is as if the mind is constantly thrown from side to side by opposing thoughts: no certainty can be achieved’ (Sodré 1994: 379). What must be emphasized, however, is that both extremes on the certainty-uncertainty spectrum are problematic. If the uncertainty of today’s neo-liberal social and economic order leads to extreme forms of precarity, insecurity and anxiety, the opposite end of the spectrum represents a structural rigidity that suffocates the subject and curbs its agency. In his work on ‘the precariat’, Guy Standing (2014) illustrates this point with the example of Japan’s ‘legendary “salaryman”’—a figure characterized by lifetime employment in a single enterprise, which prevailed in the country until the 1980s (Ibid.: 28–29). The problem with Japan’s organization of labour was that the underside of job security was a paternalistic relationship of dependence between employees and employers, as well as workers’ fear of leaving their company because this would signal failure. Consequently, as Standing puts it, in Japan ‘the gilded cage can easily become a laden cage’ (2014: 28), where ‘someone psychologically trapped Introduction: The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial... 3 in long-term employment loses control and drifts closer to a form of precarious dependency’ (2014: 29). The extremes of certainty and uncertainty prove to be equally problematic when considered from a psychoanalytic perspective. On the one hand, a degree of certainty—especially the certainty of self—is essential for maintaining a stable relationship to oneself and others. As Pinheiro and Viana (2011) argue,

The certainty of self is…[an] illusion of the ego, but an illusion that works as a foundation, which the building we construct of ourselves needs in order to move, to live. Without it the possibility of internal dialogue may disappear. Without it the I is a hostage of what the other says of it…What the I is becomes what the other says it is (Pinheiro and Viana 2011: 353).

Drawing on the work of Ferenczi (1949), Pinheiro and Viana explain the origins and psychosocial dynamics of the loss of certainty. When adults refute or fail to believe a child’s narrative of an event, this can lead to a conflict between what has been perceived in the world and what has been reflected back by the other/adult. The child can subsequently lose confidence in her or his senses, and lose her or his certainty of self—something which can persist into adulthood and develop into a central organizing principle of mental life. In this case, as the quote above shows, the subject loses her or his agency and becomes passively subordinated to the agency of others. On the other hand, however, the feeling of certainty can all too easily slide into a pathological, quasi-psychotic, relationship to the world, which in turn forms the underpinnings of religious or political fundamentalism, especially under the influence of unconscious group dynamics (Figlio 2006; Stein 2006: 201). Certainty, in this extreme form, implies an absence of healthy scepticism and a lack of readiness to change one’s convictions in the face of contradictory evidence. It is a feeling underpinned by omnipotence, idealization and pathological narcissism, which in turn, disrupts reality testing and creates confusion between idealization and reality (Figlio 2006: 120). A similar conclusion has been reached by authors working in the tradition of Jungian depth psychology. Roderick Main (2006), for example, builds on the works of Rudolf Otto 4 N. Mintchev and R.D. Hinshelwood and C. G. Jung to argue for an alternative to what he sees as the polarized deadlock between religious fundamentalism and strict secularism—a deadlock based on mutual projection in which each group imagines negative attributes as pertaining to the other but not to itself. The convictions and ideologies that hardline religious and secular subjects hold are based on certainties about the validity of their respective ethical positions, which in turn support polarized attitudes of mutual hostility. Undermining this deadlock is possible because of what Main, following Otto and Jung, calls ‘the numinous’—an uncanny mysterious experience that is at once daunting and fascinating, healing and destructive. Even though the numinous is the linchpin of religious experience, in Jung’s psychological revision of the concept, it pertains to both the religious and the secular. So understood, the numinous, according to Main, can create complex internal differentiation within the subject. This, in turn can undermine the certainties of both the religious and the secular psyche with the consequence of forestalling the polarization between the two. But challenging the work of certainty can be a very difficult task. As Robert Burton observes, following the social psychologist Leon Festinger, ‘[t]he more committed we are to a belief, the harder it is to relinquish, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Instead of acknowledging an error in judgement and abandoning the opinion, we tend to develop a new attitude or belief that will justify retaining it’ (Burton 2008: 12). What this suggests is that certainty is essentially a self-referential, tauto- logical thought process. In certainty, the subject believes in an idea regardless of evidence that may support or refute the latter’s validity. This means, essentially, that the subject believes in an idea because he or she believes in the idea, and not because evidence suggests that the idea is right. Yet, this circularity is often hidden from consciousness through repression and covered up by a narrative that neatly justifies the reasons for holding a conviction. This self-referential logic of certainty is nowhere more evident than in the construction of ethnic/cultural/racial identity and difference. As a number of chapters in this book argue, the feeling of certainty can act as a foundational block of fundamentalist movements and for violent pre- dispositions towards otherness and difference. Such is the case of twentieth century fascism (Wieland), Islamophobic anti-liberal extremism such Introduction: The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial... 5 as in the case of Anders Breivik (Richards), and Islamic extremism (Hinshelwood). These extremisms are underpinned by convictions that social antagonisms and rigid boundaries between the self and others are a natural part of the order of things, which can only be resolved through violence and destruction. Furthermore, such certainties do not have to manifest themselves in open conflict; rather, they can flare up intermit- tently in ways that run contrary to conscious values and attitudes towards others. For example, as Davids shows in his chapter, people can be racist and non-racist at the same time; they can be actively committed to anti- racist liberal ideas and simultaneously animated by internalized racial stereotypes that can determine their actions in moments of anxiety. What is crucial, however, is that the kinds of identities represented by a polarized mode of thought have little to do with social reality where people often hold multiple ethnic identities (or variations of identities) at the same time, without ever fully fitting either into ‘us’ or ‘them’. In the polarized logic of racism and prejudice, this complexity is obfuscated and covered up by a phantasy of homogenous group identities and unbridgeable gulfs between groups. In this constellation, the self-referentiality of identity/ difference operates along the following lines: when the question is posed of what makes someone X, the standard answer is that people are X because of a set of associated markers (they eat a particular kind of food, they believe in a specific religion, they can trace their heritage to an ances- tral land and so on); however, if we ask why someone eats certain foods, practices a particular religion and so on, then the answer, according to this logic, is because they are X. Here, identity is short-circuited so that the predicates in question define the subject, while at the same time the subject explains the existence of the predicates. The markers that define X as such, therefore, have no external reference point since they originate from X itself. The logic of identity thus operates in a closed circuit which boils down to the simple tautology X is X (for an elaboration of this point see Mintchev in press). The statement that X is X—which in racialized reasoning also presupposes that X is not Y—is a self-evident truth that anyone can be certain of. The problem with it is that while it may be true in the abstract, its simplicity does not overlap with the multiply constituted, internally divided and constantly transforming realities of identity and difference 6 N. Mintchev and R.D. Hinshelwood on the ground. This raises another crucial question which this book sets out to tackle: when and why does the psyche give in to the certainties of racism and fundamentalism? Where this book diverges from standard social science is in the resort to the unconscious functioning of individuals in relation to their identities, and in relation to other members and leaders of their social groups. These phenomena are addressed in the following chapters from a wide range of psychoanalytic, depth psychological and psychosocial perspectives, and with reference to ethnographic and historical case studies of certainty and identity. One recurrent theme which explicitly or implicitly runs throughout the book, and which we would like to emphasize here, is that the feeling of certainty is inseparable from its opposite—from the feeling of uncertainty and instability. Identity, as Frosh’s chapter emphasizes, is fractured and incoherent in its constitution; it is haunted by uncertainties about itself which prevent it from establishing a stable sense of unity. Furthermore, we would emphasize that despite the fact that internal fracturing is part of the ontological condition of being human, different social contexts and/or experiences can lead to more benign or more radical forms of psychic instability. Uncertainty and precarity in the social world, whether it is economic, political, social or cultural, leads to internal turmoil that challenges the foundational certainty of self that is necessary for maintaining at least a partial sense of stability. This thwarting, in turn, opens up a pathway to developing more radical and tyrannical ver- sions of certainty which leave little room for dialogue and acceptance of contradiction. For this reason we believe that it is imperative to understand certainty from a psychosocial perspective that examines the social causes and consequences of the subjectivity of certainty, as well as the unconscious dynamics upon which social forces play. In today’s world of austerity, social change and global inequality, the precarious nature of people’s lives and the widespread public discontent with mainstream politics in so many countries can open a pathway for xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism among both majority and minority groups. Understanding the psychological and social bases of the convictions that animate these processes is a pressing task for future research in the field which this book begins to address. Introduction: The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial... 7

The chapters that follow draw on a wide range of theories, including those of Freud, Klein, Lacan, Bion and Jung, to address the feeling of certainty from multiple angles. The opening chapter by Karl Figlio offers a psychodynamic account of how the feeling of certainty operates in the mind, arguing that projection—especially, projection of internal unease, doubt or uncertainty—is the basic mechanism through which a certain state of mind is established. Following the work of Wittgenstein and Bion, Figlio opposes the feeling of certainty to ‘knowledge’, arguing that while the former is based on an omnipotent or omniscient attitude towards the external world, the latter is a way of being informed by one’s experience of the world without necessarily removing doubt. Figlio’s theoretical account is followed by Nikolay Mintchev’s chapter on psychosocial methodologies for studying subjectivity empirically. Focusing specifically on the Kleinian and Lacanian schools of thought and the way they are used to theorize certainty, Mintchev argues that the theoretical foundations of the two schools lead to different interpretations—each with its own advantages and limitations—of culture, society and identity. Stephen Frosh’s chapter approaches the topic by emphasizing the experience of history and its disruptive effect on the subjectivity of certainty. It argues that historical phantasies about the origins of the subject’s identity—whether in psychoanalytic case studies, religious narratives or diasporic tales about belonging and alienation—haunt the subject much like the Freudian shadow of the object does. They are ‘bewilderments’ which undermine the certainties of the present and can thereby create fractured, ambivalent experiences of who one is. The two chapters that follow by M. Fakhry Davids and R. D. Hinshelwood offer a unique clinical perspective into the ways in which the feeling of certainty can underpin an unconscious racial and racist subjectivity. Davids argues that the feeling of certainty is an integral part of an internal, usually unconscious, organization of phantasies about ‘what they are like’. Building his argument on two case studies—one drawn from his own clinical practice, and the other based on the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the subsequent inquiry about the handling of the case—Davids shows that racism and anti-racism often coincide within the same mind. He shows that even if 8 N. Mintchev and R.D. Hinshelwood people consciously hold anti-racist convictions, this anti-racism can at times be subordinated to the unconscious certainties of an internal organization of racial phantasies. Hinshelwood’s contribution is based on the premise that racism is both a collective and individual phenomenon, which in turn raises the question of how racism in the social can get inside the individual. Arguing that there is ‘a hook’ of internal mechanisms onto which social attitudes attach themselves, Hinshelwood presents clinical material of two different variants in which the subject can develop and hold a racist attitude. In the first instance, racism can develop spontaneously, in opposition to the subject’s previous (conscious) convictions. Hinshelwood illustrates this point with the case of a patient—a woman of Middle Eastern origin who had grown up in Britain—who was nearly drawn into a fundamentalist movement after being approached by a hardline religious cleric fighting a racist war. In the second case, a racist attitude is embedded into the psyche in a much more stable way. This is illustrated with a patient who grew up in a setting of institutional racism in Latin America, and whose social and economic privilege was reinforced by a racial hierarchy in her country of origin. Natalia Hernández Jiménez’s work gives an account of the social tensions within the Mexican-origin community in the USA. Drawing on interview data from her fieldwork in the USA, she shows that Mexican immigrants in that country perceive US law enforcement agents of Mexican origin as much harsher and stricter than agents of other ethnic backgrounds. According to her the perceived conflict between the two groups is derived not only from the circulation of stereotypes about border agents but also from a subjective feeling of certainty (one based on little ‘objective’ evidence) that these stereotypes are true. This, she argues, is closely linked to the specific taxonomy of race relations that is pre- dominant in the USA. The two chapters by Christina Wieland and Tamaki Noro explore the relationship between militarism and violence, on the one hand, and masculine identity, on the other. In her analysis of twentieth century fascism, Wieland argues that fascist hyper-masculine militarism is a response to an earlier social trauma brought about by a sense of national humiliation and widespread discontent. Drawing on W. R. Bion’s theory of containment she shows that the disruption of ‘basic’ or ‘ordinary’ certainty of Introduction: The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial... 9 identity can provoke a ‘super-certainty’ as a defence against the anxiety of failed containment. Similarly, Noro argues that during World War II, the sexual violence committed by Japanese soldiers was driven by the severe anxiety that was structurally embedded in the organization of Japanese military life. For her, the conflict between violent militarism towards enemy soldiers and the submissiveness towards internal authority within the Japanese military’s hierarchy created confusion and ambivalence about gender identity, which soldiers attempted to resolve through acts of sexual violence. Finally, the closing chapter by Barry Richards approaches the problem of neo-fascism with reference to a recent event—the murderous acts of Anders Breivik that took place in Norway in 2011. Richards provides an in-depth analysis of the manifesto that Breivik had written prior to his attacks, arguing that it betrays a deep-seated sense of fear and humiliation which coincides with narcissistic grandiosity constructed along lines of race and gender. He argues that although nationalism is often seen as fos- tering hostility towards others, some forms of non-violent nationalism can offer the stability and containment necessary to counter extremist views.

References

Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid times: Living in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U. (2009). World risk society and manufactured uncertainties. Iris, 1(2), 291–299. Burton, R. (2008). On being certain: Believing you are right even when you’re not. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Ferenczi, S. (1949). Confusion of the tongues between the adults and the child (The language of tenderness and of passion). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 225–230. Figlio, K. (2006). The absolute state of mind in society and the individual. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 11, 119–143. Main, R. (2006). Numinosity and terror: Jung’s psychological revision of Otto as an aid to engaging religious fundamentalism. In A. Casement & D. Tacey (Eds.), The idea of the numinous: Contemporary Jungian and psychoanalytic perspectives (pp. 153–170). New York: Routledge. 10 N. Mintchev and R.D. Hinshelwood

Mintchev, N. (in press). Object-relations and cultural narratives in the analysis of racism: Theorizing subjectivity after Klein and Lacan.Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Pinheiro, T., & Viana, D. (2011). Losing the certainty of self. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 71, 352–360. Sodré, I. (1994). Obsessional certainty versus obsessional doubt: From two to three. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 14, 379–392. Standing, G. (2014). The precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury. Stein, R. (2006). Fundamentalism, father and son, and vertical desire. The Psychoanalytic Review, 93, 201–229. Zinn, J. (2008). Social theories of risk and uncertainty. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Nikolay Mintchev is a research associate at the Institute for Global Prosper- ity, University College London, and Visiting Fellow at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, where he was previously Lecturer. He specializes in ethnic diversity, social transformation and psychosocial approaches to identity and difference.

R.D. Hinshelwood is Professor in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, and previously Clinical Director, The Cassel Hospital, London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He has authored A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1989) and other books and articles on Kleinian psychoanalysis. He has an interest in how psychoanalysis may contribute to social and political science. The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search for Truth

Karl Figlio

In the film Twelve Angry Men (1957), a young boy is standing trial for murder, and there is near consensus on the evidence of his guilt. One juror is not sure, and intrudes doubt into the certainty of the Jury. He is reviled for his doubt, but one by one, jurors come to share it until only one member remains with his certainty. A personal story of inconsolable discord between him and his son emerges. In anger and great emotional pain, he gradually accepts that his certainty in support of convicting the boy stands in for his wanting to punish his son: reality is falsified by an illusion with compulsive force.

There are so many people who made this book possible. The conference organizers—Matt Ffytche, Kevin Lu, Nikolay Mintchev, Mike Scott and Debbie Stewart, as always, backed up by Alison Evans, Fiona Gillies and May Andrews—chose The Feeling of Certainty from a paper of mine with that title. Bob Hinshelwood and Nikolay Mintchev had the idea that the conference contributions could become a book and with dedication and hard work fashioned it into a reality. And, of course, the speakers and the additional authors kindly and thoughtfully turned their minds to producing a fascinating text. I am grateful to them all.

K. Figlio (*) Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

In this paper, I argue that certainty is a feeling through which we believe and through which our experience becomes evidence. Typically our convictions are so inside our sense of empirical reality that they seem—with certainty—to come directly from it. And while that confusion of certainty with perceived reality can be productive, as persistence in science and mathematics, its unconscious aim is to unburden the individual or group of doubt by projection, which further obscures evidence, whether of the senses or reason. In this case, certainty not only misleads and changes the minds of others but forces a traduced reality upon others to the point of violent suppression.

Knowing and Feeling Certain

Certainty is neither an empirical finding nor a logical conclusion, but a state of mind—a state of mind that does not tolerate the complexity either of empirical investigation or of conceptual analysis. That is why I will speak of the feeling of certainty. The pronouncement of certainty is absolute, a position that can obtain only with the simultaneous projection of any grain of unease internal to the subject who claims it. Thus, the feeling of certainty occurs with projection, and projection, which can be easily detected, is strong evidence of it. The feeling of certainty is matched by the feeling of truth-seeking, both empirical and conceptual, and of scientific naturalism and investigation, in particular, of reality, of moral thinking and of aesthetic satisfaction. I will call the whole package ‘truth’ vs ‘anti-truth’. I take this emotional dimension of truth and anti-truth to be what Bion was getting at when he proposed K/−K (knowledge and anti-knowledge) as passionate links, along with L/−L (love and anti-love) and H/−H (hate and anti-hate). To know the object is a passionate getting to know it, a relationship between subject and object, and the same applies to links in logical sequences.1 The feeling of certainty is fundamentally anti-scientific. It is a powerful force, which pulls against the knowing represented by science and even more intensely against the engagement with the irrational unconscious, pursued by psychoanalysis.2 It obstructs inquiry and sets up false problems The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search... 13 that cannot be resolved. The process through which the feeling of certainty asserts itself is projection. For the purposes of this paper, I will use ‘projection’ to encompass all projective processes, adding clarification where necessary. For Freud, projection is an action that establishes the difference between internal and external domains 1915a( , pp. 134–136). In establishing a difference between internal and external, it establishes a repository into which the internal world can unburden itself, and also an externality—an objectivity through which external reality can be investigated while maintaining the passionate links with the internal world, which animate the engagement. We often speak of feeling certain, as a way of buttressing a belief in clear thinking and clear evidence. Ludwig Wittgenstein (somewhere) spoke of a visitor, who, having been invited in and taken to the back garden sees two gentlemen sitting next to a tree, each pointing at it and authoritatively declaring, ‘that is a tree’. Don’t mind them, he reassures his bemused guest, they are just philosophers. Elsewhere (1969/1975), he speaks of a philosopher (G. E. Moore), who holds up his hand and states categorically ‘this is my hand’ (e.g., pars 1–3, 13, 21–23, 32, 40). Both are statements of certainty, and Wittgenstein seems to be having a bit of fun with them and with the philosophical current that aims to reduce knowledge to statements of this sort. There is a serious issue here. For Wittgenstein, the claim of certainty can seem ridiculous. We would be better off looking at how we learn to engage with the world so that it is deeply inside the way we act and think. Wittgenstein distinguishes between belief or conviction and knowledge, between feelings or states of mind and truth, holding that knowledge is independent of conviction. For him, the assertion ‘I know …’ can con- fuse certainty and knowing, which are two, different, ways of exempting oneself from doubt (1969/1975, pars. 88, 160–2, 337, 375). To be certain is a state of mind in which one cannot accept doubt; to know is to be informed by the outside world, overcoming doubt without removing it. It occurs only inside a ‘language game’ that is adopted with trust and with the acceptance of some parameters as given (par 150, 508, 509). It is inductive, in that there must be a position outside one’s current experience, against which one could be mistaken and from which one could learn. It involves being surer after there is evidence than before: otherwise 14 K. Figlio it is belief (par. 245). The assertion, ‘I know …’ as an expression of certainty, lies outside such a language game. It is a misuse of ‘I know’ if one says, for example, ‘I know I have two hands’ or ‘I know my name is X’, because they are aspects of one’s very experience of being oneself. ‘Knowledge and certainty belong to different “categories”’ (par. 308). But, although conviction should not be confused with knowing, perhaps an emotional force does accompany a logical, empirical or practical process. Indeed, it may use these processes to represent it. Scientists and mathematicians do speak of elegant solutions. Bion puts ‘K’, knowing the object, with the passionate links, ‘L’ and ‘H’, loving and hating the object. Can there be a feeling or state of mind that carries the force of knowledge? Maybe, like K, there is an experience of knowing, regardless of reinforcement or distortion by other emotions. Let us continue with the question, whether emotion is associated with knowing, from a psychoanalytic angle. Wittgenstein gives us a clue.

‘I know’ has a primitive meaning similar to and related to ‘I see’ (‘wissen’, ‘videre’)…‘I know’ is supposed to express a relation, not between me and the sense of a proposition (like ‘I believe’) but between me and a fact. So that the ‘fact’ is taken into my consciousness…This would give us a picture of knowing as the perception of an outer event through visual rays which project it as it is into the eye and the consciousness. Only then the question arises whether one can be certain of this projection. And this picture shows the ‘representation’ that we make of knowledge, but not what in essence grounds it. (1969/1975, par. 90; translation slightly altered)

What essentially grounds a representation is an empirical matter, or a theoretical supposition, that can be tied to an empirical inquiry. There are two components to it: (1) there are facts; that is, things that can be discovered, so that one is, in Wittgenstein’s terms, more sure after the evidence than before; (2) the mental representation—the way things come to us—takes the form of responsiveness to the outside or internal worlds, rather than domination of it. It is more than a matter of representation, in the sense of a picture of nature in the mind: it is an attitude or approach to the world; it is also an attitude or approach to thinking. To be open to the world and to be open to thinking go together. Perhaps Wittgenstein was trying to distinguish what Bion called K from what he called L and The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search... 15

H: knowing from conviction or certainty or, more generally, from particular emotional attitudes. In Bion’s terms, certainty would be a form of arrogance, perhaps associated with –K, while an empirical attitude would be a form of K. Both arrogance and certainty rest on a basic projective process—a displacement from inside the subject into the object. I distinguish projection, not from introjection, but from assimilation. Introjection can place the object into an internal world, but at a distance from the ego, in an internal, projective relationship to it. Assimilation, by contrast, is what Freud meant by identification with the ego, when he said that the ego is the accumulation of identifications with lost objects 1923( , p. 29). This definition is a scientific statement, in that we can do a lot of work with it and it implies a reality—an inner reality in this case—that is beyond our immediate, empirical reach. But we can build a model of what we take to be a reality. In so doing, we are following Freud, who spoke of models as virtual realities, in line with the scientific attitude of the Vienna of his time (see Janik and Toulmin 1973/1996 for a discussion of models as the core of scientific thinking in Vienna).

Projection—The Model of Certainty

Freud knew the crisply drawn models of nineteenth-century physics, which had been summarized in Maxwell’s Matter and motion and which figured in one of his dreams 1900( , pp. 455–459). Maxwell’s book is a compendium of abstractions. It embodies the pinnacle of a representation of nature seen from any angle, any place: a universe viewed by a mobile observer who is so much everywhere and anywhere, as to be nowhere in particular; and as a result, to disappear, leaving a depiction of nature as it is, not in relation to any observer. Maxwell’s book does not refer to any actual object or to any empirical reality. It does, however, present mathematical processes that allow one to transform, in wholly abstract circumstances, say, a given amount of energy in one form—say, motion—into an equivalent in another form, say, heat. Similarly, Freud’s models of the psyche were idealized and abstracted descriptions of a psychological process—it did the work of a 16 K. Figlio model. Freud thought it was verifiable, a position confirmed by later investigators (Hinshelwood 2013).3 Models aim to represent natural processes in their outcomes, but not as equivalents to the processes themselves. They are imaginations that allow an entrée into further investigation by assuming some form of similarity to the natural world, but with knowable and manipulable parameters. As Laplanche (1989, pp. 17–88) has pointed out, Freud’s use of the reflex arc as a model of the psyche as a system for discharging the excitation of sensory input through muscular movement as an output, flies in the face of what is—and was in Freud’s time—known about the reflex arc. Similarly, the idea that the ego and the perceptual conscious system sit on top of the id in his structural model (as in the diagram in The ego and the id, 1923, p. 24), the way the cortical layer of the brain sits on top of the lower centres, is wrong. It would imply that sensory input impinges on the cortex of the brain, as, in the structural model, it impinges on the ego and perceptual consciousness; when in fact, sensory input is carried to lower receiving centres first, and only later reaches the cortex. The reflex model is inadequate with respect to physiology—no one would have known that better than Freud. But who has not experienced the relaxation of psychological tension in the smooth performance of physical activity that has become habitual, carried out by the nervous system without conscious direction? Who has not, therefore, experienced a lowering of psychological energy through nervous activity that approxi- mates to a reflex discharge? The model is wrong as a physiological model, but not necessarily as a psychological model. If there is no mechanism for assimilating thoughts, they build up just as excitation, in Freud’s economic model, builds up and seeks discharge. They are discharged through a projective process, as actions equivalent to muscular action, sometimes actually making use of muscular activity. In Bion’s (1962a) view, the model for the assimilation of thoughts— the failure of which led to an accretion and to discharge in a reflex-like mechanism—is digestion. The model of the thinking apparatus is the digestive system, in which failures of digestion lead to an accretion of thoughts. Alpha-functioning is a form of digestion and beta-functioning, a failure of digestion, which leads to evacuation. This model is clearly a fiction. Bion said it was inadequate, but then proceeded to use it. In this The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search... 17 case, it wasn’t that the model was wrong in physiological terms—it was too general to be right or wrong—but that it could not provide a model for investigating psychoanalytic objects. So why did he use it anyway? I think he used it because it meshed well with Freud’s equally wrong reflex arc model (cf. Bion’s ‘grid’, which is based on Freud’s Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning, 1911b). The digestion/reflex model links up with alpha- and beta-functioning and with Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions to form Bion’s theory of thinking (Klein 1946/1952; Bion 1962b). That theory has to be concretized in its application to any particular person or any particular moment. Bion highlights three features of psychoanalytic theorizing: (1) psychoanalytic theories are, compared with physical theories, concrete—they do not, therefore, lend themselves to high levels of abstraction and manipulation, as is the case in mathematical physics; (2) they have continuously to be recast into the patient’s own models of the then re-abstracted and compared with the analyst’s models; (3) they nonetheless should allow the same sort of testing against key processes as would be expected of any other sort of theory. Bion thinks that psychoanalytic work could be based on no more than six theories (he does not say which). It would be better to retain a small number and deploy a range of models to meet individual needs, rather than to expand the number of theories and lose any basis for systematic investigation (1962a, p. 88). I would count the theory of super-ego formation in ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917) as among major theories that we could model and use for investigation. And along with the forms of identification, I would include Eugenio Gaddini’s (1969) imitation and Rosenfeld’s (1987, pp. 105–132) ‘destructive narcissistic organization’. My list would, therefore, include: the Oedipus complex, projective and introjective identification, paranoid-schizoid/depressive functioning, imitation and destructive narcissistic organization. In this paper, I am concerned with projection. In the model of projection, the subject displaces part of itself into the object, in order to unburden itself, but inside the object it gets to know itself as part of the object. It struggles to know its internal reality by projection and identifying with the internal world of the object. The core internal reality is the mystery of coming into existence and the nature of that existence. By projection, it 18 K. Figlio becomes an experience through casting it into an ‘observed reality’. This reality is the primal, oedipal scene. Thus, for Freud one dimension of the oedipal model was the phantasy of being present at one’s own conception and, in replacing father in relation to mother, conceiving oneself (Freud 1910, p. 173). The core phantasy, the core model of psychoanalytic thinking, is as workable, yet as irrational, as π or the imaginary number, i. We project into an imaginary—even if ‘observed’—intercourse: specifically, parental intercourse. This ‘projective observation’ is the unconscious phantasy of observing our creation, an observation that is as unobservable and as essential to psychoanalytic understanding as the number i is to physics. It can never be empirically confirmed by observation. It is a model, a product of imagination and thinking, which nonetheless aims to correspond with reality by matching a putative unconscious phantasy, or maybe simply by doing work by making many other psychic phenomena more comprehensible. We can approach one of these psychic phenomena—the feeling of certainty—by considering Bion’s (1957/1967) analysis of Oedipus’ dilemma in the Oedipus complex. Bion says that Oedipus’ problem was not the crime of incest, but the arrogance of pursuing the truth no matter what the cost. Oedipus would find and punish the man who could—who, we would say, unconsciously believed he could—be his own father. He believed it was someone out there, because he could not fathom or bear an inner reality. He confused his inner reality with the easy job of finding the culprit who killed his father and slept with his mother. The inner reality is incomprehensible; the projected form is seemingly comprehensible as an apparently observable occurrence—a crime in the external world. It goes unnoticed that the actually observable reality is infused with an omnipotent phantasy.4 Oedipus is certain that a crime has been committed by someone. His unconscious phantasy had become a juridical offence, an abhorrent criminal act, from which men keep their distance. Oedipus banished himself. How, Bion implicitly wonders, is Oedipus different from the psychoanalyst who also claims virtuously to pursue the truth at any cost? The difference lies in the psychoanalyst’s acceptance that he/she could very well be mad, but has a responsibility to help someone who promotes the The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search... 19 idea that the analyst is mad and to be open both to its possible accuracy and to the likelihood that it is a delusion on the part of the patient. The analyst, ideally, persists in K.

Struggling for Objectivity

Freud spoke of the confusion that arose when objectivity is bent towards subjectivity by projection. ‘Now you’ll think I mean to say something insulting, but really I’ve no such intention’. We realize that this is a repudiation, by projection, of an idea that has just come up (1925, p. 235). Projection undermines the solidity of a perceived external world with phantasy—in the extreme, with delusion. And as Freud pointed out,

The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the first. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality- testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there. (1925, pp. 237–238; Freud’s emphasis)

For Bion, the struggle for objectivity is at the heart of any attempt to ground a judgment on evidence and to distinguish this evidence from a phantasy projected into it. This struggle besets anyone aiming to establish a reality based on evidence, differentiated from a delusional satisfaction that so easily replaces such a reality along with the frustration that bur- dens the perennial attempt to establish and embed it. The scientist, philosopher and psychoanalyst struggle with a thought disorder along with the psychotic patient. We all struggle to move this thought disorder towards recognition of an empirical—uncertain—reality (Bion 1962a, p. 47, 48, 63, 66).

The question ‘How can x know anything?’ expresses a feeling; it appears to be painful and to inhere in the emotional experience that I represented by xKy [x is getting to know y]. The difficulties of the patient suffering from a 20 K. Figlio

‘disorder of thought’ are similar to those that beset scientists, and others concerned with the establishment of facts, in that they arise through the failure to ascertain facts and so involve investigation of the nature of the failure…Psychoanalysis of that failure is impossible without understanding the problem of the philosopher of science and conversely his problem is incompletely stated without the aid of psychoanalytic experience of disor- ders of thought. (p. 66)

A delusional reality is so much more quickly and pleasurably achieved. In order to minimize the temptation of delusion, with the pleasure in certainty that it brings, one can either acknowledge it and struggle against the certainty that accompanies it, or squash it by making oneself, the object and the link between them inanimate. For Bion, ‘The conviction that a scientific outlook prevails in the relationship xKy is more easily maintained if y is inanimate and if x can be made to seem to approximate to the inanimate, for example x uses a machine’ (1962a, p. 47; on making nature inanimate, Figlio 2000, pp. 73–101). But there is a problem with this objective knowing. ‘Doubts about the capacity to know anything … spring from an inescapable awareness that the situation represented by these abstract terms xKy is identical with xLy [x is loving y] or xHy [x is hating y]. That is to say that in proportion as inanimate machinery is introduced to displace the living element, L, H or K have ceased to exist …’ (p. 66). So, if the links that animate curiosity, knowing and investigating, are deadened, the universe of intelligible reality vanishes, as it does for the psychotic (as it did for Schreber; Freud 1911a; cf. Steiner 2011). Engagement with frustration or its evasion lies at the heart of psychoanalytic investigation. For Bion, ‘An emotional experience that is felt to be painful may initiate an attempt either to evade or to modify the pain according to the capacity of the personality to tolerate frustration (1962a, p. 48) [;] not to represent [it] but to … make it appear to be a fulfilment rather than a striving for fulfilment’ (p. 49). And nothing satisfies the evasion of frustration more than the fulfilment offered by certainty. Certainty and omniscience go together (I am not discriminating between omniscience and omnipotence). Omniscience is used as a defence against frustration and learning by experience; that is, the ‘mating of a pre- conception with a frustration’ (Bion 1962b, p. 111). It ‘substitutes for the The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search... 21 discrimination between true and false a dictatorial affirmation that one thing is morally right and the other wrong. The assumption of omniscience that denies reality ensures that the morality thus engendered is a function of psychosis’ (p. 114). Moreover, following Bion’s line of thinking that getting to know the object is a passionate linking, dissipated by making the link inanimate, we can add that certainty is a feeling and that the feeling of certainty involves the destruction of the animate object, the animate subject and the animate link (see also, Figlio 2006). I think this formulation of certainty also approaches Wittgenstein’s criticism of Moore’s assertion of certainty (this is my hand), which overrides the recognition of the animate link of hand, and body (Wittgenstein 1969/1975). Let us return to Oedipus and his arrogant—delusional—state. He was projecting an internal unease about something he knew, but did not know; wished, but did not acknowledge. In the process he transformed the unfathomable unconscious into a disowned, but conceivable and potentially observable account of a crime. Projection makes a link with external events and creates a bridge to the unconscious. But it is also a delusion, in that it creates the conviction that one has mastered an inner reality: the delusional reality of creating himself, as a basic phantasy of omnipotence. We need the concept of projection to capture this idea of comprehending as both engaging with reality with the tools at hand and of the delusion of mastery (cf. Malancharuvil 2004 for an analysis of investigative vs defensive use of projective processes, from a more cogni- tive angle). I take it to be a psychoanalytic postulate: we need it and understand a lot once we have it in place. An oedipal feeling of certainty can erupt in the clinical setting. An interpretation can, for example, go in one of two directions: in one, the interpretation reduces anxiety and kindles interest, which supports the belief in its accuracy. This is a version of Freud’s model of the testability in psychoanalysis, in which the tally between interpretation and truth eliminates the symptom; in the other direction, an interpretation provokes a repudiation. The latter is interesting, because the patient experiences the interpretation as a projection on the part of the analyst. The patient might agree with the interpretation, but believe that analyst has spoken accurately about him/herself. If this belief is a delusion, the speaking of the 22 K. Figlio interpretation is not heard as a communication, but as a projection. Curiously, this view shows an unconscious understanding of psychoanalysis, in believing (of the analyst) that projection can either unburden the psyche of unconscious thinking and feeling or aim to communicate with the object. The analyst might, reciprocally and with a feeling of certainty, insist on the interpretation and follow Oedipus into nailing the patient as the culprit and, as happened to Oedipus, see the exchange of projections escalate. But, though unsettled by the patient’s repudiation, the analyst might, instead of re-projecting, tolerate the patient’s projection with its attendant ‘discovery’ of the analyst’s madness and core unease and aim to garner the patient’s cooperation with further analysis. The more precise the interpretation, the more thinking is needed; the more thinking, the more frustrating it becomes, and the more powerful the contradiction between further evasion by both patient and analyst, on the one hand, and bearing the unease, on the other (Money-Kyrle 1956; Steiner [1993, pp. 131–146] proposes ‘analyst centred’ interpretations to avoid the resistance to ‘patient centred’ interpretations, which can be experienced as projections into the patient).

Thinking vs Projection in Society

The dilemma of projection also occurs in a society, culture or nation. One might dispute this view by saying that, while projection might fit the clinical case, there is no psyche in the social case to experience the deep unease, or to receive and tolerate a projection, or to refuse and re-project it. I think such a restriction is misleading. I am proposing that we work with a model based on projection in both cases. In doing so, we align psychoanalysis with its kindred scientific mentality. We avoid speaking of essences, stick with the phenomena and the links between them and generate fruitful models. In the clinical process, we can discern elemental features of such a model. In the case above, for example, the analyst who relinquishes a feeling of certainty and allows that he/she might be mad is available for discovering that the escalation of projections has been trun- cated. Such a truncation would confirm the projection model, whether in an individual or (even more forcefully) in a society, in which group processes intensify splitting and projection. The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search... 23

Projection manages the distance between ego and the unconscious, with its complexity, irrationality and ‘unease’ (Unbehagen), through plac- ing it in an other. In this distancing relationship to the other, the ego can either explore reality or maintain a delusion. The former gives rise to observation and experiment; the latter gives rise to certainty. Once we recognize projection, whether in a society or an individual, we can look for evidence either of an analytical attitude or of certainty; of relating either to a tolerable level of reality or to a delusion. The projection model has a corollary: it includes the unease mentioned above—perhaps a catastrophe—at the core of the individual and of a society, which impels the projection. Freud (1930) called it an Unbehagen in der Kultur (an unease in culture, translated as Civilization and its discontents in the Standard edition). It was not just a conflict between libido and civilization based on repression of libido: the unease arose with the inner workings of the death drive and of the consequent aggression that had to be expressed, for the individual to survive, but also to be returned to the aggressor, for the society to survive. So here is my working model in brief. At the core is unease—a catastrophe, perhaps an implosion, a collapse of identity—managed by projective processes. We can track the vicissitudes of these processes: not the state of mind, but the empirical or delusional processes that follow it. They can, in the latter case, escalate into unlimited violence in order to preserve a feeling of certainty, secured by projection. Relationships between factions in society or between societies show the same urge towards and the projective processes as in the individual or between individuals. In both cases, the capacity to receive projections and maintain an analytical attitude might succeed, or might give way to re-projection and escalating projective loops (On difference and the violence that it provokes as a delusion, see Davids 2011; Figlio 2012; Jacoby 2011). Science in its social as well as epistemological function is a bulwark against the delusion of certainty. It has been tarred with the brush of certainty by projection from fundamentalists, such as adherents of intelligent design, who indulge in it themselves (I have called a conviction of certainty an ‘absolute state of mind’; Figlio 2006). They assume a certainty of God’s intentions. They project an unconscious, omnipotent phantasy into a conscious rendering of God and literal texts, with which they identify. Science neither assumes nor accepts such an identification 24 K. Figlio in its understanding of nature or even of mathematics. But if we look for the grain of truth into which fundamentalists project an omnipotent phantasy, we could discern—for example, in the charge of ‘playing God’—that science does attack its objects and therefore invites omnipotent phantasies, built on an unconscious destructiveness and triumphalism. With such a phantasy exacerbated by the relentless pursuit of ever deeper knowledge, science does seem to enact Oedipus’ arrogance. In addition, given that objects within scientific naturalism are inanimate, science aims, in line with Bion’s associating certainty with the destruction of animate links (1962a, p. 47), for certainty. But here is the difference between science and fundamentalism: Science aims for coherence, both cognitively and aesthetically; for congenial agreement among participants; for satisfaction with a job well-done, rather than the pleasure of phantasy; for beneficial outcomes; and science is reparative rather than triumphal and aggressive (I have explored this theme extensively in Figlio 2000). Moreover, the intractability of nature, the difficulty in solving equations in line with natural phenomena, the public forum of science (which opens ideas and findings to scrutiny and to a democracy of public scientific advocacy), and the open-endedness of research, transform the conviction of certainty, arising from an illusory identification with the mind of God or the design of nature, into a conversation among interlocutors who aim to agree and to ground their agreement in evidence. One can cast this ‘epistemological social relationship’ in several forms. Richard Rorty (1987) thinks of science, not primarily as a unique type of enquiry, but as an exemplar of democracy: a quest for a community based on ‘free and open encounters’ (pp. 42–43). Hannah Arendt conceives of thinking itself as an internal conversation, in which rationality is a process of congeniality in seeking agreement, and seeking discord is irrational (Arendt 1978; on Freud and internal conversation, see Rorty 1984). In psychoanalytic terms, we might formulate the scientific attitude in terms of the mitigation of the relationship between the super-ego and the ego, giving authority to the ego and its anchoring in reality, as opposed to domination by a savage super-ego (Britton 2003, pp. 71–144; Reddish 2014). Identification with this super-ego salves the ego, but at the cost of projecting it and thrashing it in an other individual or group. Similarly, The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search... 25

Davids (2011) proposes a racial internal object, with which the ego can instantly identify when insecure and which endows the ego with omnipotent superiority over the object into which the insecurity is projected. In more general terms, science has, especially in the modern period, gradually developed fields for observation; that is, socially reinforced communities, institutions and practices in which to formulate questions within circumscribed domains, so that they can be conceptualized in naturalistic terms, modelled and observed. I can only indicate briefly what I mean by an observational field as a historical development. In ‘Theories of perception and the physiology of mind in the eighteenth century’ (1975), I looked at the circumscribing of the source of anima- tion and thinking within an observational field mapped onto the brain, thereby allowing the beginnings of brain research. Brain research could take form through a subtle movement from theological and philosophical certainties, for example, of the nature of the soul, towards an uncertain engagement with biological matter, in a search for the roots of animate and sentient phenomena. In ‘What is an accident?’ (1985), I sought to understand the setting within which something could simply happen, as opposed to being produced by animate forces. Although we feel more certain that we understand animate forces because we project ourselves into them, science can only deal with accidents, in the sense of ‘things happen’ rather than with delusions caused by projection (on an empiri- cism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which embraced sentient, animate and inanimate phenomena, see Figlio 2007; Kolakowski 1968). As Hume argued, we attribute causality to regular sequences of events in nature, but causality is not observable: it is a belief, an imposi- tion of our own feeling of certainty, not a finding of science. It is, therefore, vulnerable to illusion and phantasy, which has to be constrained by the epistemological social relations of science (on belief and illusion, see Britton 1998, pp. 8–18).

Conclusion

To restate my original claim: certainty is a state of mind; there is a feeling of certainty. While it can be benign as the experience or the force of evidence of the senses or of reason, it often becomes an absolute state of 26 K. Figlio mind (Figlio 2006), a form of arrogance (Bion 1957/1967), an omnipotent state of mind. It can only come into being with projection, which eliminates internal complexity. The feeling of certainty is the experiential correlate of projection. Internal complexity is an unconscious ‘unease’, a state of the internal world, which may take various conscious forms, such as annoyance with disagreement, frustration, guilt, paranoid anxiety— any derivatives of libido or aggression, such as Freud explored in Civilization and its discontents (1930). The feeling of certainty is compelling, and it can be observed in both individuals and society: if anything, more easily in society, where group dynamics tend towards division and projection between factions. Our mainstay against it is science, with the ‘epistemological social relations’ that create, maintain and protect naturalism. If we ask for evidence of this internal world, we will see it in the processes and outcomes of projection: between internal objects in the individual, which are experienced as internal divisions among internal figures; between individuals, experienced as the carrying by another of a feeling or thought or attitude, which can be traced back to the ‘projector’; between societies, evidenced as the consolidation of identity at the cost of another group; within societies, seen in a similar consolidation of identity between factions.

Notes

1. Kant conceived of a moral law that garnered authority from the very fact of its lawfulness. The idea that this sort of immediate authority of rationality could—that the super-ego could—be motivated, could be passionate, could be loving, has been explored by Velleman (2006). 2. By irrationality, I don’t mean ‘bizarre’, as in a strange symptom: I mean something more like the root meaning of irrational; one cannot make a ratio of it. 2/4 works, but 2/3 does not: it creates the infinitely extending 0.666666. Or, in the physical world, the value of π, the ratio of the cir- cumference to the diameter of a circle, which turns up in countless equations that describe the world, equals 3.14159265359 and on for ever. Add to these irrationalities, what we mean by the imaginary number, i = the The Mentality of Conviction: Feeling Certain and the Search... 27

square root of −1 or any number multiplied by it. A bit like π, it enters into many formulae that describe the real world, and it will drive you nuts trying to understand it. Irrationality drives you nuts. Apart from its derivatives and defences, psychoanalysis cannot describe the unconscious. What Freud said, and it is implied in all psychoanalysis, is that we experience the unconscious as projection, as if it were conscious— we project it and act towards it as if it were like consciousness. In consciousness we can take action against what threatens us, now from the outside, and can disregard the threat that came from the unconscious (1915c, p. 184). 3. For example, Freud used the conservation of energy, according to which energy could be transformed but neither created nor destroyed, in his model of neuronal functioning; and this abstract process provided a model of the psychological processes of displacement, according to which one thought replaced another, as the affect—the energy of a thought—was transferred from one thought to another, leading to repression of the original thought: a thought remained conscious only while it was charged with energy (1915b). 4. Steiner (2011) develops Bion’s (1961, p. 149) notion of the numbing feeling of reality, in which a compelling emphasis on external reality defends against an awareness of internal reality and the fear of breakdown that it entails.

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Karl Figlio was the founding director of the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, now the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, and is now Professor Emeritus in the Department. He is a registrant of the British Psychoanalytic Council, Senior Member of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association and Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society. His research interests include the psychoanalysis of science, of masculinity and of culture, and especially of remembering and reparation. What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically? Understanding the Feeling of Certainty Through Psychoanalysis and Ethnography

Nikolay Mintchev

This article explores some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that arise in the empirical study of subjectivity in general and the subjectivity of certainty in particular. In using the term ‘subjectivity’, I follow the anthropologist and social theorist Sherry Ortner who defines the concept as ‘the ensemble of modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate acting subjects’, and also ‘the cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke those modes of affect, thought and so on’ (Ortner 2005: 31). Subjectivity, according to this definition, is inherently tied to agency insofar as it ‘animate[s] acting subjects’. Following Laura Ahearn and Lois McNay, I take the concept of agency to mean people’s ‘socio-culturally mediated capacity to act’ (Ahearn 2001: 112), as well as their ‘capabilities for independent reflection and action such that their response, when confronted with difference and paradox, may involve accommodation or adaptation, as much as denial’ (McNay 2000: 3).

N. Mintchev (*) Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, London, UK

Social theorists often agree that both subjectivity and agency are structured by complex power relations, paradoxes and contradictory discourses and/or ideologies. Foucault’s (1977) notion of ‘subjectivation’—the process in and through which people become subjects—has been particularly influ- ential in social theory and become a paradigmatic term used to denote the simultaneously constraining and enabling effects of power (Butler1997 : chap. 3). Yet to say that power, in all of its fragmentation and heterogeneity, is both constraining and enabling, negative and positive, or in a dialectical relationship with agency, is not an explanation but a methodological truism. It is an abstract metaphysical claim that provides a framework for conceptualizing power, subjectivity and agency in concrete contexts, but which, when taken on its own, is far too abstract to explain anything in sufficient depth (see Moore2011 : 64, 73). Power inevitably grabs hold of the subject’s psyche and body in one way or another, and ‘cultural and social formations’ always shape thought, affect and identity. However, the extent to which power succeeds, the ways in which it is experienced as enabling or constraining and the kind of purchase that representations hold among subjects are all issues that exceed theoretical abstraction and require a thick historical and empirical analysis. In his later work, Foucault himself moved towards this direction by proposing a more open and complex theory of power that allowed the subject to assume various postures vis-à-vis discourses or ethical rules. He consequently introduced the term ‘mode of subjectivation’, which he defined as ‘the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice’ (Foucault 1984: 27). But to study subjectivity empirically, one must also have a theory of the subject and its relationship to society. This is where psychoanalysis becomes indispensible as the dynamic study of psychological experience par excellence. Psychoanalytic theory offers a rigorous account of what the subject is and how it develops. However, as Henrietta Moore (2007) points out, one difficulty in psychoanalysis that is often overlooked is that each school of thought is grounded in its own set of ‘pre-theoretical assumptions’. In psychoanalysis, according to her,

the definition of…[the unconscious] and the characterization of the associated processes of the development of mental structures, vary depending on the kind of pre-theoretical assumptions about what constitutes the defining What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically?... 33

characteristics of being human. Are we fundamentally alienated in language, are we basically object-seeking, are we propelled by instincts? The answers to these questions result in changes in the topography of mind, in reconceptu- alizations of the relationship between subjects and objects. (2007: 63)

Building upon Moore’s observation, this chapter examines two approaches to the subjectivity of certainty, each with its own pre-theoretical assumptions. The first approach is based on the work of Melanie Klein, the second on the work of Jacques Lacan. While the former approach is based on the non-verbal ‘object-relations’ as the building blocks of inter- and intra-psychic processes, the latter focuses on language and the symbolic. One of the paradoxes of psychoanalysis is that theories as different as those of Klein and Lacan can both ‘work’ in terms of describing psychic functioning accurately and offering a basis for successful clinical treatment (Mintchev 2015). The question, then, is not whether one theory is right and another wrong, but rather what it is that each theory allows us to do. What theoretical tools does each school offer to help us understand subjectivity? How can these tools be used to study the subjective experience of certainty empirically in concrete social/cultural contexts?

Melanie Klein and the Feeling of Certainty

The Kleinian theory of the subject is based on the experience of concrete objects and object-relations, or what in Kleinian language is known as unconscious phantasy. Klein, in contrast to Freud, argued that a rudimentary ego exists from birth. This ego, she claimed, is an ensemble of bits or part-objects that are bound to the life and death drives and hence experienced, respectively, as bad and good objects. For her, furthermore, object-relating exists from birth, firstly vis-à-vis the mother’s breast and later in relation to other objects in the external world. Child development in this framework is defined not through the Freudian concept of ‘stages’, but in terms of ‘positions’—modes of mental functioning characterized by specific forms of object-relating both at the inter-psychic and intrapsychic levels (Klein 1935, 1946). 34 N. Mintchev

There are two different positions that Klein talks about. These have been explained and elaborated by a number of other authors (e.g., Hinshelwood 1991; Segal 1988), and so I will only summarize them briefly here. The first is the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, which character- izes the period from birth to six months. Here, mental functioning is dominated by splitting, whereby the life and death drives are severed from one another, as are the good and bad aspects of objects that the drives relate to. As a result of the splitting, there is no ambivalence at this position, only extreme forms of good and bad experiences—envy, hatred, rage and fear of annihilation, as well as gratitude, love and satisfaction. What is more, the boundary between subject and object in paranoid- schizoid functioning is permeable and rudimentary, leading to a feeling of omnipotence and confusion between the ego and the object. As I explain shortly, this is directly linked to the splitting of the instincts and the absence of ambivalence. With the onset of the second, ‘depressive’ position at about six months of age, the drives begin to fuse into one another. While in the paranoid- schizoid position the good breast and the bad breast are experienced as different, unrelated entities, in depressive functioning the breast/object is perceived as a single entity containing good and bad elements. This ambivalence towards the object has two important consequences. Firstly, it establishes a stable boundary between the ego and the object. This is because, as Freud (1915, 1925) argued, the life instinct has a propensity to bring the object closer to the ego and to incorporate it into the ego, to turn the two into one. The death instinct, in contrast, is compelled to cut off the object from the ego and expel it as far as possible. Without the balance of good and bad aspects unified into one, the object will be either fully introjected so that the boundary dissolves and differentiation is no longer there, or it will be fully expelled so that it bears no relation to the ego. In both cases the perception of the object is lost. The only way out of these two scenarios is to maintain a conflict of ambivalence where the two tendencies of introjection and expulsion exist simultaneously side by side: it is only ambivalence, as Ferenczi puts it, that ‘leads to acceptance of the existence of things’ (1926: 317). Secondly, the depressive position transforms the structure of anxiety from a paranoid one (based on fear that the infant’s own aggression will provoke retaliation from the bad What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically?... 35 breast/object) to a depressive one (derived from fear that the aggression towards the bad aspects of the object will damage the good aspects). This is important because strong depressive anxiety and guilt can trigger splitting as a defence mechanism and return the subject to the paranoid- schizoid position. Klein’s entire theoretical and clinical edifice is based on these paranoid- schizoid and depressive types of object-relating. One of the main criti- cisms against Klein, however, is that while her theory of the subject provides a rich account of pre-verbal and non-verbal aspects of subjectivity, it gives little weight to language and culture (Frosh 1989: 141–142; Laplanche 1993: 124–125; Likierman 2001: 6). While it is important to acknowledge the importance of language and cultural meaning, this should not be used as an occasion to dismiss the Kleinian paradigm. Instead, we should see the latter as originating from a different starting point than symbolically oriented approaches and as achieving a different result, namely, an account of non-verbal processes, phantasies and relations, which all too often are ignored in psychosocial inquiry. How then do we make sense of certainty within the Kleinian framework? What are the object-relations and psychic mechanisms that constitute this feeling? What are the social and ideological conditions that can facilitate the subjective feeling of certainty? Karl Figlio’s (2006) work on ‘the absolute state of mind’ offers a robust Kleinian description of how certainty works psychologically (see also Figlio, this volume). Following Wittgenstein (1969), Figlio distinguishes between knowledge and certainty, both of which are antithetical to doubt. Knowledge, he claims, is based on perception of the outside world, and also on trust in one’s own senses. Such a position is inductive—it presupposes that ‘there must be a position outside one’s current experience, against which one could be mistaken and from which one could learn’ (Figlio 2006: 124). Certainty, in contrast, is primarily libidinal and fundamentally narcissistic—it begins with narcissistic polarization in which ‘the self is raised beyond doubt, or denigrated into valueless by the superiority of narcissism’ (Ibid.: 126). Relations to people, objects and ideas also follow this pattern in which they are either experienced as identical to the self or as separated by an irreparable schism. The feeling of certainty eradicates nuance, contemplation, ambivalence and doubt. 36 N. Mintchev

Within Klein’s schemes of paranoid-schizoid and depressive functioning, the experience of certainty falls into the former. In fact, as Figlio points out, certainty is a paranoid-schizoid defence against depressive anxiety—one that prevents the ego from dealing with the possibility that the object is not what the subject perceives it to be. This threat of loss— the possibility that one is wrong, essentially—is countered by a manic defence in the form of omnipotence.

It seems clear that the retreat from the emotion of knowing into certainty is paranoid-schizoid in character. Since paranoid-schizoid processes defend against depressive anxiety, the anxiety of having damaged and lost one’s good internal object. In the paranoid-schizoid position, in which the object is the object of phantasy, not perception, the depressive anxiety of loss of object is replaced by persecutory anxiety of loss of self, perhaps organized as a manic defense…The grandiosity of certainty, which then secures the self, persecutes, denigrates and discards the external world. (Figlio 2006: 127)

At the psychosocial level, Figlio, like many Kleinians, extends object- relations to group dynamics, which he uses to explain various kinds of religious and political fundamentalism (2006: 120, 131–133). The basis of this analysis is Freud’s Group Psychology (1921), where Freud argues that members of the group identify with the group leader in their ego- ideal, while simultaneously identifying with one another in their egos (see also Hinshelwood, this volume). For Figlio, however, the feeling of certainty in a group is most accurately captured by Meltzer’s (1973) account of tyranny, which is an elaboration of the Freudian theory of groups. In Kleinian terms, tyranny offers an escape from the harsh real- ization that there is something wrong with the group that the good objects are compromised, mutilated, dead or dangerous. To defend against this, the tyrannical group resorts to a paranoid defence, whereby it projects the bad objects outwards and establishes an illusory certainty of the group’s internal goodness and purity. ‘The tyrant, basking in certainty, promises safety from attack by pushing uncertainty into outside groups and inviting an alliance in destroying them. The Tyrant’s apparent omniscience and omnipotence seduce potential followers into an addictive dependence on a protection racket’ (Figlio 2006: 132). Here, within the co-ordinates of the Kleinian paradigm, the feeling of certainty What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically?... 37 is theorized at the level of objects and object-relations set up in psychic representation: uncertainty about the object (the possibility of loss) leads to anxiety, which in turn leads to the feeling of certainty as a narcissistic, paranoid-schizoid defence. This paradigm, as I show later, offers a useful theoretical toolkit for understanding the structures of religious and ideological doctrines, but it also has shortcomings with regard to the distinction between ideology and subjectivity.

Jacques Lacan and the Uncertainty of Lack

Lacan’s theory of the subject and the unconscious is radically different from that of Klein because it shifts the focus to language and signification, albeit, unfortunately, at the expense of object-relations. Subjectivity, for Lacan, emerges at the moment when an infant enters the world of symbols. Prior to the inscription of the symbolic order onto it, the subject has no capacity to differentiate objects from one another and no ability to conceptualize the absence of things (Mintchev 2015: 318). Things, at this stage, are simply present in their immediacy. The subject enters the symbolic order through an Oedipal drama involving identifications at both the imaginary level, with its own mirror image, and at the symbolic level, with its self-recognized image as the addressee of the speech of the Other/Mother (Lacan 2006 [1949]; Fink 2004: 108; Žižek 2008[1989]: 116). Once this takes place, the subject is irreversibly alienated into the perpetual deference of meaning and thereby becomes ‘barred’, symbolically castrated and marked by the constitutive lack and emptiness of signification. Two formulas from Lacan’s Seminar III (2000[1955–1956]) capture the simultaneous power and emptiness of signification. The first formula is that ‘the signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier’ (2000[1955–1956]: 207). The subject comes into being in and through identification with language/naming, and thereafter it is held together as a unity, however illusory and fragile, precisely because it is attached to a name. The signifier/name is the agency which consolidates the subject and which represents the subject within the symbolic register. In this dynamic of symbolic mediation, social relations are first and foremost relations between 38 N. Mintchev signifiers/names and, only secondarily, between people. Lacan’s second formula is that ‘the signifier, as such, signifies nothing’2000 ( [1955–1956]: 183), a claim derived from Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1986[1916]) structural- ist theory of language. For de Saussure, what matters in language is not the relationship between the signifier (word) and signified (the concept that the word stands for)—that relationship, he famously argues, is arbitrary and has no objective grounding; what matters, instead, is the relationships of differentiation between signifiers and that between signifieds. In language, according to de Saussure, ‘there are only differences and no positive terms’ (1986 [1916]: 118). A signifier can only establish its meaning in relation to other signifiers that are different from it, and the same goes for the demarcation of signifieds from one another. In this structure of differentiation, there is perpetual deference of meaning, which leaves the signifier ultimately empty. There is no final point at which meaning becomes stable, only infinite predication— perpetual circling around the subject (in both the linguistic and anthropological sense) in an impossible attempt to fully describe it. As a result, the human subject becomes marked by a lack at its very core. This creates a misalignment between the subject and the symbolic order and opens up a site of disruption in the determination of the subject by language, as well as by cultural narratives of identity and power. Language, culture and power, within the Lacanian framework, can never fully determine subjectivity precisely because the lack of the subject—a lack constituted by their very own structure—is beyond their reach. The lack of subjectivity offers a theoretical foundation for understanding certainty and uncertainty from a Lacanian perspective. The structure of the symbolic order leaves the subject in a constant uncertainty about who she or he is and what others want of her or him. Uncertainty is an essential part of the human condition, and the feeling of certainty is a foreclosure of that uncertainty—a foreclosure of the constitutive lack, which, in turn, bridges the distance between the subject and the external world and leads to a concrete mode of thought not unlike that in psychosis. However, although lack/uncertainty is a human universal, this does not make it ahistorical and unchanging. If the lack of the subject is constituted by the symbolic order, and if the structure and content of the symbolic order vary according to social and historical contexts, then What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically?... 39 uncertainty and certainty must be theorized as embedded in the specific conditions of the external world. In her book On Anxiety (2004), the Lacanian social theorist Renata Salecl offers an account of how the decline of political, social and religious authoritarianism in the West since the late twentieth century is directly linked to the fabrication of false memories and the emergence of what she calls ‘recovered memory therapy’ (Salecl 2004: chap. 6, see also Prager 1998). This demise of authority, according to Salecl, means that the socio-symbolic order can no longer guarantee the identity of the subject, and so identity becomes, more than ever, a project of individualist self-fashioning. No longer defined by the authority of religious, political and other institutions, the subject must ‘choose’ and ‘create’ his or her own identity as an individual. However, in the absence of an external authority that acts as a guarantor, forging a stable sense of identity becomes a process ridden with difficulty, uncertainty and anxiety. The fabrication of a traumatic memory in this instance offers a solution to the problem of uncertainty—it explains what is wrong with the subject and why he or she is failing at constructing a cohesive, ‘authentic’ identity.

One finds in today’s society the emergence of a new individualism. The subject is more and more perceived as creator of his or her identity and less and less identifies with the values of his family, community or state. Linked to this ideology of the subject’s self-creation is the perception that there is in the subject a truth, which only needs to be rediscovered for the subject to become him- or herself. But if some childhood experience shattered the core of the subject’s identity, they will be deprived in the pursuit of authen- ticity. Thus we come to the problem of memory: in order to reinstall their equilibrium, subjects have to remember the trauma that undermined their identity. (Salecl 2004: 129)

In this context, practitioners of ‘recovered memory therapy’ become cult- like figures, who act like substitutes for the missing traditional authority; perhaps religion, community and family can no longer offer ‘the truth’ of the subject, but a therapist certainly can. Salecl illustrates her arguments with the example of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948 (1996). This best-selling book is a memoir depicting the author’s survival in a 40 N. Mintchev

Nazi concentration camp during his childhood. However, as it later emerged, the author was never in a Nazi camp, and his account had been completely fabricated. What is interesting about Wilkomirski’s falsifica- tion of memory is that, as he points out himself, his recollections of his childhood only became clear to him later in his life, and with the aid of therapy and research about the Holocaust (see Salecl 2004: 124). And when people close to him tried to convince him that his recollection was inaccurate, he saw them as threatening and persecuting. He was thus deeply doubtful and suspicious of people, but he was certain of his memory and, apparently, also of the legitimacy of his therapist. Certainty and uncertainty in this Lacanian framework are not an outcome of the subject’s specific relation to an object and the defence mechanism that ensue. Rather, they are the outcome of the subject’s relation to the symbolic order, the emptiness that language and meaning leave at the core of subjectivity and the historically specific dynamic of absent authority. While for both Kleinians and Lacanians, the feeling of certainty is a defence against uncertainty, the two traditions theorize this process in different fashions. In Lacanian terms, as Salecl puts it, ‘the subject invents a traumatic memory because of the necessary inconsistency of the symbolic order and, especially, because of the inherent powerlessness of the authorities’ (138–139). And, as mentioned earlier, this emptiness is both universal and historical: it is the necessary effect of language, but it is also variable depending on the specific constitution of a given cultural context. So, rather than object-relations—including a threat of losing the good object and a persecutory defence in one’s relation to others—the focus here is on how identity is set up within the symbolic order, namely, as a project of individualist freedom and self-creation. This is what facilitates the feeling of certainty as a defence, as a solution to the anxiety situation of uncertainty.

Studying Subjectivity Empirically: The Case of ‘Reformist’ Islam

How, then, can each of these psychoanalytic paradigms help us understand the subjectivity of certainty in a concrete socio-cultural context? Consider the example of the so-called ‘reformist’ Islamic movements What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically?... 41

(Laidlaw 2014: 171–172) in places such as Egypt, Indonesia and the Middle East, where some people are evermore strongly evoking the aut hority of religious law in their ethical and social conduct. One of the key features of reformist Islamic piety is that it advocates subordination of the body and soul to the law of God to the point where piety becomes a matter of habit without thought or deliberation. In this doctrine, submission to God must become instinctive in a way that bypasses consciousness. As Saba Mahmood (2005) and Charles Hirschkind (2001) show in their ethnographies of Egypt, this requires the active cultivation of oneself as a pious subject through various activities such as praying regularly, following a specific bodily movement during prayer, seeking out the right kinds of preachers and listening to cassette recordings of sermons. James Laidlaw summarizes the subjective dynamics of this doctrine succinctly:

Women actively seek out preachers who will make them afraid … and men prefer tapes that create an intensity of fear (khawf) and terror (faza) … Preachers have developed a repertoire of rhetorical techniques specifically designed to terrify … and to make the certainty and immediacy of death and divine judgement present as bodily experience within life … Both [Mahmood and Hirschkind] argue that fear produces ‘self-willed obedience to religiously prescribed social conventions’…and submission that becomes visceral, involuntary, and ‘outside the purview of consciousness’, and so makes moral behaviour ‘a nondeliberative aspect of one’s disposition’. (2014: 151–152)

Here, the aim of religious practice is to overcome the boundary between the self and the perfection of God; it is also to reconcile the contradiction between the spontaneity of one’s will or desire and the rules and regulations of divine law. In short, prayer/ritual ‘promises the complete moral perfection of Islam itself, in which all contradictions vanish and a moral self emerges without contradiction’ (Simon 2009: 166). So how can psychoanalytic concepts and categories help us theorize the psychosocial dynamics of reformist Islamic piety? From an object- relations perspective, it is easy to identify a familiar pattern in the relationship between the subject and God—in fact, the mechanisms described by Figlio (2006), whose work I discussed earlier, appear relevant in this 42 N. Mintchev context. Are not the ‘omnipotence’ and feeling of superiority (Figlio 2006: 126) that are characteristics of ‘the absolute state of mind’ also at work in reformist Islamic piety as described by Laidlaw and others? As one pious man puts it in Gregory Simon’s ethnography of Islam in Minangkabau, Indonesia, ‘When Muslims pray … they feel strong. Very strong. Without any problems. All problems disappear … if we pray, we won’t ever be sick. Never any kind of illness at all’ (2009: 260). As this claim indicates, prayer—when carried out in the right way—has the power to negate the subject’s perceptions of problems in the material/ external world, to foster an emotional feeling of power which is beyond doubt and beyond conflict with life problems related to health, money and family. But while such a Kleinian reading is compelling—and indeed quite useful for understanding the structural relations inscribed into reformist religious doctrine—I would claim that it risks missing the crucial point that a doctrine or ideology that professes omnipotence does not necessarily create omnipotent subjectivities (I will return to this point shortly). The Lacanian framework offers a different approach, which can help us avoid this problem—it asks how the subject relates to the imperative to achieve physical and mental purity in its unification with God. This is ultimately an empirical question, but it is one that we already have a partial answer to on account of Lacan’s theory of the subject. Recall that the relationship between the subject and the symbolic order is always a thwarted or barred one. Any attempt to fully internalize, follow and carry out the demands of the symbolic order is bound to fail. Reconciliation is impossible, and the only solution to this problem is to ‘traverse the fantasy’, to come to terms with the fact that the subject and the symbolic can never be aligned. The Kleinian and Lacanian approaches come into conflict because their pre-theoretical assumptions lead to the theorization of different kinds of relationships: in one instance, what is at stake is a relationship between subject and object (God); in the other, it is the relationship between subject and structure, the latter being in this case the symbolic system of religious meanings and ethical imperatives. The problem, however, is that while both of these frameworks have something to contribute, neither is very helpful in the absence of detailed empirical analysis, which is all too often missing from psychoanalytic What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically?... 43 inquiries into the social. Subjectivity, as is now well-known, is both social and individual; but in order for this truism to have any purchase, we must address how the social links to the individual and how it is that people interpret, identify with and live within their social contexts. In other words, as mentioned earlier, we must have an account of subjectivation, and this tends to be omitted by both Kleinian and Lacanian approaches. In light of this, I would argue that a major shortcoming of Kleinian psychosocial writing is that it tends to conflate ideology and subjectivity, which in fact are two quite different categories. It is one thing to understand the internal logic of ideologies that evoke a feeling of certainty, and quite another to grasp the psychodynamics of certainty among groups and individuals. To say the least, ideologies all too often fail to successfully shape people in their image, but the Kleinian under- theorization of language and meaning tends to leave this issue unac- knowledged. This problem, however, is only partially a consequence of the pre-theoretical assumptions of Kleinianism: on the one hand, Klein (1930) is quite clear that the relationship between the subject and the symbolic is itself an object-relation; yet, on the other hand, there is little Kleinian writing that indicates that the ‘object’ of symbolic meaning is anything more than a rudimentary concrete ‘primal’ object such as food or the Kleinian ‘maternal breast’. With the Lacanian paradigm, the problem is somewhat different. Lacanian theory tells us that the relationship between the subject and the symbolic is one of misalignment, but it offers little insight into what shape this misalignment takes and how exactly the subject relates to its context. In other words, there is no theory of object- relations that can help us link the subject to ideology. In Lacan’s defence, however, I should emphasize once again that this is an empirical question that must be explained concretely and not in an abstract, purely theoretical fashion. Coming back to the ethnography of ‘reformist’ Islam will help to illustrate my argument that we need careful empirical analysis, as well as attentiveness to both object-relations and symbolic meanings. In his work on Islamic prayer in Indonesia, Simon (2009) shows that there is tension between, on the one hand, people’s aspirations to carry out a prayer (shalat) five times a day and, on the other hand, their ability to actually perform the prayer. In order to carry out shalat properly, the 44 N. Mintchev person who prays must fully submit to God both physically and mentally; otherwise, the prayer will be a failed one and the worshipper’s duty will remain unfulfilled. To achieve the mental requirement of a successful prayer one must be in a state of khusuak, by which is meant

a total sincere concentration on God. God must completely saturate the consciousness of people while they pray: They cannot think about what is on TV, what they are doing later, what they want from God, or whether or not they will be able to feed their children the next day. All of these are elements of daily life in the corrupting world but not part of the transcen- dent truth of God that is the sole focus of prayer. (Simon 2009: 266)

However, this stern superegoic demand to purify one’s mind misfires regularly in everyday practice. People’s minds get distracted, they face difficulty in concentrating, and they often worry about problems in life, such as where to find money for rice. The resulting failure to achieve khusuak, and therefore the nullification of one’s prayer efforts, has significant consequences. People experience frustration, inability to pray regularly and neglect of religious duties that feed into a vicious cycle where less prayer leads to more problems in life, which in turn creates more distraction and even less prayer. As one woman confided to Simon (2009: 268), the fact that she had struggles in life meant that she should try to become closer to God in her search for a solution; however, the fact that she had problems meant that she could not focus on her prayer, and therefore any effort to pray was considered ‘a waste’. This ethnographic vignette illustrates the complex interplay of meanings and object-relations in the subjectivity of certainty. On one level, the women and men depicted in the ethnography have an unshakable conviction in the law of God. This is certainty at the level of the ego-ideal, which in this case represents that law. On another level, there is a tension between the ego-ideal and the ego so that the two cannot merge with one another; the mind cannot be purified and saturated with the thought of God because it remains preoccupied with other aspects of life. This (object-relational) tension between ego and ego-ideal comes into conflict with the (symbolic) imperative to unify the two and the aspiration to achieve that imperative. Here, insofar as certainty is about blocking out What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically?... 45 perceptions of the outside world—insofar as it ‘denigrates and discards the external world’ (Figlio 2006: 127)—we find a failure of certainty. The reason for this is that at the psychological level, the subject is misaligned with the signifier and this prevents a merger, while at the social level, it is problems in the ‘external world’ (ones linked to economic and social uncertainty, no doubt) that thwart the achievement of khusuak. As this ethnographic example demonstrates, subjectivity, and specifically the feeling of certainty, is not only about object-relations, and neither is it only about doctrines at the symbolic level; rather, it includes elements of both. Thus, in order to understand subjectivity we need a nuanced theoretical and empirical account of how the subject relates to its objects as well as to the larger circulation of discourses and ideologies. This, as I have argued, demands that we pay close attention to our pre- theoretical assumptions, and the ways in which they define how we make sense of empirical case material.

References

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Freud, S. (1915). Instincts and their vicissitudes. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIV, pp. 109–140). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XVIII, pp. 65–144). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1925). Negation. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIX, pp. 233–240). London: Hogarth. Frosh, S. (1989). Psychoanalysis and psychology: Minding the gap. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hinshelwood, R. (1991). A dictionary of Kleinian thought. London: Karnac. Hirschkind, C. (2001). The ethics of listening: Cassette-Sermon audition in contemporary Egypt. American Ethnologist, 28(3), 623–649. Klein, M. (1930). The importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11, 24–39. Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16, 145–174. Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27, 99–110. Lacan, J. (2000). The psychoses: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III 1955–1956. London: Routledge. Lacan, J. (2006). The mirror stage as formative of the I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. In Écrits: The first complete edition in English (pp. 75–81). London: W.W. Norton and Company. Laidlaw, J. (2014). The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laplanche, J. (1993). Essays on otherness. London: Routledge. Likierman, M. (2001). Melanie Klein: Her work in context. London: Cromwell Press. Mahmood, S. (2005). The politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McNay, L. (2000). Gender and agency. Cambridge: Polity. Meltzer, D. (1973). Sexual states of mind. Strath Tay: Clunie. Mintchev, N. (2015). A theoretical impasse? The concept of the symbolic in Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan. Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 33(3), 307–324. What Is Subjectivity and How Can We Study It Empirically?... 47

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Nikolay Mintchev is a research associate at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, and Visiting Fellow at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, where he was previously Lecturer. He specializes in ethnic diversity, social transformation and psychosocial approaches to identity and difference. Haunted by Uncertain Refrains

Stephen Frosh

Bewilderment

In his paper on ‘Little Hans’, Freud (1909) takes a moment to consider an idea that will later return to him ever more strongly, notably in The Uncanny (1919), but also in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Moses and Monotheism (1939). ‘In an analysis’, he writes (1909, p. 123), ‘a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken’. For psychoanalysis, haunting is a central trope, eventually becoming formally codified as the ‘return of the repressed’ (Freud 1920), but visible in all its theorising and in its practice, in the ever-present iterative process that takes place as the patient speaks of her or his concerns, under the repetitive pressure of unconscious ideas. As many contemporary commentators have remarked, the idea of ghostly returns itself functions as a kind of haunting, reappearing time and again

S. Frosh (*) Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2017 49 N. Mintchev, R.D. Hinshelwood (eds.), The Feeling of Certainty, Studies in the Psychosocial, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57717-3_4 50 S. Frosh in cultural products and also in literary and social theory. So we have the continuing popularity of revenants and poltergeists, of the undead and of dybbuks; and we have a ‘trauma culture’ (Luckhurst 2008) in which what cannot be symbolised keeps returning to trouble us, both at the level of personal psychology and recurrent, often melancholic, social remains. This all makes psychoanalysis a paradigmatic science of the temporal confusions of modernity: its primary concern is what keeps coming back, and it suggests that we are both plagued by these returns and given depth by them. Without them, without living memories and the psychic remains of past events and people, what would we be? But psychoanalysis also needs to beware its own certainties and tendency to tidy things away through too-simple reference to the unconscious. In her seminal sociological work on this topic, Avery Gordon (1997), who is in part at least a psychoanalytic sceptic, comments, ‘The “reality-testing” that we might want to perform in the face of hauntings must first of all admit those hauntings as real’. It is no fantasy, after all: things keep coming back and our personal and social lives are built upon such ghosts. If it is possible to consider a whole culture as ‘haunted’, as some contemporary theorists do (Khanna 2004; Gordon 1997), then perhaps we can think of the many ghostly returns with which we are confronted— symbolic returns of myth, memory and identity, material returns of violence and of intimacy and care—as uncanny moments that disrupt our certainties. In her psychoanalytic reflections on the biblical Book of Numbers, the Bible itself being one of those cultural objects that keeps reviving itself, Avivah Zornberg (2015) coins the term ‘bewilderments’ for her title, playing on the Hebrew name for the book, ‘In the Wilderness’. Given the extent to which the Bible, and indeed other holy texts, is drawn on to provide a sensation of certainty, to emphasise ‘bewilderment’ as one of its central ideas is a very daring and revealing move. In Numbers itself, the bewilderment is concretely expressed in the Israelites being lost in the wilderness, this ‘great and terrible’ place in which they go round in circles for 40 years, until a whole generation—the generation freed from slavery—dies out. A wilderness is precisely such a bewildering terrain: it has few markers, little grows in it, one is thrown back on one’s own resources, navigation is hard, uncertainty prevails. Where Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 51 are we going? Will we survive? These are the key questions that a wilderness provokes, and they are psychic as well as practical shocks for all time. On the other hand, a wilderness is a borderless terrain, its markings are subtle and there is an openness about it—open land, open sky—that can never fully belong to anyone. It is probably no accident, for instance, that the Bible presents Revelation as taking place in the wilderness (at Sinai), whilst the Israelites are wanderers and not after they have conquered and settled in Canaan. Revelation does not depend on nation statehood or on knowing who and where you are. In fact, it needs something else, which we might call uncertainty or bewilderment, openness to the unexpected and even the unbearable. In religious terms, we are talking about the state of mind that allows connection with the Divine; in psychoanalytic terms, we are talking about tolerance of ambivalence and a capacity to live in doubt. But the phenomenon of hauntedness is not just about managing uncertainty and remaining open. Being haunted can be a melancholic comfort (the return of loved ones, the famous Freudian ‘shadow’ of the lost object on the ego, which means that we are constituted in great part by our lost loves), but it is also an opportunity for trouble and unsettledness. This can take the form of the revenants, poltergeists, doubles and dybbuks mentioned above (Freud 1919; Frosh 2013), returns that disrupt and plague and that hold on for much longer than the recipient might want. Yet, what would we be without them? What would be the object of study for psychoanalysis if it did not have returns to deal with—not just the ‘return of the repressed’ but all those moments of Nachträglichkeit, those uncertainties of temporality in which the present is saturated by the past, the future by the present, the present by the future. ‘I might become (something)’ is the optimistic state of mind in which a patient confronts psychoanalysis; ‘I am what I have become out of the crisis of what I was’ is its more pessimistic counterpoint. In each case, there is a compression of time in which what was and what will be are alive in the present, running through the speech of the analysand. All this is to say that hauntings of various kinds are the ordinary daily stuff of psychoanalysis and are also explicitly valorised in its model of the mind. ‘The mind is a palimpsest’, writes Jacqueline Rose, referring not explicitly to its overlapping tempo- ralities but to the way the different ‘others’ out of which we are constituted 52 S. Frosh are layered within us, giving form and substance to our mental landscape, to the bewilderment within:

We only exist through the others who make up the storehouse of the mind: models in our first tentative steps towards identity, objects of our desires, helpers and foes. The mind is a palimpsest in which the traces of these figures will jostle and rearrange themselves for evermore. From the earliest moment of our lives—since without the rudiments of contact, the infant will not survive—we are ‘peopled’ by others. Our ‘psyche’ is a social space. (Rose 2007, p. 62)

This is a fairly familiar account of the psychoanalytic perspective, linking object relations and Kleinian theory (introjection of objects of various sorts), Laplanchian and Lacanian thinking (the enigmatic signifier, the desire of the other) and classical Freudianism (melancholic internalisation). But if we take it out of its specific psychoanalytic context and read it simply as descriptive text, then the various strands are full of the resonance of haunting. ‘The mind is a palimpsest … traces of these figures … “peopled” by others … Our “psyche” is a social space’. It is reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s (1974) story The Dead Fiddler, in which one girl is inhabited by the unsettled and mischievous souls of two dead people, who proceed to entertain the whole village with their antics, eventually getting married. This may be dramatising things too strongly, and with obvious psychopathological resonance (although the period in which she is possessed is offered by Singer as her most intense period of life); but still, the idea of the mind as a theatre in which ghosts locate themselves and act out their impulses is perhaps not so far from the truth. A palimpsest, figures jostling and rearranging themselves: not much certainty can be preserved under these circumstances.

Fractured Identity

Freud was haunted by Biblical personalities, who recurred in his thinking and identifications. The most notable of these were Joseph (the dream interpreter and son of Jacob, as was Freud—‘My own ego finds it very easy to hide itself behind people of that name, since Joseph was the name of a Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 53 man famous in the Bible as an interpreter of dreams’ (Freud 1900, p. 484, n. 2)) and, particularly, Moses, especially in Freud’s late, reflexive and morose text, Moses and Monotheism (1939). Much has been written about this, with Yerushalmi’s (1991) Freud’s Moses the outstanding contribution, notwithstanding its contestation by Derrida (1995). The more relevant commentary, however, is that of Edward Said, whose Freud and the Non- European (2003) examines Moses and Monotheism from the perspective of the ‘outsider’, and notes in it specifically the issue of fracturing. Through an excursus into his idea of ‘late style’, Said stresses the lack of closure in Moses and Monotheism, the way it leaves material open and unreconciled, even contradictory, thereby also making it available for interpretation. Whilst recognising the various colonial elements of Freud’s discourse (his ‘lackadaisical’ treatment of the non-Jew and his identification of the Jew with the European, as against the ‘primitive’ other), what is crucial for Said is Freud’s claim that Moses was an Egyptian monotheist. For Said, the presence of this outsider at the heart of Jewish identity disrupts the integrity of identity itself—it undermines any claim to ‘true’ or ‘pure’ identity, to its ‘certainty’, one might say. It is this question of identity that Moses and Monotheism is concerned with, the question, in the book’s specific case study, of what is instilled and what perseverates to sustain Jewish identity from one generation to the next, even amongst those who, like Freud, have no religious conviction. Rose (2007, p. 84) makes an important link here. ‘We could say’, she writes, ‘that the question of his Jewish identity propels Freud towards the idea of “transgenerational haunting”, a concept forged by the Hungarian émigré analysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, significantly in the aftermath of this historical moment, as they tried to understand the silent persistence of the Holocaust in the minds of second-generation Jews’. In the reading offered by Yerushalmi, following Freud himself, the issue is a Lamarckian one:

Deconstructed into Jewish terms, what is Lamarckianism if not the powerful feeling that, for better or worse, one cannot really cease being Jewish, and this not merely because of current anti-Semitism or discrimination, and certainly not because of the Chain of Tradition, but because one’s fate in being Jewish was determined long ago by the Fathers, and that often what one feels most deeply and obscurely is a trilling wire in the blood. (Yerushalmi 1991, p. 31) 54 S. Frosh

For Said, however, the issue is not one of continuity but precisely the opposite: what bewilders any claim to certainty of identity is the notion Freud has that right at the start—the moment of originary trauma, to use the psychoanalytic frame—there is an intrusion from outside. This happens in individual development, as Laplanche has emphasised and as has been developed more recently by Laplanche’s acolyte John Fletcher (2013): the moment of inception of the subject is also the moment at which something comes from the other to make impossible the settledness of being. (As an aside, disruption of settledness is also a familiar Biblical trope, not just in the wilderness but prior to that. Abraham is told to leave his home—‘get yourself out’, says God—and at the moment when Jacob thinks he might be ‘settled’ in Canaan, all the trouble with his son Joseph—one of Freud’s identificatory figures—comes upon him, and a great exile starts to loom.) And it happens in the historical life of the ‘nation’ or the ‘people’, these too being charged terms. However far back one might look in pursuit of the pure origin of one’s culture, something extrinsic is to be found, the king from across the water, the exile who returns to take revenge or—in Moses’s case—the outsider who takes the people on as his own and is then slaughtered by them. Said sees this as dramatically subverting attempts to homogenise identity, as seen, for example, in some Zionist renderings of the continuity of Jewish identity. In contrast, he argues (pp. 44–45) Freud ‘had left considerable room to accommodate Judaism’s non-Jewish antecedents and contemporaries… Freud mobilized the non-European past in order to undermine any doc- trinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular’. In practice, this can be seen in politics and even in archaeology, which is used in Israel to maintain a narrative of continuous settlement. ‘What we discover’ writes Said (p. 47), ‘is an extraordinary and revisionist attempt to substitute a new positive structure of Jewish history for Freud’s insistently more complex and discontinuous late-style efforts to examine the same thing, albeit in an entirely diasporic spirit and with different, decentring results’. The idea of thediasporic is central here to the bewildering uncertainties of identity. Identity in general—personal, political—is open and conten- tious, and Freud’s insistence on the Egyptian origins of Moses is seen by Said as asserting this against the grain of nationalism. ‘Identity cannot be Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 55 thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered—and later, perhaps, even triumphed’ (Said 2003, p. 54). For Said, this is a general lesson that can be addressed to other ‘besieged’ identities, about how to come to terms with the fractured and conflictual elements of identity politics and of social life in general: ‘not through dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion but, rather, by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilising secular wound—the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or Stoic calm and no Utopian reconciliation even within itself’ (Ibid.). This sounds melancholic but does not seem to be meant that way. What Said is stressing is the difficult freedom provided by openness and fragmentation, in which the final stage is not integration but maintenance of the ‘wound’ of disruptive uncertainty. Jacqueline Rose’s (2003) response to Freud and the Non-European draws out some of the problematics of Freud’s relationship to his Jewishness and suggests that the fissures and flaws in identity are lived in an even more complex way than Said suggests. Even though the deconstruction of identity is an important response to nationalist politics, ‘broken’ identities, she argues, can also be traumatising rather than empowering or enabling, a point that has been made by some postcolonial theorists. The issue here is partly that the damage done by colonialism may not be the best passage to political activity that embraces openness and nonviolent ‘hospitality’ to or ‘cohabitation’ with the other (to use some of Judith Butler’s (2015) terms)—which is perhaps one of the measures of the extent of Nelson Mandela’s achievement in post- Apartheid South Africa. This is also possibly part of the difficulty faced in the Israel-Palestine situation: that is, the history of trauma in each society, Israeli Jewish and Palestinian, is such as to render highly problematic any reaching out to the other (Hollander 2016). Trauma itself leaves its legacies, and whilst one might hope that what is learnt from trauma is the need to generously open out to others, that is not necessarily an easy thing for a traumatised body to do, either as an individual (though this does happen, as testified to by various attempts by those who have 56 S. Frosh suffered losses to reach across lines of conflict) or as a social collective (which happens less often, but nevertheless does at times, as in some of the various truth and reconciliation commissions in different parts of the world, despite their manifest and deep-rooted problems). There are questions that can be asked about the accuracy and compre- hensiveness of Said’s version of Freud’s account of Jewish identity (Frosh 2005), but perhaps it is another set of issues worth raising here. What is attractive about Said’s lecture is both its humanistic and optimistic slant—that what he takes to be Freud’s vision of openness can become a template for progressive politics—and also its careful delineation of what might be read out of and into Freud’s work from a contemporary, postcolonial perspective. His notion of ‘contrapuntal’ reading is important: reading or hearing different lines of thought against one another, keeping them in tension without it being a case of restoring the past in the present or harking back to a better time. This is a constructive version of hauntedness, in which what comes from a writer of another time (Freud in this instance; famously in other parts of Said’s work, Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad—Said (1993)) might find itself emergent in the present in a different form from its earlier incarnation. Judith Butler 2011( ) has also worked on this theme, via Walter Benjamin’s notion of messianic ‘flashing up’, whereby the occluded voices of the past reappear in the present, undoubtedly as ghosts but also as living figures that trouble contemporary certainties. Butler (2011, p. 83) reads this as a kind of break- ing apart of the ‘surface of time’ in which ‘the memory of suffering’ emerges ‘into the future of justice, not as revenge but as the figuring of a time in which the history that covers over the history of oppression might cease’. Whether or not one can maintain this degree of optimism about political shifts, it is a salutary reminder that the past always refuses to be dead, at both individual and social level and that the bewilderment this produces is potentially a healthy one, in which new discoveries might come about. The anachronistic (Baraitser2015 ), out-of-time readings that these psychopolitical theorists (Said, Rose, Butler) draw us towards leads to a radical form of ‘reading against the grain’ that operates in two directions—to unsettle the present and to reopen the past in the light of present concerns. Ghosts therefore travel both ways, back and forth, and if we can listen to them, we might yet hear what they have to say. Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 57

Diasporas of Uncertainty

Said’s stress on the diasporic as a source of rejuvenation and disjunction for identity politics is echoed in Stuart Hall’s rendering of diasporic identities as essentially processual and fluid. Rather than being fixed in a relationship to the past—the ‘genuine’ or ‘true’ Caribbean identity, for example—the concept of ‘cultural identity’, at least as deployed by Hall, is one that stresses movement and struggle, that is, various modes of uncertainty. It is true that Hall retains some space for historically rooted affiliations, for example, recognising (Hall1990 , p. 223) that one type of cultural identity might be experienced as ‘a sort of collective “one true self”, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves”, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common’. Hall notes the importance of this kind of shared identity for mobil- ising postcolonial struggles, particularly in bringing to light ‘hidden histories’ that play a critical role in emancipatory political activity. But it is a second, more fluid conceptualisation of diasporic identity that provides a possible political and psychosocial platform for action and understanding. Cultural identity, he writes:

is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (Hall 1990, p. 225)

Cultural identity is a process of becoming, structured around ‘unstable points of identification or suture’ (p. 226); such identities exist as a rein- vention of a past that is real, but which is neither determining nor unequivocal in its effects. In terms of identity studies, what this produces is an interest in specific histories in which the impact of colonialism and 58 S. Frosh diaspora figure as organising principles. It also reinforces a theoretical thrust towards an understanding of identities as unstable registers in which these histories of subjectification and oppression materialise but also are transformed. In terms of the psychosocial analysis of haunting, what is revealed is how the shades of the past that operate in the present are always reinventions; we are troubled by uncertainty, but the potential opening out that such uncertainty allows—the ‘unstable points of identification or suture’—is what makes it possible to consider that there might be discoveries and disruptions even in what appear as the most rigidified passages of formal identity. Said’s reading of Moses and Monotheism as a poetics of broken identities fits well with this idea of the primacy of diasporic ‘becoming’ in the context both of Freud’s life (the book was finished and published only once he had become an exile waiting ‘to die in freedom’ in England) and in the broader context of the progressive possibilities made available by uncertainty and ‘bewilderment’. Indeed, the very form of the book, with its successive ‘pref- aces’ and its repetitions and inconsistencies, can be read as reflecting the creative intransigence demanded by cultural identity formation under diasporic conditions. Struggling and, unusually, failing to express himself fluently, Freud creates a nomadic text that attests to the struggle to forge something new out of conditions of adversity and suffering. To return to the ‘wilderness’ analogy, revelation might require these conditions of wandering; too much settledness leads to narrowing of the arteries of disruption. Of course, this does not mean that settledness is not preferable to exile, security to precarity; it is rather that psychic openness requires a deep awareness of how much vulnerability is a condition of human existence—a point that Butler (2004) has made many times. In this respect, an alternative but contemporaneous version of the Moses story by another Jewish exile of the 1930s, Arnold Schoenberg, provides an exemplary companion piece to Moses and Monotheism. Yerushalmi (1992) is a useful guide: in a lively talk presented to the New York Academy of Medicine, he draws on both Freud’s text and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron to explore the question of what can be expressed in language and, most compellingly, what might be the conditions under which truth can be known—the conditions of certainty—and those under which it must be compromised specifically in order to meet the needs of human fragility. Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 59

The parallels are strong, not just in the period in which the two Moses pieces were written—the turning point of Jewish history marked by the overwhelming rise of the Nazis and the explosion of antisemitism that accompanied it and engulfed the two creators, Freud and Schoenberg, sending them both into exile. Yerushalmi comments on how connected were Freud’s and Schoenberg’s experiences and positionings within the emergent culture of antisemitism, despite the fact that Freud was reso- lutely atheist and Schoenberg religiously, albeit unconventionally, ‘spiritual’.

Both were always acutely sensitive to anti-Semitism, suffered from it, reacted to it with aggressive pride, and ended up in exile because of it, Freud in England, Schoenberg in California. Significantly, both were repeatedly accused, even before the rise of Nazism, of invading the sacred spiritual precincts of the Volk with an alien and arid ‘Jewish’ intellectual- ism, Freud thereby debasing the Aryan soul, Schoenberg corrupting German music. (Yerushalmi 1992, pp. 2–3)

And both felt something ‘mystical’ in the appeal of Judaism or at least Jewish identity. As noted, Freud’s version of this was played out as an examination of what it is that is passed down through generations to bind people into a culture and what (Lamarckian) explanation there might be for the ‘many dark emotional powers all the stronger the less they could be expressed in words’ that ‘make the attraction of Judaism and the Jews irresistible’ (Freud 1961, p. 368). Schoenberg was after something else in his dramatisation of the Moses story, perhaps best understood as a way to explore how complete self-conviction and absolute certainty of being is unsustainable when faced with the emotional and psychic uncertainties of social being. In this regard, it might even be said that Schoenberg is more Freudian than Freud. Freud always seems to assert the superiority of what he regards as ‘paternal’, abstract civilisation over the regressive, ‘maternal’ pull to consolation (a division between intellectuality and emotionality, in more conventional terms), yet reveals in the form of his book and in his wider psychoanalytic vision just how much human subjects are governed by ‘irrational’ forces that they cannot escape. Schoenberg, showing more constitutional and artistic emotionality, 60 S. Frosh seems more easily able to accept that human needs and aspirations are necessarily discordant. Perhaps this can be cast as a willingness to adopt as a virtue what Yerushalmi reports as the Nazi antisemitic slur of ‘corruption’ applied to both Freud and Schoenberg (and to all Jews): if the truth is defined as always ‘pure’ and ‘certain’, then the ethical position an intellectual might take is to show just how intolerant purity is, how remaining open and ‘hospitable’ (Butler 2011) requires ‘corrupting’ of what might today be named the fundamentalist ideal. Unlike Freud, Schoenberg had actually converted from Judaism to Protestantism when he was 18, but gradually moved back to Judaism, impelled in part by antisemitism and in part by genuine religious feeling. In 1933, after he had been excluded from the Prussian Academy of the Arts for, exactly, ‘corrupting’ German music, he formally (and unneces- sarily) converted back to Judaism in Paris. The document attesting to this, signed by a liberal rabbi, was witnessed by Marc Chagall. Schoenberg wrote a kind of Zionist oratorio in the late 1920s, called der biblische Weg, but his great opera, Moses und Aron, was also the fullest expression of his Jewish identification. There is a lot that could be said about this master- piece, and much of this requires substantial musical understanding of a kind that I do not claim. But the central dilemma of the opera, embodied in the relationship between its two protagonists, relates directly to the question of ‘corruption’ itself and more generally to the issue of how too much certainty might be destructive and how it can be challenged in the name of a kind of progressive vision of human coexistence. The opera was left unfinished, despite Schoenberg having devised the libretto for the third and final act; and many say that it had to be left unfinished, because of the nature of its subject matter. This is, put crudely, the inexpressibility of religious truth and of course of artistic truth. Yerushalmi (1992, p. 5) describes its central struggle as ‘to ask how the God of Israel, the Absolute, can possibly be expressed in words or, should you prefer a more secularly intimate layer of interpretation (the two are not in conflict), how can the artist possibly express and communicate the plenitude of his own vision?’ Schoenberg’s theme is the struggle to make material the realisation of an abstract God. The philosophical, musical and dramatic debate about this centres on the relationship between the two brothers Moses and Aron (the additional ‘a’ in the conventional spelling of Aaron apparently Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 61 dropped so that the opera’s title would have 12 letters to parallel the 12-tone scale that Schoenberg used). Moses is the one in pure pursuit of absolute truth, the fixity that comes from complete revelatory understanding—an impersonal kind of knowledge that tolerates little uncertainty and that rides roughshod over ordinary human comfort. (As a parallel, the classical Jewish commentators assume that Moses had separated from his wife in order to pursue his relationship with God to the full, and they criticise him for this.) Moses knows the truth, and Aron does not object; but Aron is oriented towards the people and their human needs, and he understands these needs both ethically (in Jewish tradition he was the archetypical peacemaker) and politically, realising that to hold sway over the people there must be something material, some translation of the austere word of God into humanly comprehensible, and even con- soling, terms. ‘Moses is obsessed with the pure Idea of God, who can hardly be conceived, let alone visualized or expressed’, writes Yerushalmi (p. 6). ‘Aron, realist that he is, knows that a God who cannot be com- municated will not be accepted by the people. And so, constantly compromising the purity of Moses’s Idea, Aron is always prepared to offer them at least a verbal notion of God, to demonstrate the divine power through miracles, to win their favor through earthly promises, all of which Moses finds abominable and idolatrous but, despite his protests, cannot prevent.’ Unlike Freud, who sees in the development of the abstract God of monotheism a triumphant move forwards in culture and civilisation, Schoenberg picks up on the problem of zealotry, on how dangerous it is to pursue absolute knowledge and truth, unhampered by the oscillations of human emotion and subjectivity. The difference between Moses and Aron is dramatised through the episode of the Golden Calf, which fills one of the opera’s two completed acts. Schoenberg’s interpretation of the smashing of the Tablets of Law, usually seen as an act of anger, is profound here. When Moses comes down from the mountain and sees the Calf, it is enough for him to be enraged for the Calf to disappear. He then takes Aron to task for having allowed the people to make the Calf in the first place, a moment that is well expressed in the Biblical text itself (‘What must the people have done to you …? ’ Moses asks Aron (Exodus 32, 21)), but Aron defends himself: out of love for the people, he has given them something to help them 62 S. Frosh believe, a symbol of the truth. ‘What have you done?’ demands Moses. Aron replies:

Naught different, Just my task as it ever has been: When your idea gave forth No word, my word gave forth No image for them, I worked marvels for eyes and ears to witness.

Aron goes on to make a bold statement about his relationship to the people, who need such concrete translations:

I love this humble folk, I live just for them and want to sustain them.

Moses responds,

My love is for my idea. I live just for it!

Aron points out to Moses that the stone Tablets are images too—and not just the Tablets, but the words themselves written upon it. It is in acknowledgement of this truth that Moses smashes the Tablets; he can see that what Aron says is correct, that the pure idea will always need translation and interpretation and so can never be wholly pure. As it happens, this realisation that given the people’s propensity for idol worship they might have idolised the Tablets is well represented in classic Jewish commentary—for example, the eleventh-century commentator Rashi returns to it at the very end of Deuteronomy as an index of Moses’ great- ness: that he should have risked everything in this way, to keep the people pure. But for Schoenberg, purity is an impossible burden. Yerushalmi sees a radical difference between Freud and Schoenberg here, in relation to what language can express: ‘The problem of communication in Moses and Monotheism is not one of words or speech per se, but that of the formation and transmission of a religious tradition and its power to grip its adherents through the generations, over vast stretches of historical time, Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 63 which is a very different matter. In Moses und Aron the problem is intrinsic to language itself which, in relation to that Reality which is most important to express, is found to be impotent’ (p. 10). This is unbearable for Moses, but the recognisable norm of human subjecthood for Aron; one might say, it is the difference between living in the Real and accepting the necessity of the Symbolic, with all its lacks and failures. The completed part of the opera concludes with Moses in utter despair about this:

Inconceivable God! Inexpressible, many-sided Idea, Will you let it be so explained? Shall Aron, my mouth, fashion this image? Then I have fashioned an image too, false, as an image can only be. Thus am I defeated! Thus all was but madness that I believed before, and can and must not be given voice! O word, thou word, that I lack!

As Yerushalmi points out, it is hard to see how it would be possible to complete the opera after this. There is moreover a simple, beautiful and intentional irony in Moses und Aron. Aron is a tenor whose part is sung and in many places beauti- fully so. Moses does not sing, however, except in one brief moment; his part is Sprechgesang: a form of heightened speech used by Schoenberg often to suggest estrangement and difference, as well as to provide a clar- ity of diction that is difficult to achieve in singing. This is a brilliant solution to the problem of what to do with Moses’s ‘uncircumcised lips’, the speech blockage that he complains about several times in the Bible and that is perhaps linked with his anti-linguistic drive. In a medium in which communication is through song, in which song is the basic currency, Moses does not sing. Yerushalmi comments (p. 6), ‘The ultimate irony in Moses und Aron is that speech is the symbolic equivalence of inarticulate- ness’. But maybe the whole of the relationship between Moses and Aron also conveys this: knowledge of God will always be inarticulate; its translations will always be distortions, embellishments, conjecture, 64 S. Frosh compromise. Moses is one of the least compromising figures in the Bible; thus he needs his Aron, the one who can make his words into speech. On the other hand, it is all words in very important ways. In the Bible, Moses, the man of blocked lips, is also the one who speaks fluently and passionately throughout the book of Deuteronomy, the one who praises and appeals to the people, who defends them through words and who blesses and warns them of what is to come. Zornberg (2015) notes the poignancy of this in her account of Moses’s disappointment at not being allowed into the Promised Land; she also suggests that the problem might not be so much one of speech but of reception—that it takes 40 years (the time the Israelites spend in the wilderness) for a pupil to understand a teacher. Yerushalmi, picking up on the link between Schoenberg’s portrayal of Moses and the twelfth-century polymathic commentator Maimonides’ passionate rejection of all attempts to describe God, notes the contradictions:

Maimonides and Schoenberg assure us, in words, that no words can describe God. But even the awesome and austere tradition of verbal negation must rely on words. In Moses und Aron Moses is, negatively to be sure, as verbal about God as can be, stringing beads of glistening adjectives: unvorstellbar (‘unimaginable’); unsichtbar (‘unseeable’); unüberblickbar (‘ungraspable’); unendlich (‘unending’); unausprechlicher (‘unutterable’); but also ewig (‘eternal’); allgegenwärtig (‘ever-present’); allmächtig (‘all-powerful’). And how many musical compositions of Schoenberg are set to words, and what of the texts he himself wrote to convey his thoughts, including the massive Theory of Harmony (Harmonielehre)? For Schoenberg was both Moses and Aron, as I dare say Freud was too, and the rest of us as well. (Yerushalmi 1992, pp. 18–19)

All this is to say that in these identificatory models, however much one pushes for purity and certainty, something else enters in—a twinge of suffering, perhaps, or a glimpse of hope. If one is to stay human, it is impossible to keep in the negative and equally impossible to adopt the absolute position of the one who knows. If Moses could not do it, if Schoenberg had to relent and create his Aron, if Freud (despite his admiration for abstraction and reason) had to fill his desk with ancient figu- rines, then who are we to know better? In the construction of cultural Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 65 identities—here, riven out of the experience of antisemitism and exile, as well as positive identifications—there are no simple truths; everything has to be adapted and adopted, compromised and made partial.

Exile

The ghost that haunts us is also the guarantor of disruptive uncertainty. Even the most tyrannical of identificatory figures—in this example, Moses—is restored to human discomfort: ‘Thus am I defeated!’ Wandering in the wilderness, in daily communion with God, he might have thought that truth was his to hold; yet in the essential matter of communication, of passing something on, he needs translation and knows that this means that something will be corrupted in his message, something will be lost. Zornberg (2015, p. 309) suggests that at the end of his life Moses has come to realise something essential about the nature of teaching, that his words must model for the people ‘a process of coming to the knowledge that holds ignorance at its heart’. The notion that the ‘heart’ of knowledge is a form of benevolent ignorance is a familiar one in psychoanalysis, whether it references the ‘negative capability’ beloved of the followers of Bion (1970, drawing on a quotation from Keats that refers directly to ‘uncertainties’) or the Lacanian refusal of ‘knowledge’ as that which misses the point of psychoanalytic understanding. Here is Nobus and Quinn’s summary account of this latter idea:

Rather than facilitating the accumulation of knowledge, the analytic position is geared towards the ‘fall of knowledge’, which implies that the search for (better, truthful) knowledge is turned against itself, in the direction of an emergent non-knowledge. … If anything, the analyst attempts to exor- cise the spectre of ‘full knowledge’ by pinpointing its fundamental inconsistency and clearing the ground for its dialectical counterpart—the subject-less, acephalic knowledge that goes by the name of the unconscious. (Nobus and Quinn 2005, pp. 22–23).

The lack of knowledge, or nonsensical knowledge, that this version of psychoanalysis promotes is not an empty knowledge or indeed an attack on knowledge akin to ‘minus K’ (Bion 1970). Instead, it references a kind 66 S. Frosh of openness, involving clearing a space to enable something new to occur, without specifying what the newness might be; waiting, not backing away, allowing something to happen; observing, reflecting, repositioning. This space of newness is never completely new. It always involves rep- etition, in which whatever is expelled from the Symbolic comes back to haunt it. This does not mean that everything reduces to trauma; the examples given in this paper have been more to do with the ‘trilling wire’ of connected identities than with the resolution of traumatic experiences. What keeps recurring can feel like a dead weight that has to be exorcised to allow the living to get on with their lives. Yet it can also be an appeal to bring into the Symbolic—into the realm of human communication— things which are shadowy and difficult to speak about, but are nonetheless true. These things do not have the form of an all-or-none revelation, in which everything is fixed in its place for all time. Instead, at least if they can remain connected to the exilic and diasporic, to the precious ‘wilderness years’ of creative growth, they can disrupt settledness, making it possible to conceive of a ‘failure to know’ that feeds understanding of the complexity of human subjectivity. I take this to be an example of how the ethical patterns of cohabitation and assembly that Butler (2015) evokes might be achievable: to be open to others, one has to know enough to be uncertain about oneself.

References

Baraitser, L. (2015). Temporal drag: Transdisciplinarity and the ‘case’ of psychosocial studies. Theory, Culture and Society, 32, 207–231. Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and interpretation. London: Tavistock. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life. London: Verso. Butler, J. (2011). Is Judaism Zionism? In E. Mendieta & J. Vanantwerpen (Eds.), The power of religion in the public sphere. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (2015). Notes towards a performative theory of association. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Derrida, J. (1995). Archive fever: A Freudian impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haunted by Uncertain Refrains 67

Fletcher, J. (2013). Freud and the scene of trauma. New York: Fordham. Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. InThe standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IV (1900): The interpretation of dreams (First Part) (pp. ix–627). Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909): Two case histories (‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’) (pp. 1–150). Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. InThe standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An infantile neurosis and other works (pp. 217–256). Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the pleasure principle, group psychology and other works (pp. 1–64). Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. Freud, S. (1939). Moses and monotheism. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937–1939): Moses and monotheism, an outline of psycho-analysis and other works (pp. 1–138). Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. Freud, S. (1961). Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939 (E. Freud, Ed.). London: Hogarth Press. Frosh, S. (2005). Hate and the Jewish science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and psychoanalysis. London: Palgrave. Frosh, S. (2013). Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and ghostly transmissions. London: Palgrave. Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference. London: Lawrence and Wisehart. Hollander, N. (2016). Trauma as ideology: Accountability in the ‘intractable conflict’.Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 21, 59–80. Khanna, R. (2004). Dark continents: Psychoanalysis and colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press. Luckhurst, R. (2008). The trauma question. London: Routledge. Nobus, D., & Quinn, M. (2005). Knowing nothing, staying stupid. London: Routledge. Rose, J. (2003). Response to Edward Said. In E. Said (Ed.), Freud and the non- European. London: Verso. 68 S. Frosh

Rose, J. (2007). The last resistance. London: Verso. Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Said, E. (2003). Freud and the non-European. London: Verso. Singer, I. B. (1974). The dead fiddler. In I. B. Singer (Ed.), The séance and other stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Yerushalmi, Y. (1991). Freud’s Moses. New Haven: Yale University Press. Yerushalmi, Y. (1992). The Moses of Freud and the Moses of Schoenberg—On words, idolatry, and psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 47, 1–20. Zornberg, A. (2015). Bewilderments. New York: Schocken.

Stephen Frosh is Pro Vice Master and Professor in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of many books on psychoanalysis and on psychosocial studies, the most recent of which is Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions. Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset

M. Fakhry Davids

Introduction

A set of beliefs about others is central to the racist mindset. In this mindset, members of an out-group—individuals of a different race, religion, class or culture—are believed to have characteristics that set “them” apart from “us”. Ordinarily, such beliefs can appear to be nothing more remarkable than a set of opinions about what a particular group of people are really like. However, this appearance is deceptive, for under certain circumstances these same beliefs can rigidify and take on the qualities of a delusion—fixed beliefs that resist the force either of reason, or of real evidence, that may call them into question. It is then that a feeling of certainty (Figlio, this volume) that is integral to them stands fully revealed. Psychoanalysts have tended to draw a sharp distinction between beliefs that are delusional, on the one hand, and those that may be held with some conviction but are nonetheless amenable to the force of external evidence and reason. The former are generally viewed as regressive, indicating the

M.F. Davids (*) Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2017 69 N. Mintchev, R.D. Hinshelwood (eds.), The Feeling of Certainty, Studies in the Psychosocial, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57717-3_5 70 M.F. Davids persistence into adult life of modes of functioning associated with earlier periods when the ego—the agency responsible for mediating contact with reality—was as yet undeveloped, leaving the mind more fully in the grip of internal processes than it will later come to be. In delusional states, infantile omnipotence, in the form of the omnipotence of thought, looms large, whilst evidence that is at odds with the inner version of things is unwel- come and forcibly expelled, much as a very young infant might spit out a substance whose taste is unfamiliar—it does not correspond with an expectation based on inner reality. In delusional belief, therefore, unconscious phantasy is dominant and not only over-rules evidence at odds with it; it expels awareness of these aspects of reality. Generally speaking, the persistence of delusional beliefs beyond early infancy is associated with psychopathology, and these beliefs are therefore sharply distinguished from those that prevail in the “normal” mind. In the latter it is possible to incorporate relevant aspects of external reality (such as perceptions of the senses or the views of others) into the inner version of things, even though this may involve a conflicted and painful struggle. The distinction between the normal and the pathological occurs in psychoanalytic accounts of belief in the racist mindset. Fonagy and Higgitt (2007), for example, distinguish benign prejudice, which involves beliefs that prejudge the nature of the other prior to actual involvement with them, but which are nonetheless amenable to change in the light of experience, from its malignant variant, where the belief is fixed and not subject to change. They see the former as an inevitable consequence of the human condition—minds cannot but anticipate experience—whilst the latter, viewed from within their particular theoretical framework, flows from a disorganised attachment structure within the self. It is a manifestation of psychopathology. Figlio’s inquiry into the feeling of certainty, a state of mind that we can all fall into, calls into question the sharpness of the distinction between normality and pathology in the realm of belief. It suggests that there is something pathological hidden within the normal state of affairs. Although the feeling of certainty usually occurs in relation to putative observations about the real world—suggesting that it is built on external evidence— Figlio argues that it stems in fact from the dominant use of internal Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 71

phantasy: it relies on an internal frame of reference for the force of its conviction, much as delusion proper does. This eschews the possibility of transforming “the conviction of certainty … into a conversation among interlocutors who aim to agree and to ground their agreement in evidence”. Satisfaction obtained in the latter way would derive more from achieving coherence, which brings internal belief together with external evidence; its method involves “… congenial agreement among participants [and leads to] satisfaction with a job well-done, rather than the pleasure of phantasy” (Figlio, this volume, pp. 8–9). The pleasure of phantasy is the narcissistic joy of being right; the alternative holds out the more enduring satisfaction of coming to grips with the complexity of the real world as it is and our place in it. The feeling of certainty is an integral feature of belief in the racist mindset. Although couched in external observations of the out-group, the force of conviction behind the idea of “what they are like” relies on a detailed internal phantasy construction. Indeed, the involvement of external observations has a specific role: it allows apparently innocuous ideas about the out-group to be passed off as facts, rather than beliefs that are held with deep inner conviction. In this essay I shall illustrate in detail how this process works. I will begin with an assertion by a victim that racist beliefs were alive at a crime scene and interfered with the delivery of justice. The alleged perpetrator denied this assertion, leading to a stalemate. I will suggest that a psychoanalytic approach can help to shed light on impasses such as this. Turning to the clinical realm, I describe a racist incident that occurred at the beginning of the patient’s treatment and, drawing on information gleaned from the analysis that followed, elaborate on the nature of the beliefs that lay behind the incident. I then outline a general model of internal racism that flowed from this work, which suggests that a racist structure is part of the normal mind and is mobilised under conditions of anxiety. I suggest that the feeling of certainty stems from the operation of this structure, and I go on to consider whether this understanding can shed light on the question of whether racist beliefs may have been in play at the crime scene in question, in both victim and perpetrator. 72 M.F. Davids

A Racist Murder

Late one night in April 1993, a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence was killed by a group of white racist thugs whilst waiting for a bus with a friend. It was not until January 2012, nearly 20 years later, that two men were finally con- victed of his murder, for which they received life sentences. The police had been anonymously tipped off as to the identity of his assailants, including these very men, in the days immediately following the murder. However, a long and extraordinary series of blunders in the way they conducted the investigation ensured that this information was not properly acted on, allowing time to slip by in which direct evidence of their complicity was destroyed. As a result, at two earlier trials—one a criminal, the other a private prosecution—the only direct evidence available was that of Stephen’s companion at the time; his visual identification of the men was, in turn, deemed unreliable, and the suspects were therefore acquitted. This led to widespread outrage that known killers should so brazenly evade natural justice. From early on there were suspicions that antiblack racism was playing a part in this state of affairs. This was of course vigorously denied, a stance reinforced when the Metropolitan Police were fully exonerated by an internal police investigation conducted by a neighbouring force. The government of the day accepted this finding and offered the police their full support, which meant that the matter could be taken no further. However, in the wake of the latter’s defeat in the general election of 1997, a new and comprehensive inquiry into the police handling of the entire case was set up, this time to be conducted in public. The Lawrence family enjoyed full legal representation. That inquiry did indeed find that institutionalised racism within the Metropolitan Police Force had played a key part in the series of blunders that ended up preventing justice from taking its course. The police found this difficult to accept. It had taken more than five years for the details of what actually took place to enter into the public domain. This allowed a level of scrutiny that confirmed that the dynamics of racism had indeed been enacted in the public domain, by an institution of the state, breaching the legally enshrined principle that all citizens be treated as equals by the state. The proceedings offered a rare glimpse into what actually took place in the incident involved in cases like this. Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 73

At the Inquiry, Duwayne Brooks, Stephen’s companion when he was attacked, described what it is like to be at the receiving end of a mindset in which racist beliefs are active. He had just been through a harrowing experience where a white assailant, shouting racist abuse at them, had struck Stephen with a weapon, causing him to scream in pain and fall to the ground, drenched in blood. Brooks tried in vain to summon help from passing cars and called an ambulance, terrified that Stephen’s “life was fading away”.1 It was in this state of mind that the police found him—panicked and desperate for them to drive his friend to a hospital two minutes away, which they “refused to do”. Instead, the police constable seemed to be “repulsed” by his friend’s blood, and when he pointed out the road where the attackers had run, she “did nothing”. We know from his evidence to the inquiry what Brooks made of this response on the part of the officer: he thought there were racist beliefs in her mind, held with such conviction that they exerted undue influence on her behaviour towards him.

It was like she didn’t believe me … she was treating me as if she was suspicious of me, not like she wanted to help… [leaving me] “sad and confused … [that] racists attack and go free, but innocent victims like Steve and I are treated like criminals (italics added).

Caught up in the middle of an utterly horrifying experience, Brooks may have thought that a professional trained in dealing with emergencies would immediately grasp the gravity of the situation and act on it. She should prioritise saving a life and rush his friend to the hospital—he may even have wished that she should drive Stephen there herself instead of waiting for an ambulance. Instead, she delayed. He now sensed that she was repulsed—not concerned or alarmed—by the blood flowing from his friend’s body. This perception, together with her apparent lack of interest in setting off in hot pursuit after the white attackers, suggested to him that a racist belief system lay behind her stance, in which whites are seen as good objects who can therefore expect every leeway, whilst blacks are bad objects who are immediately under suspicion. This system of belief dominated, pushing into the background aspects of reality that, to him, were most pertinent—the risk to a friend’s life, the seriousness of the criminal act and who is actually perpetrator and who victim. 74 M.F. Davids

Two questions arise from this situation. First, was there undue delay in the police officer’s responses at the crime scene? Or was Brooks’ perception of the delay on her part as excessive influenced by his own state of panic stemming from a sense of urgency about getting help to a stricken friend and justice on his behalf by apprehending those responsible? Second, if there was delay, can this be attributed to a feeling of certainty attending racist beliefs alive in her at the time, as he suggests? Evidence was presented to the inquiry suggesting that the police officer did not in fact hold racist views; she was, on the contrary, known to be a diligent and conscientious member of a police force serving an ethnically and culturally diverse population. In the quasi-legal setting of an Inquiry, which relies on objectively verifiable evidence, this implies that if one is known to not hold racist views, then a strand of racist belief such as that described by Brooks could not—or is unlikely to—have come into play at the crime scene. The conclusion is therefore that Brooks’ perceptions as described above are the subjective products of his own mind and do not reflect the reality of what was alive in hers. The logical conclusion of this position is that it is Brooks who has a racist perception of whites, which he projected onto a non-racist police officer. Yet, the Inquiry’s overall conclusion was that institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police was indeed responsible for its failures in the Lawrence case (Macpherson 1999a). We would have to conclude that this did not begin at the crime scene itself, where anxiety is at its most intense. A psychoanalytic framework does potentially offer a way forward since it takes for granted that opposing trends of thought and feeling may well coexist within the same person. Freud himself provides an excellent example of this as far as the study of racism is concerned. In a 1938 piece on anti-Semitism, he comments on the protests of those opposed to the racism of the Nazis:

All these protests, I think, might be preceded by a particular introduction, which would run: “Well, it’s true, I don’t like Jews either. In some sort of way they seem strange to me and antipathetic. They have many disagreeable qualities and great defects. I think, too, that the influence they have had on us and our affairs has been predominantly detrimental. Their race, compared with our own, is obviously an inferior one; all their activities argue in Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 75

favour of that.” And after this what these protests do in fact contain could follow without any discrepancy: “But we profess a religion of love. We ought to love even our enemies as ourselves. We know that the Son of God gave His life on earth to redeem all men from the burden of sin. He is our model, and it is therefore sinning against His intention and against the command of the Christian religion if we consent to Jews being insulted, ill-treated, robbed and plunged into misery. We ought to protest against this, irrespectively of how much or how little the Jews deserve such treatment.” (Freud 1938a, p. 291, italics added)

Freud’s argument is that alongside the conscious strand asserting the Jew’s right to be treated as an equal, in accordance with the values of ordinary human decency, there is a second, unconscious one that subtly asserts his or her inferiority. In the above quotation, Freud frames this in religious terms involving the putative superiority of Christian over Jew, but his argument is not confined to the religious. The discourse of secular writers, he argues, is framed in terms of a “gospel of humanity”, within which the same patronisingly racist stance towards the Jew can be detected. In an area that invites a simplistic split between racist and anti-/ non-racist—as the inquiry had to adopt in relation to Brooks’ allegation—Freud characteristically restores complexity: a set of racist beliefs, held with certainty, can lie hidden in the mind that consciously opposes it and is ordinarily not prone to delusion. Within this framework it is therefore possible to consider as potentially true both Duwayne Brooks’ experience, at the crime scene, of the police officer as racist and the evidence about her general non-racist stance in her personal and professional life. One does not exclude the other. Freud himself, however, did not build on this promising start, stepping back from it since it relied too much on his own personal experience, as a victim of the Nazis, for him to have much confidence in its psychoanalytic objectivity (Freud 1938b). However, I have suggested that it is not possible to study racist phenomena in depth without reference to the impact it makes on the object. To do so systematically, however, our discipline has had to await developments that followed Freud, namely, the emergence of the theory of projective identification and, its clinical corollary, the expanded concept of the countertransference. Projective 76 M.F. Davids identification is a primitive form of projection that is so forceful that psychic content is not simply repressed within the subject’s mind; it is completely evacuated from the mind and lodged, instead, in the object, which is therefore the only locus where it can be accessed (see Spillius et al. 2011). Projective identification typically occurs in disturbed states of mind: repression, which underpins ordinary projection, is the defence of choice within the normal neurotic spectrum, whilst splitting, upon which projective identification is built, is more prevalent in narcissistic, borderline and psychotic states. To study projective identification in detail, it was necessary to recognise that thoughts and feelings projected in this way may surface in the consulting room only inside the analyst, taking their place among the analyst’s own thoughts and feelings (which are extraneous to the patient). The latter had traditionally been conceptualised exclusively as countertransference by Freud and subsequent analysts2—quite literally the analyst’s transference to the patient, which parallels the patient’s transference to the analyst. However, the new observations required an expansion of the concept to incorporate responses within the analyst specifically evoked by the patient (Heimann 1950). At times these can provide the only clue to the nature of split-off aspects of the patient’s mind, and hence it was vital to be able to incorporate this information systematically. The clinical and theoretical validity of both concepts have since been amply demonstrated. These developments are vital to understanding how racist mechanisms work and therefore to illuminating how a feeling of certainty comes to be attached to beliefs stemming from those mechanisms. In the case study that follows, I shall illustrate how those beliefs about the object of racism stem from a particular structure in the mind.

Racism in A Clinical Encounter

Mr A, an intelligent but deeply disturbed young man, sought analytic help having previously tried several other forms of treatment. Though he spoke readily and easily about himself, the atmosphere he created was so cosy that it successfully prevented emotional contact. In his third session, however, a comment of mine pierced his defensive armour and he switched Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 77 instantly from the polite, laid-back gentleman he had been and attacked me so ferociously that my mind was numbed for several hours afterwards. I knew only that I was immobilised by something very powerful inside without being able to identify what that might be. On my way home that evening, a police car sped by, siren blaring and blue lights flashing. In my mind’s eye, I could see them stop and harass some hapless black man—something I had personal experience of. Feelings associated with being racially violated, immobilised and gripped by helpless fury all literally flooded back in. Some hours later I realised that these feelings corresponded to what I had felt after Mr A’s session but couldn’t name: I had felt racially attacked. This response puzzled me since my patient, like the police officer at the Lawrence crime scene, was not a racist. In addition, even after exhaustive reflection, I could find no hint of anything remotely racist in what he had discussed with me. I thus had no choice but to dismiss these associations as countertransference in Freud’s original sense—something of mine and thus extraneous to him—that had imposed itself on my mind in response to his attack. I therefore put it out of my mind. In the following session, however, Mr A said he was anxious that I would not be able to help him in the way that my English colleague, who had referred him to me, might. We discussed this and, as a result of the significance now attached to my ethnicity, I reconsidered my emotional response following the last session as countertransference in the more modern sense. Had I not noticed and grappled with that response after the previous session, it is likely that I would have passed over his mention of my colleague’s Englishness as deftly as he himself was wont to. In fact, it proved highly significant. In response to his anxiety, I tried to open up the question of whether race may have been involved in his attack. However, this hit the nail too firmly on the head: when I mentioned the words “race” and “attack” in the same sentence, he immediately felt accused of having made a racist attack on me. This accusation ushered in a prolonged descent into an openly paranoid transference: he had done something terrible to me, for which he would no doubt have to pay. Now he was on his guard. At the time I recognised only that it had not been possible to open up the meaning his attack on me and what connection, if any, it had with ethnicity/ 78 M.F. Davids race. Instead, we were stranded in a concrete world where there was little or no symbolic functioning and thus limited room for manoeuvre. This understanding helped me to orientate myself sufficiently to his state of mind for the analysis to get under way. At the time I had not anticipated that men- tioning race had instantly robbed him of an entire defensive system, thus exposing the raw impulses it was designed to protect him from. The paranoid transference that arose can be seen as a (normal infantile) defence hast- ily assembled to deal with the impending catastrophe threatened by powerful, raw impulses characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid mindset (Segal 1964). At that time, I had not understood that the use of internal racist mechanisms had, for Mr A, solved an urgent problem connected with beginning the treatment.

Internal Racism

The details necessary to understand the racist attack of the third session emerged gradually in the course of the long analysis Mr A had with me. I have already noted that he was a very disturbed man whose problems, at root, stemmed from the absence in his mind of a containing object. As a result, the prospect of depending on an analyst was, for him, utterly horrifying. Nevertheless, he clung on to the awareness that he desperately needed that help. This created an impossible dilemma, which he solved by projecting the source of the problem—the needy part of himself— into me. It is not uncommon for disturbed patients to do so, but what was unusual was that he used his awareness of the meaning of the colour difference between us as the basis for that projection. He was a native Englishman and he saw me, correctly, as an immigrant; he was also acutely aware of racist attitudes in the country towards brown-skinned foreigners (which he, of course, did not subscribe to). Through projection I was transformed, in his perception, from an individual who happened to have a brown skin (and a strange accent) into a foreigner struggling to find acceptance in a hostile (xenophobic) Britain. His problem of finding acceptance or containment was now relocated in me. Following the projection, this problem—now mine—was to be faced on the street outside, where nameless racists would threaten me. This enabled Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 79 the consulting room to become, from the outset, a very cosy meeting place devoid of real emotional contact. As far as the task of conceptualising the racial dynamic between us goes, what I have been describing thus far is not new. Contemporary psychoanalytic conceptualisations of racism, especially in Britain, recognise the primitive quality of racist projection—it is projective identification rather than projection that is involved (Rustin 1991). Projective identification can account for the following two aspects of Mr A’s defence:

1. A real difference that divides subject and object is identified—in this case skin colour/spoken accent (that marks us out as “English/native” and “foreign”, respectively). Psychically, this lays the foundation for the use of splitting. 2. Unwanted aspects of the patient’s mind are split off and forcefully projected across that divide—in this case a psychotic “infant” desperate for a home/place. As a result, the other is now literally believed to possess those qualities, whilst the patient is free of them—I was the one struggling to find acceptance; he the calm, unflappable gentleman.

However, splitting and projective identification cannot, by themselves, explain why his attack on me had been so extraordinarily violent—he lay into me as if his life depended on it. Immediately before, he had described a disturbing incident involving explosive violence and a delusional mindset, to which I responded with the suggestion that he needed me to be aware of very disturbed states inside of him. I think this cast him too directly as a patient in need, which he experienced as me forcing the initial projection of need (the needy infant) back into him. He heard my comment as a complaint and then attacked me for complaining about him when I ought to be more tolerant. If projective identification were the only process involved he would have stopped at the point where he reprojected the infant into me, restoring me to the role of a complaining infant—a situation that is not uncommon clinically. However, between us things were more complicated. When I made my suggestion, it was as an analyst offering a view of what his communication meant, but he experienced this differently. For him, I violated a set of role expectations seen as absolutely vital for his survival. 80 M.F. Davids

These were located in a highly organised phantasy system, an innertemplate, whose primary function was to ensure that we related to each other in ways that reassured him that his initial projection into me—of the needy infant—remained in place. His role was to “cooperate” by supplying all the details I needed, which serviced a deep unconscious phantasy3 that I was an infant being fed. When I made a comment, he was alert not to the content of what I said—I had a sense that my interpretations did not touch him— but to the fact that what he offered had been welcomed into my mind as a good, life-enhancing feed, which my words that inevitably made reference to his confirmed. I did not scream at him, ignore what he said or spit out his offerings, which meant that those words were being taken in: the infant in me was content. The system was in place. Rather than depending on an object such as an analyst or parent, therefore, Mr A put his trust in this defensive system, which he believed really ensured his mental stability. I sparked off his attack by stepping out of line—I had gone against the demand of the system by asserting my ordinariness: I made an interpretation suggesting that he needed me, as his therapist, to be aware of his disturbed states of mind. If allowed to stand, the words suggesting that he had a need threatened to turn the entire system upside down and thus deprive him of protection felt to be absolutely vital. What followed was, therefore, a desperate attempt to reinstate the system. I had to be turned back into an infant, either a complaining one, which did not quite work, or a bewildered one incapable of thought, which succeeded—at least for a whilst. The moment I violated the demand that I follow only my prescribed role, emergency procedures were thus triggered to reinstate it. Following the initial projection, therefore, a complex inner template governing how we were to conduct ourselves had been set up in his mind. I was attacked only when I was seen as having departed from the script by referring to (as I saw it, or insisting on, as he saw it) my ordinary analytic role. Because I had crossed a sacrosanct boundary, he had to act to force me back into my allocated role and thereby reinstate the system in which he put his trust. This was the aim of his attack. This clinical understanding allows me to complete the picture of how internal racism works by suggesting that, in addition to the two steps already outlined, a vital third one followed: Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 81

3. An organised internal template is set up to govern the relationship between subject, now free of his unwanted aspects, and object, now containing them. Henceforth all their interactions must conform to the demands of this defensive organisation—both parties must stick to their roles. Safety from the feared situation is promised in return for compliance. This requires that the object should not be seen as an ordinary, but should remain visible as the recipient of the original projection; the organisation remains hidden until this demand, that the object must not be ordinary, is breached. At that point the violence behind its opposition to ordinary object relating is unleashed in full.

I think that one aim of this third organising procedure is to cover over the first two steps, which are more recognisably racist, and so to sanitise the situation. What remain visible are innocuous beliefs about what people are like and how they might be expected to be. The fact that these beliefs are based on phantasy construction is concealed and instead the beliefs are seen as accurate descriptions of the way things really are. For example, as a psychoanalyst what could be more reasonable than Mr A’s expectation that I should take in what he had to say and tolerate his feelings? The violence of his reaction when I did not conform to this expectation betrayed the fact that it was a belief underpinned by the feeling of certainty. I am suggesting that the beliefs about subject and object that are encountered in the racist mindset exist within a defensive system such as the one revealed in Mr A, and that the characteristics of such beliefs cannot be fully understood without reference to this structure. Mr A believed that I was an immigrant to this country and, as brown-skinned and non- English, the victim of forces of racism that prevented me being fully accepted in Britain. The defensive structure illuminates the meaning to these beliefs, their function and why Mr A was so dependent on them at this time. If I were to have discussed with Mr A the meaning of the difference in our ethnicity, he would have told me, with some embarrassment, that there were English people who hold unpalatable stereotyped beliefs about brown-skinned immigrants—for example, that they are backward, dirty, lazy, live off state benefits and so on—which they use to justify their hostility to these groups. He would be aware that I would inevitably 82 M.F. Davids

experience the impact of these beliefs from time to time, but it would be clear that he himself did not subscribe to them. He would agree if I said that those who hold these beliefs hate to see the object as ordinary, and if pushed he would no doubt acknowledge that of course nobody could claim to be completely free of such beliefs either. Such a hypothetical conversation with him would have been entirely possible in our first two sessions preceding the attack. It was the anxiety of being forced to accommodate a needy infant inside of himself—to him, an utterly terrifying prospect—that caused these beliefs to coalesce and rigidify as they took their place within his defensive system. There are two aspects of the above material that have a direct bearing on the questions raised by Duwayne Brooks’ perception of how he was dealt with at the crime scene. Firstly, Mr A was unaware of any of the dynamics I outlined here; they existed unconsciously. If asked he would have been as dumbfounded as the police officer was by Brooks’ perception. Indeed, my attempt to speak about it had the same effect: he was stunned and alarmed by what he felt was an accusation of racism since he not only held liberal beliefs but had also entrusted his treatment to a brown-skinned immigrant analyst. The fact of the lack of awareness of this dynamic, therefore, does not necessarily rule it out. Secondly, from Mr A’s point of view he felt wrongly accused, which led to the paranoid transference. He himself was completely unaware of the racialised defensive system that was in operation, and the only hint of its existence was to be found in my response—for some reason unfathomable at the time, I felt racially attacked. However, had I not identified this countertransference response, and struggled with it, I would not have succeeded in engaging him in the analysis, and the understanding of these mechanisms would not have been opened up. Deprived of the possibility of doing such in-depth work in public or legal settings, the interrogation of racism there usually ends in a stalemate where one party feels victimised by an unprovoked racist attack, whilst the other is completely dumbfounded by this accusation. Conscious beliefs—they are decidedly not racist, and can produce evidence in support (“some of my best friends are black”)—are then produced to counter a web of beliefs and the role expectations that flow from them, which are clung to with delusional certainty, but which do not exist in the light of Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 83 consciousness, as my case material shows. This is how far the inquiry was able to take Brooks’ perception of racism on the part of the officer. Ordinarily that would have to be the end of it. However, because of the forensic nature of the inquiry a further piece of evidence, crucial from a psychoanalytic point of view, is on public record. On the morning after the murder, the police officer visited the hospital where Stephen was taken to find out whether she “could have done more” (Norton-Taylor 1999, p. 30). We could infer that, away from the heat of the incident, she had recovered from her anxiety and felt guilt—had she delayed too long?4 This corresponds to Brooks’ experience of delay at the scene and answers the first question I raised in connection with it, namely, whether his perception was accurate or whether it was the product of his own panic at the crime scene. Both parties present, it turns out, agree that there was delay. However, where he attributes this to a set of racist beliefs in her about which she had the feeling of certainty—she acted entirely in accordance with them—she flatly denies this. Can the two be reconciled? Evidence of the officer’s guilt is analogous only to Mr A’s mention of Englishness in the session: it suggested a link with racism but did not constitute evidence of it. It was the inquiry into that possible link that provided the evidence. Based on his deep paranoid reaction, together with material that followed, in time, it became apparent that his internal racism involved a relationship between a white English “self” and a brown-skinned immigrant (from the Third World previously colonised by Britain) and that this relationship was itself projected into his more overtly racist compatriots. At the time the only hint of something racist in his mind existed exclusively in the countertransference (in the modern sense). As far as the police officer is concerned, we would have to consider that Brooks’ perception of something racist—the equivalent of something sensed in the countertransference in the clinical situation—may have been accurate but that the officer, like my patient, was completely unaware of it, much as Freud had suggested is the case in those who publicly profess non-racism. However, the absence of a proper analytic setting means that we cannot explore this question with the same rigour as was possible as far as Mr A’s racist attack was concerned. Instead we must be content to rely on general findings deriving from the model of internal racism to deepen our consideration of whether and if so, how, racist dynamics may have 84 M.F. Davids been present and played out at the crime scene. First, I must spell out further aspects of internal racism and the place it occupies in the mind.

The Racist Mindset as Normal

What follows is a summary of a fuller discussion of the theoretical impli- cations that flow from the clinical account I have given above (Davids 2011). My central contention is that a relationship between self and racial other exists in every mind and that this relationship is embedded within a paranoid us-them defensive system. This system functions like a pathological organisation. Our inner world is populated by an array of objects particular to each one of us, but some occur in every internal world and can thus be thought of as part of the structure of the mind. Self, mother, father and superego fall into this category, and it is to this list that I think the racial other belongs. This figure may be someone of a particular race, culture, religion or gender affiliation or who has particular qualities (such as speaking with a particular dialect) that identify them as belonging to the out-group and thus attracts the stereotyped beliefs, usually negative, associated with that group. The racial other exists in a paranoid relation to the self. This mode of object relating dates back to the infant’s earliest days when the paranoid- schizoid mode prevails and anxiety that threatens to overwhelm the ego is managed through splitting (see Segal 1964). At first the third object,5 usually the father, is recruited into the role of the bad object—separate and distinct from the mother—in an attempt to create a benign protective circle around the mother and infant. Instead of unmanageable anxiety, the infant now has a known enemy. With the growth of depressive position functioning (Klein 1932), and the greater integration that this enables, the infant moves on from this mode of being, but it reappears at around eight months in the form of stranger anxiety (Spitz 1950, 1965). By now the benign circle has been expanded to incorporate the father and other family members, and the stranger is recruited into the role of the bad object, of whom the child then becomes phobic. The paranoid mode of relating to the stranger also wanes, at about 12 months, and I have suggested that it makes a further, final, appearance at about 3–4 years, when the child is sufficiently aware of stereotypes within his or her world. Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 85

The object of social stereotyping is now installed in the inner world as a permanent bad object and the racist structure set up. Because the beliefs about this object are in line with the consensus in the child’s world, they are not likely to be challenged; since one limits contact with the out- group, there is little opportunity for reality testing, as was the case with the father and the stranger. Faced with unbearable anxiety, it will henceforth remain possible to invoke this defensive mode of operating, as Mr A did. Turning now to the nature of the relationship with the racial other in the inner world, I have suggested that the place of the racial other is that of a bad object, and that the relationship with this object exists in an organised system of phantasied beliefs. The most complete theorisation of such systems is that of the pathological organisation (Steiner 1987, 1993). Steiner sees them as phantasy systems that mediate contact with the outside world, protecting the patient from unbearable primitive anxieties (paranoid-schizoid and depressive) mobilised by object relating. They do this by “holding” the patient—safe in the arms, as it were—and have been most extensively studied in the borderline patient. The borderline patient distinguishes between actual contact with the world and awareness of it. Real contact with others is tolerated, but only to the extent that allows need satisfaction, following which there is a systematic rewriting of the history of that contact and how it is to be seen. The role of others responsive to one’s needs is minimised, and things are reconfig- ured so that the primacy of the defensive system—an internal construction— is asserted. To this end, a complex set of phantasies is needed to constantly monitor transactions with others and reinterpret them in a way that shows how the system, through its control, is to be credited with taking care of one. The relationship with the object thus comes to be held as strictly sec- ondary, which elides into it being incidental. These organisations have a stranglehold on the mind, and thus be viewed as psychic retreats from which it is very difficult to break free. If others fail one, it confirms how inadequate they are; if they meet one’s needs, it proves how well the system mediating the contact is arranging things to minimise anxiety. Either way, therefore, the system’s claim to the patient’s loyalty is enhanced. Almost every interaction with the outside world therefore strengthens the system’s hand, and real learning from experience—learning about the true nature of the object—is minimised. Instead of being deepened and enriched 86 M.F. Davids as a result of involvement with others, the ego’s capacity for object relating thus remains limited and impoverished, and relationships that are formed— as they must be—end up thin and lacking in depth. Although Mr A was deeply disturbed, the defensive system he deployed at the outset of his treatment was not a pathological organisation: in his pathological organisation, he projected an idealised internal mother into his object, leaving him as the infant that found refuge from the demands of the world in the arms of that mother. In this system, however, he projected that infant into the object: I came to embody the dependent infant and all its struggles. This was therefore an alternative arrangement constructed opportunistically around the observation that the difference in our ethnicity is suffused with social meanings that allowed him to rid himself of his infantile dependency into me. Since these meanings were at odds with his personal stance as a tolerant liberal, he did not feel responsibility for my plight. Freed of the infantile aspect of himself, he became preoccupied with absolute loyalty to the system that had rescued him, a feature of defensive organisations in general (Rosenfeld 1971). I went on to show how primitive psychic themes, both paranoid- schizoid and depressive in nature, are regularly encountered in the racist mindset. I argued that unlike the borderline patient, for whom the defensive system mediates most of their contact with the outside world, in the normal mind, the influence of this system is much less pervasive. However, in the face of anxiety, it is readily mobilised, and apparently innocuous beliefs about the racial other then become more rigid and intense (e.g. Sherwood 1980), revealing the extent to which the inner processes of projection imbue them with a sense of certainty.

The Racism of Everyday Life: What Belongs to Whom?

With this model in the background I can now return to the questions raised earlier about what took place at the Lawrence crime scene in each of the individuals involved. The model suggests that in a situation as fraught as a crime scene, racist dynamics are readily mobilised in each of Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 87 the parties. The accounts that I will put forward here are of course schematic; their accuracy or otherwise could be evaluated only by direct evidence obtained from the individuals concerned. As indicated, Duwayne Brooks felt that a set of racist beliefs influenced how he was seen and treated. To him, this involved a split between black and white, with blacks cast as bad objects and white as good: the black victim falls under suspicion in the first instance, but the white perpetrator is granted sufficient leeway to make a clean getaway.6 This suggests that during the delay a thought deriving from stereotyped racist beliefs was running through the police officer’s mind and preoccupying her. For example, if the stereotyped belief were that black youth are inherently violent, she may have been trying to keep open the possibility that these young men might have been involved in a fight that went wrong, which the story of white assailants, told with such urgency, was intended to cover up. This is, of course, speculative, but whatever its specific content, I think that Brooks felt the impact of a racist defensive system being active in her mind at the time—in the same way that a clinician might sense something in the countertransference. If such stereotyped beliefs were in operation, they clearly functioned outside of the officer’s conscious awareness, and a psychoanalytic inquiry—individually or in a group—would establish more accurately the precise nature of her internal racism: who is “us”, who “them” and how are they to relate to each other. Assuming that she grew up in Britain as a native citizen of England, her most likely original (childhood) racial other might have been from any of the other home nations (Ireland, Scotland, Wales), from a different social class (“posh” vs. “poor”), across divides of region/dialect (north-south) or religion (Anglican, Catholic, Jewish), depending on the divisions available in her world. If she moved to London when the number of immigrants was growing, these groups may have displaced the original racial other in her mind; or she may have made common cause with them and intensified her differences with the original racial other (e.g. the backward Irish, Scots or Welsh). Upon joining the police force, its racialised canteen culture (Macpherson 1999b) might have enabled her to project her internal racist into one of her more overtly intolerant colleagues (as Mr A had done). 88 M.F. Davids

Whatever the identity of her racial other, the nature of that relationship or its locus, there is always guilt associated with internal racism. In the police officer’s case, her guilt, which she acted on the following morning, relates to the fact that such systems take temporary control of the mind and filter out aspects of reality—here, the urgency of the situation. I have suggested that this can be thought of as guilt at the fact that we all have an area of racist functioning in our minds and that it comes to the fore in the cross-race/cross-culture encounter and lies behind the anxiety and awkwardness that attend such interchanges. Usually it produces either political correctness or a paralysis of one’s functioning (e.g. Dalal 2008). In ordinary life this may be an uncomfortable fact that has to be endured, but for those with a public service role in a multicultural society, some familiarity with these inner racist mechanisms and the fixed systems of belief they spawn can reduce their power to take over and control a situation in a defensive way. Of course, it is necessary to reach the unconscious levels of the mind in such work (e.g. Davids 2013). Whatever the nature of the internal racism in the officer’s mind, it is also clear that in Brooks’ mind a white-black racist relationship existed during their encounter, and it would come as no surprise were this not an isolated occurrence but a more stable feature of his mind. That is, that his internal racism takes the form of an empowered white figure—the racial other— and a disempowered, dark-skinned immigrant, reproducing internally a division that continues to mark our postcolonial world today (Treacher 2005). This is the same as the internal racism in Mr A’s mind, with the position of self and racial other reversed. We would have to conclude that he had internalised the racism of the world that he grew up in and that this recreated internally the prejudiced beliefs the world held against him. Frantz Fanon (1952) spoke of this as the black problem—a negative identification against his own dark-skinned self. This is hard to bear—it is enough that one suffers in the external world—and creates a temptation to project the racist attitudes and beliefs into an external figure. The danger in doing so is that rather than recognise this as an internal problem (i.e. one that involves phantasied relationships within the mind), it becomes con- flated with external reality, where one then looks for redress. Does one, then, owe it to oneself to become more aware of these issues in order to free oneself of this inner legacy of growing up in a postcolonial world? Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 89

In conclusion, I have tried to show that an understanding of the psychodynamics of racism is essential to illuminate how a set of beliefs about the racial other is held onto with a certainty that derives from the projective processes involved in creating that object in the first instance, and the role of inner phantasy in regulating the relationship between self and racial other. These processes take place outside of conscious awareness and leave seemingly innocuous observations about what the racial other “is really like” as their only conscious derivatives. These putative aspects of reality, in turn, are intended to disguise the centrality of inner phantasy in the whole process.

Notes

1. This account, including quotations, is from a report of evidence given to the inquiry in The Guardian, 16 May 1998. 2. It was the involvement of his countertransference feelings to the oppo- nents of Nazism that, I argue, persuaded Freud to step back from the position he outlined in the above quotation on anti-Semitism. 3. A derivative of this closer to consciousness is the idea of me as a foreigner trying to find my way in the terrain, alien to me, of his internal world. 4. She was reassured that there was nothing more she could do. 5. Mother and self are the first two. 6. All of this was confirmed later, at a systemic level. It was to take extraordinary measures to eventually bring the killers to justice; and the police did place the victim’s family, including Brooks, under surveillance, a fact that they successfully concealed from the various Inquiries into these events, perjuring themselves in the process (Evans 2015).

References

Dalal, F. (2008). Thought paralysis: Tolerance, and the fear of Islam. Psychodynamic Practice, 14(1), 77–95. Retrieved from http://www.informaworld. com/10.1080/14753630701768982. Davids, M. F. (2011). Internal racism: A psychoanalytic approach to race and difference. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 90 M.F. Davids

Davids, M. F. (2013). When the outside world changes: A group’s attempts to emerge from apartheid. Forum: Journal of the International Association for Group Psychotherapy and Group Processes, 6, 13–33. Evans, R. (2015, July 2). Police facing claims that senior officers knew about spying on Stephen Lawrence family. Guardian Newspaper, London. Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin white masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Fonagy, P., & Higgitt, A. (2007). The development of prejudice: An attachment theory hypothesis explaining its ubiquity. In H. Parens, A. Mahfouz, S. Twemlow, & D. Scharff (Eds.), The future of prejudice: Psychoanalysis and the prevention of prejudice. New York: Jason Aronson. Freud, S. (1938a). A comment on anti-Semitism. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII: Moses and monotheism, an outline of psycho-analysis and other works. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1938b). Anti-Semitism in England. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII: Moses and monotheism, an outline of psycho-analysis and other works. London: Hogarth. Heimann, P. (1950). On countertransference. International Journal of Psycho- Analysis, 31, 81–84. Klein, M. (1932). The psychoanalysis of children. InThe writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 2). London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Macpherson, W. (1999a). A summary of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry: Report of an inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny. Norwich: HMSO. Retrieved from http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/tlru/Lawrence.pdf Macpherson, W. (1999b). The Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Book, Norwich: The Stationery Office. Retrieved fromhttp://www.archive.official-documents. co.uk/document/cm42/4262/4262.htm Norton-Taylor, R. (Ed.). (1999). The colour of justice: Based on the transcripts of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. London: Oberon. Rosenfeld, H. A. (1971). Contribution to the psychopathology of psychotic states: The importance of projective identification in the ego structure and the object relations of the psychotic patient. In P. Doucet & C. Laurin (Eds.), Problems of psychosis (pp. 115–128). Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica. Rustin, M. (1991). The good society and the inner world: Psychoanalysis, politics and culture. London: Verso. Segal, H. (1964). Introduction to the work of Melanie Klein. London: Heinemann Medical Books. Sherwood, R. (1980). The psychodynamics of race: Vicious and benign spirals. Sussex and New Jersey: Harvester Press and Humanities Press. Internal Racism: Belief in the Racist Mindset 91

Spillius, E. B., Milton, J., Garvey, P., Couve, C., & Steiner, D. (2011). The new dictionary of Kleinian thought. London and New York: Routledge. Spitz, R. A. (1950). Anxiety in infancy: A study in its manifestation in the first year of life. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 31, 138–143. Spitz, R. A. (1965). The first year of life. New York: International Universities Press. Steiner, J. (1987). The interplay between pathological organisations and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 69–80. Steiner, J. (1993). Psychic retreats: Pathological organisations in psychotic, neurotic and borderline patients. In E. B. Spillius (Ed.), New library of psychoanalysis (Vol. 19). London and New York: Routledge. Treacher, A. (2005). On postcolonial subjectivity. Group Analysis, 38(1), 43–57.

M. Fakhry Davids practises full time as a psychoanalyst. He is a Fellow and Training Analyst of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, and a Member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists. He is Honorary Senior Lecturer, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, and Visiting Lecturer, Tavistock Clinic, London, and was formerly a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Honorary Consultant Psychologist at the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (Palgrave Macmillan). Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation of the Personality

R.D. Hinshelwood

The contrast between the certainty of a belief system and the certainty of a reasoned and evidenced piece of knowledge has been a preoccupation since ancient times. Plato in his dialogues has one of his young students say:

That is a distinction, Socrates, which I have heard made by someone else, but I had forgotten it. He said that true opinion, combined with reason, was knowledge, but that the opinion which had no reason was out of the sphere of knowledge; and that things of which there is no rational account are not knowable—such was the singular expression which he used—and that things which have a reason or explanation are knowable. (Plato, Theaetetus; trans. Jowett (1892). p. 83)

That is to say, states of certain belief can dispense with reality and reason and lose none of the feeling of certainty. This chapter will contribute to the discussions in this book concerning the state of mind in which beliefs are held with a certainty, but without a lot of coherent reasoning.

R.D. Hinshelwood (*) Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

Certain beliefs are not such a rare occurrence even with ordinary people. Under the stresses of a psychoanalytic session, even the analyst needs to try to gauge when he says something to ward off a state of uncertainty; for instance, Britton and Steiner (1994) make the distinction between a ‘selected fact’, in the sense of a scientifically evidenced idea (Poincare 1907), and an ‘overvalued idea’, meaning a psychologically defensive mental construction:

[The overvalued idea] is spurious and results from the facts being forced to fit an hypothesis or theory which the analyst needs for defensive purposes.... an overvalued idea is more likely to be sought when uncertainty cannot adequately be contained. (Britton and Steiner 1994, p. 1070)

Mostly the distinction between knowledge and a defensive pseudo- knowledge (or certainty) is based on some appreciation of the actual reality of others. However, this is somewhat problematic when that reality is other people’s subjective states and our evaluation of them. In the case study of the Rat Man—a patient with obsessional compulsive disorder—Freud recognised a phenomenon he called the ‘omnipotence of phantasy’. This occurred when Freud realised that the Rat Man only had to think in his mind of an aggressive or sadistic act, and he felt the guilt and shame as if he had in reality done the deed he imagined. There was a kind of certainty about this experience for the Rat Man who failed to grasp the distinction between reality and phantasy. In this book, we are concerned with what we might instead call the omniscience of phantasy, the conviction that something is certainly true just because we think it is so. Then there is a confident neglect of the reality of things in favour of a belief system that comes from some other source. Freud’s description of the reality principle (Freud 1911) came most clearly from his understanding of the way that people in psychotic states abolish reality from their minds and retreat to a disorder in which the pleasure principle dominates. Although this loss of reality in madness is characteristic, there is a similar kind when a neurotic patient distorts his world with his defences and repetitions (Freud 1924). In substitute formations that keep fears in a state of repression, perception is distorted towards seeing the substitute in phantastical terms; the fear of spiders or mice, for instance, is not realistic, and it is not amenable to reasonable discussion. Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 95

Some people’s sudden alarm at seeing a spider is as if it threatens some lethal contaminating influence if it makes a physical contact. The reality is that the vast majority of spiders are not poisonous. But the experience is of an alarm which is so certain it must be heeded immediately. Such certainty, coming from somewhere other than reality, arises in the unconscious contents of the mind. In other words, the neurotic is occupied with risks to his or her internal world of impulses and not the external world which threatens the psychotic. In this chapter I explore the internal world of phantasies and impulses in the racist mindset. I focus on racism as one of the most profoundly certain set of attitudes that people can hold, which can potentially moti- vate them to commit the most extreme acts of violence and inhumanity to each other. The power of that kind of certainty needs some explanation, which cannot be gained from conscious rational thinking. Since psychoanalysis accesses aspects of the person that are not normally available to observation, the clinical method can provide a perspective on what seems so intractable to ordinary conscious methods of influence. I consider two clinical examples, one demonstrating how racist views can be suddenly aroused by a social connection and the other demonstrating a more entrenched set of racist attitudes persistent and stabilised over a prolonged period of the person’s life. Furthermore, I argue that racism is widespread in human societies, because there is a basic internal configuration of the normal and abnormal personalities onto which social denigration of the ‘other’ naturally hooks. I propose to consider first those internal aspects of the human personality which act as that hook onto which socially prevalent prejudicial attitudes may be hung.

The Internal Intolerant Object

The internal world in Klein’s descriptions is a variable landscape of objects and relationships which evolve fluidly from moment to moment. That fluid change occurs under the influence of internal pressures and also from the encounter with external object. There are deeply hidden aspects of the personality which come to the fore from time to time and which, under conditions of humiliation and dependency, can form a pathological 96 R.D. Hinshelwood organisation in the mind known as negative narcissism. As Rosenfeld explains,

[P]art of the self exerts its power and superiority over life and the analyst, standing for reality, by trying to lure the dependent self into a psychotic omnipotent dream state which results in the patient losing his sense of reality and his capacity for thinking. (Rosenfeld 1971, p. 175)

This organisation of the personality, divided into warring parts, was first appreciated in work with schizophrenic patients, although the omnipotent dream state in which reality and thinking disappears is hardly uncommon in everyone else. Rosenfeld pictured the omnipotent anti- reality side of the personality (or rather his patient did) as an internal mafia gang. It is a tyrannical influence within the person that disconnects the person from essential aspects of his own reasonable self and appreciation of his own circumstances. Rosenfeld attributed negative narcissism to a traumatic confrontation with a dependency on some external other, an environment which fosters and nourishes. That grandiose part of the person feels no dependence on anything other than himself and freed from having to justify his state of mind to anyone else. This part of himself competes to overwhelm and dominate that other part of himself which is willing to accept reality, the reality principle and the need to think about uncertainties which reality poses. There is here, a structure of the personality which is called, after Rosenfeld (1971), a pathological organisation (Meltzer 1968; O’Shaughnessy 1981).

Group Manifestations

What needs to be emphasised, however, is the fact that racism in not just an individual phenomenon but also a collective one. This raises the question of how it is that a group of people can hold a similar omnipotent certainty about some other group. To answer that question I turn to Freud’s major work on group psychology (Freud 1921) which drew first on the French social psychologist, Gustave Le Bon. According to Le Bon, the members of a group ‘feel, think, and act in a manner quite different Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 97 from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation’ (Le Bon 1895, p. 29). This is a surprising feature of group behaviour because the individual is normally thought of as a given and consistent set of characteristics and abilities. This observation challenged the accepted view of human beings as autonomous individuals in control of their own actions, and this led Le Bon to view crowd behaviour as degenerate. Consequently, Le Bon described the change of personality as it sweeps across a group as a ‘contagion’ as if it were a physical pathology. Whilst taking Le Bon’s description seriously, Freud set out to do more than describe; he sought to explain this phenomenon, whether it was degenerate or not, employing his notion of the ego-ideal. He had understood in his paper on narcissism (Freud 1914) that much of the libido is focused inwards on a structure in the mind he called the ego-ideal, which is composed of the various ideal images of how to behave and be, which in the course of childhood development a person inter- nalises from his own parents and others. Ten years later Freud would develop this conception as the super-ego. Processes of internalisation were of interest to him in various theoretical ways, but for our purpose, he was interested in how this ego-ideal could be radically modified especially be exchanging it for something else. Freud’s group psychology followed Le Bon’s observation of a change when in a group, by his own reflections on the way a person under hypnosis changes. The state of hypnotic trance was for Freud an example of how the person can lose the integrity of this inner world. He specifically thought that the ego-ideal containing the sets of standards the person lives by may be radically altered:

[T]he criticism exercised by that agency [the ego-ideal] is silent; everything that the object asks for is right and blameless…. The whole situation can be summarized in a formula: The object has been put in the place of the ego ideal. [The personality] is impoverished, it has surrendered itself to the object. (Freud 1921, p. 113)

Here there is a radical re-organisation of the personality. A new set of standards has, without reason or thought, come to replace the ego-ideal. In the place of the ego-ideal is the hypnotist. The person, or ego, suffers a 98 R.D. Hinshelwood

significant loss of its capacity for judgement and gives itself over to the other person. In doing so, it establishes a form of solidarity with whatever the hypnotist says or asks. Freud went further and reflected on the passionate state of being in love, which he saw as a parallel example to hypnotism:

From being in love to hypnosis is evidently a short step…There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist as towards the loved object. There is the same sap- ping of the subject’s own initiative. (Freud 1921, p. 114)

The point here is that the person may in various circumstances undergo a radical change of personality. They lose, to all intents and purposes, their own standards, their ego-ideal—at least they do so for a period of time. Freud then argued that a similar displacement of the ego-ideal may also occur in groups and in societies. He claimed that a condition of belonging to a group is that some standards and behaviours must be common to all of the group’s members. Freud called that new common standard the group ideal. Once the individual’s own ego-ideal is silenced, and the object has been put in its place, then the personality is impoverished and has surrendered to the object. The group ideal displaces other individual internalised representations, and it comes from, and is the prop- erty of, the immediate group. Thus, everyone in the group accepts the same ideal, and in this acceptance, the individual personalities change as they enter the group. The point is that but they change towards the same ideal personality. In popular culture today, this process is now seen as basic to ‘radicalisation’, though it is assumed to be a process affecting only some persons who are in marginal positions and by and large only consciously. In the terms of Freud’s group psychology, this is a continually changing process. For instance, a person going into a hypnotic trance is in the process of establishing a new ego-ideal—the hypnotist. For the moment, the hypnotist becomes the dominating influence in the person’s mind. As the person comes out of the trance, the status quo ante is restored. Similarly, a process can occur with the attitudes of various social prejudices. A particular prejudice is adopted in social circumstances where Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 99 such attitudes are prevalent and they are installed, or activated, by the pressure of the group. So, through these internalisations, the intrapsychic world gets infected by the standards of the external. That is to say, insofar as the external social world defines values and attitudes, those phenome- nal things become embedded in intrapsychic relations too. Here we see the precise method by which prejudicial relations, standards and values from external objects become hooked in this way. My argument is that this hook within the individual may in some instance be the brutalising internal psychic relations of the pathological organisation, as briefly indicated above. So, social attitudes are not simply internalised and installed like a piece of computer software. There is a receptive ‘hook’ on which such attitudes are hung—that hook is the organisation of the ‘negative ego’ which can, with these social conditions, dominate the internal world. Social prejudices can be accepted as compatible with the domineering internal object which promotes brutalising sets of attitudes within the person. The adopted group attitudes, when taken in and hooked into a pathological organisation will provide a reassuring certainty supported by the aggressive omnipotence/omniscience. Denial of dependence and uncertainty is greatly enhanced by the confirmation from each group member of the certain truths embodied in this group ideal. The hook being the grandiose and unrealistic pathological organisation, prejudicial attitudes can be held whatever any contradictory evidence is presented. The result is that extreme and even terrorist attitudes become quite ego-syntonic. The most callous forms of behaviour including genocides on all continents of the globe are easily sanctioned. And the final point about these group dynamic influences on this adaptable internal world of the individuals is to consider the role of the leader in this. His role is to represent the group ideal and to relieve the members of uncertainty, thought and dependency. His corralling the group in this way plays on aspects of the members’ need for power and certainty and on aspects of his own capacity to embody the representation. There is a potential however for him to exploit it. Should the leader himself be a personality with a deeply entrenched pathological organisation within his own inner world, it would appear that there is a potential for group behaviour to be led towards more overt and less bounded grandiosity and omnipotent certainty as a group. But this is 100 R.D. Hinshelwood going further into speculation than is warranted at this point. I shall now turn to my cases. One of whom displayed less serious conflict over their negative aspects, and although she was challenged at one point by the possibility of being invaded by extreme racial beliefs—characterised, as we are saying here, by certainty and independence—she was in a position to resist the challenge. The second patient, however, lived a life in which she permanently identified with a denigrating set of attitudes that gave her a certainty of her racial superiority; her ego-ideal was already suffused with racist attitudes.

Case A

In this case, there is evidence of a superior, denigrating aspect of Miss A, which formed initially around gender attitudes but which in the right circumstances could suddenly be invested in racist ones. At one point, Miss A struggled between the pull towards, and her push against, an omnipotent narcissistic object relationship. Due to an external occurrence with a member of a terrorist organisation fighting a racist war, her internal world, as evidenced by the transference situation, acquired a racist character. Prior to this occurrence, she demonstrated, at times, a somewhat superior attitude to analysis and to me. This woman in her early 30s was brought up in Britain by émigré Middle Eastern parents. She strongly identified with her parents’ culture and also admired her father’s pro- English intellectual interests. She had a good education and a professional training, though she did not practise in her profession. She was in conflict over her cultural identity as a woman, between her parents’ traditional view on one hand and her professional standing on the other. In the first phase of the analysis, I heard a good deal about her English boyfriend, described as a somewhat ineffectual man. There was some fairly overt scorn of him; for instance, she could bully him into her way of thinking, and she had to look after his things in their flat. At the same time, she conveyed a respect for him as an experienced academic scholar in the same department she worked in. Similarly, her response to my interpretations were frequently to tidy them up, giving a summary more Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 101 articulate than mine. Often, she gave no other response to what I said, leaving me feeling a bit ineffectual too. When I tackled that reaction, she became anxious. For instance,

once when she gave some material about losing her way and had then been afraid of being late, I interpreted a problem of identity as if she was not sure if she was coming to see an analyst or a father. She quite cleverly understood me to be referring to getting lost in her ambiguous feelings about whether she wanted a sexual partner or a paternalistic security. I had meant something like this, though she put it succinctly. She did not give any further associations. I felt a little uncomfortable about my muddled efforts, and remarked, that she wanted to make sense of my interpretations, as sometimes she felt I did not express myself very effectively. She became tense on the couch, and after a moment said: “No, I understood. I was just repeating it so I could think about it.” In fact, I did not at all have the impression she had thought about the point I had raised. On this occasion, I pursued this by saying I thought she wanted to reassure me because she felt I might be sensitive to her opinion. Then she seemed a bit cross that I had not accepted her reassurance. There was a rather tense silence.

In this little sequence she had seen me, I believe, as a bit ineffectual, which countertransferentially I did feel. At the same time, she wished to conceal that degree of denigration and then to restore by her own efforts my peace of mind. Her attempts to restore me to respect were at times quite grovelling. It seemed that she was subjected to some internal voice that then placed her in a lowly position. Thus, I was becoming acquainted with an object characterised by being ineffectual, vulnerable and in need of care. This object however seemed to move erratically between me, whom she had to omnipotently rescue and reassure, and, alternatively, herself in her grovelling posture. At one and the same time, a rather denigratory and omnipotent object in her complemented the weak and dependent one. The omnipotent side of her came to the fore on occasions with a sense of her own certainty and effectiveness, and appeared in the form of material denigrating her boyfriend, and also when she made efforts to rescue me. These efforts, as I understood them, were moments when she had to dissociate herself from me and from any weak dependence on me (or of course from him). 102 R.D. Hinshelwood

As I began to be dimly aware of this configuration, I thought ofstereotyped gender relations in a non-European culture. It seemed to make sense as simply a cultural expectation of women, which she was also reacting against, turning the relationship around at times, so that she could play the role of power and certainty attributed to her own independent side. I would say that this configuration was not especially excessive, and on the whole the organisation of Miss A’s personality was not too divided, not dominated over much by the omnipotent certainties of her negative narcissism. I did not proceed very far with my speculations on how she was dominated by unrealistic certainties. In any case, they came rather slowly to my attention as I got my bearings in this transference-countertransference dynamic. This progress was interrupted when a key occurrence of the analysis occurred after about a year. The same rather brutal kind of dominance struggle occurred, but about a different issue. It was not about gender relations but racial ones. A similar evasion of weakness occurred, with a determination to force particular others into capitulation; this implies that the typical ‘omnipotent narcissistic relationship’ was something generic in her, rather than simply a cultural allegiance.

She came to one session rather shocked. She was uncomfortable on the couch, and though she was silent for a while, her movements were elo- quent, and I wondered what had happened. She told me in her articulate way that she had been approached by a member of a radical group involved in violent action in the Middle East. She was embarrassed that this contact was a highly attractive middle-aged man, who clearly found Miss A sexually interesting. He invited her to become his mistress—or rather one of his mistresses. She was shocked at how tempted she was to give in to this dangerous man. She seemed to disapprove of his unrestrained, and unashamed sexuality whilst also being captivated by it. I found myself also surprised; by a number of things, not altogether coherent—that she was so close to contacts with terrorism; that such a man with a mission should be so lech- erous and dishonourable (as I felt in that moment); that she seemed to be drawn to follow such a brutal violent lead; and not least at a loss to know what I could do interpretively to make this a therapeutic occurrence. My first thought was of her English boyfriend and the cultural choice she was confronted with. In my own perplexity this was what I took up, as it was a well-worked theme in the analysis, and gave me, I suppose, a hand-hold to Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 103

lock on to. She was quiet and seemingly thoughtful, but I felt that it was not a very powerful intervention in comparison with the overwhelming impact the man had had on her. I felt doubtful she would consider my line of thought, when she had such a turmoil in her mind about this man’s offer.

My presentation of this incident aims to indicate the sudden manifestation in external reality of a confident individual with a certainty of purpose that captured my patient’s interest. That interest was in part sexual, though his proposal was not exactly respectful of her; but more than this, he resembled in sufficient detail the omnipotent internal object that had a certainty of purpose and in this instance the certainty of a racist purpose.

In fact, she continued with some details of his approach to her, implying some sense that she was devalued by a view of her as a woman which made her a possession rather than a person. I did then say that I thought that this encounter had caused such a turmoil in her mind that it was a bombshell, and so was unable to collect her thoughts together again properly, but was intrigued and fascinated by a man who could have this effect on her. She did seem a little more thoughtful after that, saying ‘Mm, I don’t know…. It’s a fantasy. He’s a typical Arab…. She had difficulty in recover- ing her articulateness, but she seemed to acknowledge that I was at least trying to understand the problem he had faced her with. Curiously she said nothing about him the next day, and it was almost as if it really had been a transient fantasy. But the day after she told me that she had declined his offer.

However, actually in phantasy he then became a very prevalent figure consciously in her mind for some time. Up to this point, her preoccupation had been with her difficulties in making some integration between two cultural traditions. She had not shown very much interest in the racial differences which were expressed in the violence of the war this man was engaged in.

Shortly after this she told me she was concerned about her appearance. She was an attractive woman, but it troubled her that she was noticeably Arab. She knew there was no particular cosmetic ‘treatment’ to change her skin 104 R.D. Hinshelwood

colour or her features—or even if she’d have it if available. There was a sort of self-mocking quality to this, as if ashamed of a thought she did not quite know what to do with. She told me she had never thought about herself in that way. I said that although on the surface it is unlikely that she had not entertained ideas of being Arab, she was trying to tell me there was something new about the way she was thinking of it. She responded by saying she had wondered, given my profession and my name, whether I was Jewish. When she said this, I felt some alarm, not so much that she was mistaking my actual identity (which I am used to) but that there might suddenly grow up an alienation or hostility between us which at that moment seemed as though it might be unmanageable. She remained quiet, in fact the sessions during this period were characterised by a quiet thought- fulness, less anxious than previously, but more withdrawn.

Although she had rejected the man—as an external object—something quite radical had happened, and he had created a new internal situation for her. Whatever the sexual gratification the man had offered her, he had also offered her a new racist consciousness. She could be, as it were, seduced by his confident certainty in the political purpose he represented in the Middle East struggle. She became troubled by this new consciousness and a concern now that her boyfriend was English. And at the same time, she was unable of course to tell him of the encounter she had had with her terrorist. She felt the Englishness in him devalued her and in turn she retaliated, leading to a stormy period in their relationship. Her fear of my Jewish retaliation led to a continuing quiet (hidden) quality in her relations with me, as if protected by her silence. I shall not detail the working through period. However, it was a relatively good outcome in this case. Over time, it was possible to approach the omnipotent terrorist tendency within her with which she was occupied, as a part of herself. This ‘racist’ phase of her analysis was in a way easier, because it showed up more starkly the potential ideologue, even ‘terrorist’ in her whose certainty had so nearly taken her over. It became more possible to clarify who would dominate and terrorise who in the analytic situation. She became rather anxious to restore me. And slowly she could see the value of, and her dependence on, my help for understanding this. As a result, she began to feel more relaxed in her analysis. Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 105

Eventually (after four and a half years by now) an incremental step in her appreciation of her boyfriend occurred—he had nice fair hair!—and she tried with some difficulty to acknowledge how hard it must have been to tolerate her. The external encounter with a racist object occasioned the linking up with an internal object, capable of complete certainty. It made her vulnerable to the internalisation of these prejudicial racial attitudes which the external figure represented so confidently. The external man and the dominating internal figure became linked together through the certainty of the racist attitudes. Miss A illustrates my claim that external social attitudes can be swiftly internalised into an existing omnipotent narcissism, to create a racist internal state of mind. The rejection of the external racist object took a couple of days, but the rejection of the internal state of affairs was a matter of years and depended on analytic help. The encounter with this seductive external object coloured her internal intolerant object with racist prejudices, giving rise to an internal racist object. Radical political attitudes had not been a part of this patient, until ‘seduced’ by a propo- nent of political violence, who subverted the sincerity of human relations. So, Miss A’s internal racist object was inconsistent and transitory, suggesting a pre-existing internal ‘hook’ of the kind I described, which could be used temporarily for racist convictions and then discarded, though with some enduring difficulty. The fact that the man entered her mind so decisively and immediately suggests that he did indeed touch on an already present domineering object, with which she struggled. Her pre-existing internal omnipotent domineering object married as it were this new internalised figure. Driven by the intolerable experience of her own appreciative, grateful feelings for those she depended on—her boyfriend, her analyst—Miss A’s difficulties were more than the standard cultural conflict that is familiar enough with émigré families. In social terms, it might have been a choice between her English upbringing and boyfriend versus her seductive Arab inheritance. However, the analysis showed, I believe, this was more; the external drama compounded the internal configuration with the quality of the external occurrence. Miss A did disengage herself from the seductive racist Arab who had represented her harsh, domineering internal object and eventually from the internal terrorist. Interestingly, she eventually found for herself a job in 106 R.D. Hinshelwood which her new political interests could be expressed in less omnipotent destructive fashion. She illustrates the confluence of an internal pathological organisation with racist prejudicial attitudes internalised from society. It leads to the hypothesis that prejudice has this structure: a meeting of an internal organisation of omnipotent certainty based on a negativity together with socially encountered negative attitudes. In other words, an intolerable experience drives an internal state of dominance which in turn absorbs available externally derived attitudes of intolerance. Psychoanalytic treatments are less interested in the social character that a pathological organisation can assume, than in the nature of the organisation itself. In some circumstances, for instance, when patient and analyst are from different races, then social colouring of the organisation may become relevant and highly useful defensively for the patient (see Davids 2011, and chapter in this volume; see also Tan 1993). So, psychoanalytically we are primarily interested in the personality organisation. But in studying the social phenomenon of racism, we are interested in interaction of the social attitudes and the internal organisation. Since that interaction involves an organisation that can only be investigated by the psychoanalytic method, we are dependent on psychoanalytic work. However, from a social science point of view, the internal state that corresponds to racism and other prejudices is necessary but not a sufficient focus. What promotes the social sets of attitudes? Psychoanalysis can say little about that, but there is something psychoanalysts might say. Here there is again a hypothesis for further testing. People with particular kinds of internal worlds may as it were ‘carry’ the attitudes. Miss A however was introduced to them through a dramatic internalisation. But other people seem to live with a stable state of racial dominance inhabit- ing their world, and they might be thought of as ‘carriers’ of a racist culture; Mrs. B, the next case, is my illustration of that carrier personality.

Case B

This middle-aged woman was of Spanish South American origin. Her identity was sufficiently European for her to seek marriage to a successful English diplomat, with whom she then settled in England and had raised Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 107 a family for more than a decade when I met her. However, she had inherited and still owned a substantial farm in her country of origin. She now had to oversee, from this distance, the professional manager of her land. He was mulatto and clearly from a different racial background to Mrs. B. The notion of distance was significant. Her possessions had to be looked after by this intermediary manager, an expert who she employed, which pointed to transference manifestations. Her response to interpretations was cool as if she really was surveying my efforts from a distance. For instance,

She gave some material in which she described a fish on a fishmonger’s cold slab; it looked at the world with an appraising eye. I interpreted her own cool appraisal of the world, including the world inside her which she had invited me to look at with her. She responded, after a moment, with a good humoured comment about lying on the couch like a cold slab, and then her view that English people thought that South Americans, like herself, were usually rather hot-blooded. There was an implication that she was somehow different and therefore wrong to be a cold-blooded South American. At the same time, she could have been indicating that I as an Englishman must be contradicting myself by interpreting her as cold- bloodied when I knew she was South American. I wasn’t sure, and I wondered how I would find out; on the basis of past experience I thought I probably would not. So I waited without saying anything further. My experience of such moments was that she was already getting on in her mind with something else, and would ignore me if I remained quiet in uncertainty. In the event, she left the interpretation, and I did as well. The moment became distant and rapidly lost intensity

This kind of ‘dead fish’ quality to the work was frequent. In fact, anything in her mind beyond her surface associations seemed remote from real investigation and understanding and from any real encounter with it or between us. It was as if she had such apparent certainty about her own views and attitudes that she could only give light attention to those of others, including those she employed to advise her. This was a distant ‘South American’ internal land inside her, which she managed with her required imperious attitude of certainties, and I frequently felt some suggestion of that in her analysis as her attitude to me 108 R.D. Hinshelwood as her analytic ‘farm’ manager. It had the characteristic that she talked of what she wanted, and moved on as she wished, with a certainty that seemed quite impervious to psychoanalytic questioning (or interpretation). My role, as that of her manager, was to follow her thought around in the ways she determined. If I said anything arresting, it was dealt with in an intelligent, formal way before moving on in her own direction. Reports of her attempts to control the manager in South America repeated a version of what I so often felt. Her reported dealings conveyed a haughty imperious attitude, as she controlled him with various communications and visits from time to time to check what he was doing. The impression she gave was that she conducted a busy and superior interference, whilst he did his best to please her. This configuration was reflected in the analysis, where she relied on me to manage her possessions, that is, mental states and internal objects, but to do so according to her requirements. So, this woman can be described as dominated by a superior part of herself, an omnipotent narcissistic self, commanding the valuable experts (farm manager, psychoanalyst) from whom she actually need advice. This distorted ‘use’ of her needed experts suggested a working hypothesis about her unconscious dynamics. That hypothesis is that she was in reaction to a sense of dependency and helplessness in the face of experts. She retreated however from those vulnerable feelings which were carefully excluded from her actual transactions and communications.

On one occasion she told me in a session of her serious suspicions that her manager did not give proper respect to her requests, and indeed to her as his employer. She believed she instructed him on a proper means to develop the land. She insisted that her place as the white employer, and his as a mulatto employee, gave her rights, whatever grade and education he had attained. She conveyed a sense of arbitrary power. I believed for a moment that she was implying, unconsciously, that I did not satisfactorily respond to her demands in whatever way she determined, and whatever my better judgement. This would prevent her dependence coming to the fore with an unmanageable protest. So, I could never be quite sure if I was truly being asked to listen to the dependent and passive ‘dead fish’ self, or whether I really did have to restrict myself and accord her the imperial authority she expected. It was, as always, a sense that I was not quite sure to whom I was speaking—the dependent needy self or the autocrat. I also had the enduring Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 109

conviction that I would not find out; it left me once more in the passive accepting role of powerless indecision. Actually, in that material I was struck by her mention of his colour, a mulatto, as I had not until then been aware of this. Her frustration at his insubordination seemed self-evident to her when she was telling me. I recognised a feeling of wanting to remonstrate with her about these denigratory attitudes. I realised I knew nothing of race relations in her country, and anyway my job was different. I had to think about that protest in me—clearly I identified with the manager subjected to her attitudes which were now explicitly racist. I said I thought she looked down on me, too, as the person who was supposed to look after the distant aspects of her experience, and I listed some of the problems she had come to analysis with—now rather distant in our memories. I said I thought she took a view of me rather as she did of the mulatto man managing her estate, and that she regarded me as a servile assistant to be directed rather than a guide for her own exploration. ‘Hmm,’ she said,’ you do seem a bit like him.’ And she gave a short laugh as if owning to something she felt a little bad about. She added that she was not really racist but that she did think of people like that as natural ser- vants. She did in fact seem to find a protest in her, about her own racism. It was an unusual moment when she could think in a concerned way about herself, her conflicts, and her relationships. However, it seemed somewhat feeble and still did not have the full charge of pain that might be expected from someone expressing a conflict of that kind. There was a sense of shrugging her shoulders as if it did not matter to her. Then she told me, with a rising anger, of something he had done, over which she had not had control. It had had consequences for her, her finances, and her family in England. Even such a small moment when she recognised her own problems and need for help, sent her quickly back into a rage about the insubordination of her manager.

I take Mrs. B’s haughty attitude as a type of certainty that asserted dominance over those who were supposed to help her. Importantly, her attitude was in this case consistently linked in her mind to racial differences, racial superiority and inferiority. So welded were her racist attitudes to her imperiousness that I think she never told me of the racial differences because to her they were so obvious—and she assumed therefore so obvious to me, another white person. 110 R.D. Hinshelwood

In the material just given, a moment briefly emerged and disappeared in rage when she struggled, weakly, against these domineering and inhuman attitudes. Her analysis was so much less successfully than Miss A.

In the end the analysis was not a success. In the last session she presented me at the end with a book. Its title was The Book of Heroic Failures. She laughed very pointedly indicating the failure of our efforts, and her amused indifference to that. However, there was some hint in her smile which suggested a rueful regret—and even a comradely regret—at our failure.

I was left afterwards with a prolonged sense that some part of her that might have valued her opportunity existed but was easily dominated by her resilient haughtiness. The material reveals that a moment when racist attitudes, which she was normally quiet about, became overt and articulated. Her certainty about the races and their social relations was so unquestioned that it needed no discussion; she assumed those reference points were mutually understood. Her haughtiness was designed to keep the dependent side of herself as a dead fish and was naturally aligned with, and welded to, social attitudes which she must have acquired whilst young—the racial ones. At the same time, a reaction to her own entrenched attitudes did still exist in her, though weakly and transiently. She did, feebly, move away from that racist imperialism, to a more reflective questioning and in the process to a more collaborative moment with me. It was fleeting however. Neither she nor I could sustain it. Like Miss A, a domineering side of Mrs. B was linked with a racial set of attitudes. Despite occasionally a visible movement back and forth between an intolerable helplessness and the attitude of certainty in dealing with the experts, the link was more or less permanent. Mrs. B’s habitual racist attitudes are somewhat different from Miss A who can adopt them and put them down. The question is: what makes the identification of the internal ‘negative ego-ideal’ with racism so permanent in Mrs. B’s case? This question is important psychoanalytically when we consider the possibilities for therapeutic change, but it is also important socially in considering the possibilities for social change. Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 111

Conclusion

We could say that Mrs. B was more dangerous that Miss A. It is much more likely Mrs. B would influence Miss A, in a social context than Miss A would influence Mrs. B. In this sense, Mrs. B could be called a ‘carrier’ of these racist attitudes, capable of infecting others, as it were. The evidence of just two cases cannot do more than prompt further investigation. I am suggesting a factor within the personality, committed to omnipotent certainties in order to avoid a weak dependency with its consequent uncertainty. That factor is powered by a negativity that abolishes ordinary human values, relations and engagement. We can also note from the material I have given that racism may be transient or permanent. The difference would seem to derive from the degree to which a personality can manage the negative aspects of the ego. Certain people with a harsh domineering internal object are susceptible to adopting racism (or some other prejudicial certainties) as a central part of their character. Others perhaps are less occupied by such an internal conflict between helplessness and certainty and less at risk of permanent prejudicial commitments. We all perhaps have some greater or lesser propensity for this kind of internal dominance, which explains why racism can become endemic, and can do so alarmingly quickly, as the Nazi period in Germany demonstrated. The personality structure organised around the deep division over negativity is comparable (and probably related) to Bion’s description of the psychotic and nonpsychotic parts of the personality (Bion 1957). It would seem that none of us is completely free of the possibility of embracing pernicious social prejudices; and it is a defensive wish fulfilment to imagine we can be non-racist. Thus a racist society provides the wherewithal for the harsh internal object to manifest itself as the certainties of racism. A psychic ‘garment’ of racist attitudes can be acquired from social circumstances, but this requires the internal domineering object to don such a garment. Other prejudicial attitudes are also stored in the wardrobe—a politically totalitarian outfit, for instance, which when taken off the peg and inhabited by this harsh internal object creates an internal totalitarian object comparable to the racist object (see Sebek 1998). Equally, gender prejudices can 112 R.D. Hinshelwood be inhabited in this way to create serious even rapacious prejudicial manifestations. The approach of psychoanalysis to unconscious dynamics can illuminate these mysteriously intractable aspects of human beings which a psychology of the conscious is rather helpless to explain. This essay attempts to keep these unconscious aspects of the individual in proportion with the pressures of social influences and to keep in mind the interlocking of both sets of determinant factors.

References

Bion, W. R. (1957). Differentiation of the psychotic from non-psychotic personalities. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 38(3/4), 266–275. Reprinted in Bion, W. R. (1967). Second thoughts (pp. 43–64). New York: Jason Aronson. Britton, R., & Steiner, J. (1994). Interpretation: Selected fact or overvalued idea? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75, 1069–1078. Davids, F. (2011). Internal racism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Freud, S. (1911). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. In Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 218–226). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1914). On narcissism: An introduction. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 73–102). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 67–143). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1924). Loss of reality in neurosis and psychosis. In The Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 183–187). London: Hogarth. LeBon, G. (1895). Psychologie des foules. Paris: Alcan. English translation (1995) as The Crowd. Brunswick, NJ and London, UK: Transaction Publishers. Meltzer, D. (1968). Terror, persecution, dread. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 396–400. Re-published (1973) in Sexual states of mind. Perth: Clunie). O’Shaughnessy, E. (1981). A clinical study of a defensive organisation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 62, 259–369. Being Racist: The Certainty of a Pathological Organisation... 113

Plato, trans. Jowett, B. (1892). The dialogues of Plato (Vol. 4, p. 83). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poincaré, H. (1907/1914). Science and method. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Rosenfeld, H (1971). A clinical approach to the psychoanalytic theory of the life and death instincts: An investigation into the aggressive aspects of narcissism. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 52, 169–178. And republished (1988) in E. Spillius (Ed.) Melanie Klein Today Vol. 1. London: Routledge. Sebek, M. (1998). Post-totalitarian personality—Old internal objects in a new situation. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 26, 295–309. Tan, R. (1993). Racism and similarity: Paranoid-schizoid structures. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 10, 33–43.

R.D. Hinshelwood is Professor in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, and previously Clinical Director, the Cassel Hospital, London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He has authored A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1989) and other books and articles on Kleinian psychoanalysis. He has an interest in how psychoanalysis may contribute to social and political science. ‘Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try to Screw You’: The Feeling of Certainty and the Mexican-Origin Border Patrol Agents

Natalia Hernández Jiménez

If I claimed to be absolutely certain of something, it would surely be reasonable for you to ask me for the evidence which left me without any doubt whatsoever. But what kind of evidence could possibly afford me such confidence? Perhaps the strength and internal consistency of logical statements would do the job. But once we get to the messy business of concrete social, historical and political reality, the possibility of justified absolute certainty becomes very doubtful indeed. Yet it is precisely in these realms that people often display such certainty. If the evidence required here cannot be found, why do people feel certain about, say, the nature of people of certain nationalities, classes or sexualities or about the cause of contemporary social problems and so on? In this paper, I argue that certainty in (at least some) social or political contexts is not a considered response to our experience, but an orientation towards our experience. In other words certainty precedes our experience and therefore forms it. This is in contrast to the everyday understanding

N.H. Jiménez (*) Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

© The Author(s) 2017 115 N. Mintchev, R.D. Hinshelwood (eds.), The Feeling of Certainty, Studies in the Psychosocial, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57717-3_7 116 N.H. Jiménez of certainty as a position that succeeds experience and therefore is formed by it. In this way I follow Karl Figlio’s psychoanalytic account of certainty as ‘an absolute state of mind’ or ‘feeling’ (2006, this volume). In particular, I hold that we can understand certainty through projection, where this is defined as a process in which unconscious qualities, feelings and wishes (which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in herself) are expelled from the self and located in another person. I utilize this account of certainty to shed light on a specific socio-political issue: prejudice and discrimination between members of the same ethnic group. During fieldwork carried out in the US state of Arizona, I observed pervasive tensions amongst the Mexican-origin population. One particular instance of this I found intriguing was the convictions held by Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans about the United States Border Patrol officers of Mexican descent.1 The latter, also known as the ‘coloured migras’2 by the Mexican-origin population, were usually described by both Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans as ‘harsher’, ‘less empathetic’, ‘stricter’ and even ‘worse than the Anglos’ in both applying the law and in interrogat- ing people of Mexican-origin at the border-crossing stations. And this is even the case amongst those that have never encountered the Border Patrol officers. Figlio’s account of the role of projections in unburdening unconscious feelings of unease can help make sense of how a level of certainty can be held without sufficient evidence. However, as I shall argue, this kind of explanation is still too general to fully clarify what is happening in this specific phenomenon. I think we can see why it is specifically the Mexican- origin Border Patrol officers who are the target of projection by supplement- ing this account with postcolonial considerations on identity consolidation and skin colour. I do this by using Fakhry Davids’ (2011) psychoanalytic interpretation of Frantz Fanon’s ‘black problem’, thereby fleshing out Figlio’s theory of certainty. In the following section, excerpts from interviews with three Mexican- origin residents in Arizona show that even when Mexican-origin residents have had no first-hand experience with the Mexican-descent Border Patrol officers, this certainty that they will be attacked by the latter is deeply engrained and part of a broader problem of tensions within this ethnic group. ‘Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try to Screw You’... 117

Maria, Aaron and Alejandra3

Maria was born in Yuma, Arizona. Both of her parents were from Sonora, Mexico. Her father had migrated without the required documents to Arizona when he was quite young, but after residing in the United States for more than ten years he had obtained a green card, which allowed him to work ‘legally’ in the country. Similarly, her mother had also migrated without documents to Yuma as a child where she eventually met her hus- band. During the interview, Maria and I talked about Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans. Maria said that she believed Mexican immigrants have a tendency to make Mexican-American people feel as if they are not ‘truly’ Mexican. She gave an example involving a couple of people who she worked with. One of her Mexican co-workers frequently made jokes and patronizing comments, such as ‘yeah, you are a bit Mexican’ or ‘you pass as a Mexican’ to a young Mexican-American man who also worked with her. According to Maria, comments and behaviours like these caused Mexican Americans to feel ‘embarrassed’ and as if they had to ‘try harder’ to be ‘truly’ Mexican. I then told Maria that in interviews I had conducted with Mexican immigrant respondents, they claimed that the Mexican-American population made them feel unwel- come in the United States. Maria admitted that she had heard or seen instances of this phenomenon herself and believed that the reason it happened was due to the ‘poor’ image of Mexican immigrants in the United States:

I’ve had the opportunity to interact with Mexican-American people who say ‘look how all these people (Mexicans immigrants) who are still coming to get their papers and to take advantage of the country. They only hurt the name of the Mexican population in the United States… and make us look as if we don’t have values or anything.’

I then asked Maria if she knew anything about why Mexican Americans took jobs in the government to stop Mexican immigrants coming to the United States, for example, as Border Patrol agents and Operation Streamline4 judges, to which she replied: 118 N.H. Jiménez

One of my cousins became a Border Patrol agent. Can you imagine how my family reacted? They were like ‘Oh my God! He became a Border Patrol! He turned against our own race because he is ashamed of being Mexican!’ But when I talked to my cousin, he said to me “I prefer to be the one who deals with the Mexican immigrants than to let a white racist person do it (…) I want to see if the Mexican immigrants are treated well and with dignity”.

Maria said it was a commonly expressed view that both Latino and Mexican-American Border Patrol agents were ‘harsher’ than the Anglos. She had heard that the Mexican migras or the coloured immigration officers had a tendency to ask for a ‘second control revision’—a request to provide additional information than what is usually required to enter the country—to most visitors and residents of Mexican descent. I asked Maria if she could explain why the Mexican-descent migras might behave ‘harshly’ towards other Mexicans. Maria replied that they were ‘just doing their job’, even though some people felt that they were not showing solidarity with people who shared their nationality and ethnic background:

I mean, they are not doing anything illegal or anything inhuman (…) they are just telling immigrants “you have to stop, because if you get closer or if you try to cross the border you are going to get in trouble”…I believe, I don’t see it as discriminatory behaviour, I see it just as a job they have to do.

Although Maria recognized that there were tensions and conflicts amongst Mexican-descent tourists/residents and Mexican-origin Border Patrol agents, she thought that there was a rational justification for the latter’s behaviours. Unlike Maria, who believed that Mexican-descent Border Patrol agents could be a source of help and support for the Mexican-origin population, Aaron had very different views. Aaron was born in Sonora, Mexico. Despite the fact that he had been residing in Arizona for more than fif- teen years by the time I interviewed him, he still did not have the necessary legal documents. Therefore, Aaron was an ‘illegal immigrant’ in the United States. I started the interview by asking him if he still saw as many Mexicans in Arizona as when he had first moved to the state—more specifically, since Arizona had become tougher on immigration in 2010— to which he replied: ‘Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try to Screw You’... 119

No, not really. Before there used to be more jobs and it was easy to cross the border. Now it is more complicated… Like coming from Nogales to Tucson…nowadays there are many immigration stops and more police officers, something you wouldn’t see before.

Aaron claimed that since the mid-2000s crossing the border had become ‘dangerous’ and ‘risky’. I asked Aaron what he was most worried about if he did get stopped in Arizona. He replied that he was afraid of the kind of officer who might stop him. Aaron claimed that officers made decisions based on their feelings. Consequently, there were some who would call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) straight away, whilst others would simply issue a ticket and let the person go.

It all depends on how much the officer likes you and who he is. In the time I’ve been here I’ve heard so many times that if you are stopped by a Mexican migra…you are basically fucking screwed. They are very racist, and instead of trying to help you, they try to screw you…I am not saying that the grin- gos5 or the blacks are not mean too, but from what I’ve heard, they don’t try to screw you, they even try to help you.

For Aaron, the reason why Mexican-origin agents lacked a sense of ethnic solidarity with other Mexicans was because of their feelings of ‘envy’ and ‘selfishness’. What he meant was that Mexicans did not want to see someone who was ‘like them’ succeed in the United States. He also believed that Mexicans enjoyed ‘screwing each other’ and that this was part of the ‘Mexican culture’. To illustrate this point, he told me how his Mexican co- workers were reluctant to provide any kind of assistance to new Mexican- origin workers. According to him, if he asked a ‘gringo’ to train a new waiter or cook he would accept it and get on with his work ‘without a problem’, whereas if he asked a Mexican, they would do it grudgingly, treating the new employee ‘poorly’. Furthermore, Aaron stated that if he had to choose he would certainly prefer to be stopped by a white officer than by a Mexican one for the following reason:

Because it might be too risky… The problem with the Mexican officers is that you do not know how they are going to be… I feel I have more to lose with someone from my own race than with a white officer…seriously…I’ve 120 N.H. Jiménez

been stopped so many times because the car I used to drive had a broken light. I mean…I’ve been stopped by Chicanos,6 by Mexicans, and by gringos, I have to say I’ve had better experiences with the gringos.

By way of further illustration, Aaron told me about an occasion when he had been stopped by a gringo police officer. After requesting Aaron’s documents, the officer asked Aaron if he was drunk to which he replied that he was not. The officer asked him a couple more questions about what he had been doing during the day and where he was from. He told Aaron that the reason why he had been stopped was because one of the backlights on his car was broken. Finally, the officer advised Aaron to go to the nearest auto-parts shop and buy some tape to fix the light. Once Aaron had concluded his story, he took the opportunity to reaffirm his conviction that Mexican-origin officers are more prejudiced towards Mexicans in the United States by speculating that his experience would have been completely different if he had been stopped by a Mexican- origin officer rather than a white officer. Aaron claimed that, instead of being treated leniently, he would have been accused of driving under the influence of alcohol, or even be sent to ICE. Like Aaron, Alejandra also believed that Mexican-origin people in the United States felt ‘envy’ as a consequence of seeing someone from their own ethnic group succeed. She was born in Queretaro, Mexico, as were her two younger siblings. She recounted how hard it had been for her to move to the United States when she was only fourteen, especially trying to communicate in English, even though she had already been studying English for some time prior to that in Mexico. During the interview, Alejandra and I chatted about the Mexican-descent Border Patrol officers. She claimed that Mexican-descent Border Patrol officers were ‘harsher’ than their white counterparts. Alejandra said that she had heard about this phenomenon several times. She emphasized that, in her experience, Mexican-origin people generally were competitive or hostile towards each other, rather than show solidarity or support. As an illustrative example, she told me about how her grandmother had been the target of ‘envious feelings’ as a result of ‘making it in America’: ‘Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try to Screw You’... 121

I’ve noticed for example that with my granny, many of her Mexican friends acted very weird when she bought her car and her house. They would envy her because despite not having any documents when she came here, she managed to ‘make it in America’. And some of her friends, which are even U.S. citizens, haven’t been able to achieve anything in this country. So it is not uncommon to hear that among us, we attack each other because we don’t want others to be better than us.

Following these remarks, I told her that other interviewees had said that they blamed Mexican immigrants for ‘bringing problems’ to the United States. Specifically, they highlighted the fact that newly arrived Mexican immigrants would not allow ‘already settled Mexicans’ to be perceived as ‘assimilated’ in the country, and consequently, the Mexican- American population behave discriminatorily towards them in order to avoid being seen as ‘undocumented immigrants’, to which she responded:

Mmmm… For me, the main problem is that we attack each other because of bitterness and perhaps… the gringos see this and then they feel like they have the right to attack us too. Because they see that we are not a strong community…or that we don’t help each other.

I tried to follow Alejandra’s rationale for how the gringos perceived the Mexican community. I asked her if she believed that because Mexicans were not seen as a ‘strong community’ and did not ‘help each other’, the gringos deliberately employed people of Mexican descent as Border Patrol officers, as part of a strategy to create discord amongst people of the same ethnic background. Alejandra believed that this was the case. She justified her point of view by stating that she had heard that Mexican-descent Border Patrol officers treated the Mexican undocumented immigrants ‘poorly’. I then asked her if a Mexican-descent Border Patrol officer had ever stopped her, to which she replied she had not, but that it was a ‘common belief’. Even in the book The Devil’s Highway, by Luis Alberto Urrea, she had read about the Mexican Border Patrol agents. 122 N.H. Jiménez

Certainty, Projection and Discrimination Against the Mexican-Origin Border Patrol Agents

In each of the above cases, then, we can see an unwarranted certainty about the Mexican-origin Border Patrol agents. In the case of Maria, although she believed Mexican-origin Border Patrol agents were simply doing their job when it came to dealing with other immigrants, she nonetheless was certain that the ‘coloured migras’ were ‘harsher’ than their white counterparts. In the case of Alejandra, she positioned herself and the Mexican immigrant population as ‘good’, contrary to the Mexican-descent Border Patrol officers, who were ‘harsh’ and ‘bad’. Aaron mentioned that after being stopped on different occasions whilst driving his car, he had become convinced that he would rather be stop by a white officer instead of a Mexican-origin officer. The rationale to prefer a white officer and not a ‘coloured migra’ was mainly because Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers often lacked ethnic solidarity, meaning that Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers could be ‘racist’ towards other Mexicans, and instead of being ‘helpful’ they could find ways to ‘screw you’. Although Maria, Aaron and Alejandra did not have numerous interactions with Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers (or no interactions at all, in the case of Alejandra), they still were certain of their opinions about them based merely on their brief encounters and what they heard second- hand. How could they be so sure that the Mexican-origin Border Patrol agents were ‘harsher’, ‘less empathetic’, ‘stricter’ and even ‘worse than the Anglos’? This can be explained as qualities that they unconsciously believe themselves to have that they find unbearable and cope with them by expelling and projecting them upon the Border Patrol agents. The fact that certainty is felt in the absence of reasonable evidence can be explained in this way. Of course, such unjustified views about people might be explained by saying that each of the subjects simply accepted (and per- petuated) an existing stereotype about the Mexican-origin Border Patrol agents. But to call this an explanation of the certainty involved here is misleading. At most, this common-sense approach merely names the problem rather than answer to it. The virtue of the account I offer here is ‘Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try to Screw You’... 123 that it goes behind the phenomenon, as it were, to offer a hypothesis about why people would hold certain views in the first place. Although this account can explain why individuals in a precarious situation would project unwanted features in order to get rid of unwanted aspects of themselves, it does not seem to help us understand why it is specifically the Mexican-origin officers that are the target. Would it not make sense for them to project onto the white officers? Why do Mexican immigrants such as Aaron and Alejandra not feel trust, loyalty and safety with people who resemble them? One way to answer this question is to say that the ‘certainty’ of the ‘harshness’ of the Mexican-descent Border Patrol officers felt by Aaron and Alejandra (as well as other Mexican immigrants) is triggered by an unconscious fear (‘unease’) of the Mexican- origin Border Patrol’s dark skin colour. Why skin colour should be an important element here might not be immediately obvious. There is no doubt about the importance of the distinction between black and white in the United States and the role this has played in discrimination. It should also be added, however, that discrimination due to skin colour is not limited to such strict dichotomies. Various studies have shown there to be a continuum where the life chances of Latinos with more European features (lighter skin colour, straighter hair, thinner lips, etc.) are greater than those with more indigenous features (darker skin) (e.g. Gómez 2000; Montalvo and Codina 2001). As one study puts it:

We found a system of both categorical racial discrimination (exemplified by the U.S. system) and continuum racial discrimination (characterized by the Mexican system). We believe that this racial system exists even today. Specifically, people have paid a penalty for being Mexican, and some have paid an even greater penalty for being both Mexican and dark and Indian looking. (Murguia and Telles 1996: 287)

As a result of experiencing segregation, discrimination and racism from the white dominant population, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans have unconsciously engrained the idea that they are ‘unwanted’, ‘illegal’, ‘second-class citizens’ and ‘bad’. In the case of Aaron and Alejandra, although they did not use the term ‘coloured migra’ to describe 124 N.H. Jiménez the Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers, it is worth highlighting that amongst the Mexican immigrant community this term is commonly employed to describe Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers. Why do Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans use the Border Patrol’s skin colour to refer to these people? Why is this feature so relevant for them? Following Frantz Fanon’s (1952) analysis of the ‘black problem’, the psychoanalyst Fakhry Davids (2011) stresses how in the colony, as in today’s postcolonial world, ‘the dark skin confers an inescapable psychic problem: it invites the projection of undesirable and unwanted mental content’ (2011: 108). As the author points out, projections towards people with black skin can easily be found in the public discourse, such as in ‘the black as an animal, the black as bad, the black as evil, the black as full of rhythm but short on intelligence, and the black, of course, as hyper- sexual’ (Davids 2011: 109). As noted above, although the Mexican-origin population are not black, their dark skin still attracts discrimination and thus can invite the projection of undesirable mental content. Following the thought that Mexicans have engrained the idea that dark is ‘bad’ and white is ‘good’, I would argue that when the law has a ‘dark- skinned’ face—when the law is enforced by a ‘coloured migra’—it is perceived (by the Mexican immigrants) as ‘harsh’, ‘evil’ and ‘bad’. In contrast, when a ‘white face’ enforces the law, then it is felt to be ‘good’, ‘helpful’ and ‘pure’. However, there is also a very important aspect to consider that involves both Mexican immigrants and Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers. This is that both Mexican immigrants and Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers have dark-skinned faces and, in front of the white dominant eye, they are perceived as being identical. This is where the feeling of certainty plays a crucial role when it comes to the interactions between Mexican immigrants and Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers. What I mean by this is that not only do Mexican immigrants project ‘harshness’ and ‘badness’ onto dark skin but simultaneously find familiarity in these faces. Due to the social and political context in the United States (more specifically in Arizona), Mexican-origin people (Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans and Chicanos) are perceived by themselves and by the white dominant population as ‘bad’, ‘illegal’ and ‘second-class citizens’. Therefore, if the Mexican immigrant community ‘creates’ (or experiences) ‘Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try to Screw You’... 125 the Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers as ‘bad’, disloyal and unreliable, then unconsciously they (the Mexican immigrants population) become ‘good’. Badness is therefore in the Mexican-descent Border Patrol officers and not in the Mexican immigrants. By being certain that Mexican- descent Border Patrol officers would be ‘mean’ and ‘harsh’ towards them, both Aaron and Alejandra (as other Mexican immigrants) denigrate those who resemble them and become ‘superior’ within the Mexican-origin population.

Social and Psychological Consequences

Throughout this essay I have argued that, although the Mexican-origin population (Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans) in the United States are target of prejudices and discriminations from the white dominant population, Mexican-origin people are not exempt from practising discriminatory behaviours amongst each other. In order to develop my argument, I have analysed the interactions and experiences of three Mexican-origin people: Maria, Aaron and Alejandra, and the Mexican- origin Border Patrol officers. The analysis of these three people is linked to Figlio’s (2006, this volume) psychoanalytic approach of the feeling of ‘certainty’ and to Davids’ (2011) development of Fanon’s concept of the ‘black problem’. Although this research mainly focuses on the understanding of the feeling of ‘certainty’ and the interactions of different Mexican-origin groups, it also introduces the idea of how unconscious distortions and defences play an important role when it comes to object relations. An important consequence of this phenomenon is the creation of unconscious psychic divisions (such as splitting into ‘good’ and ‘bad’) and their transformation into real boundaries/borders amongst themselves. By being ‘certain’ that Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers will not have solidarity with them, Mexican immigrants perpetuate an inter- minable cycle of prejudice and discrimination between the Mexican- origin populations. This is not to say that the Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers do not contribute to this cycle themselves. In comparison to the white Border Patrol officers, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans have ‘dark-skinned’ faces which, as proposed by Davids, 126 N.H. Jiménez invites the projection of undesirable unconscious content. From the perspective of the white dominant eye, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans are not sharply distinguished. Therefore, these groups face the pressure to differentiate themselves forcefully, even manifesting in aggressive behaviour in order to define who they are. The more alike Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans are (or the smaller differences they have) the more ‘violent’ the process of differentiation will be. And this includes the Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers as much as the Mexican-origin population more broadly. Moreover, nothing I have said should suggest that the Mexican-origin Border Patrol officers do not sometimes, in fact, behave discriminatorily towards those that share their ethnicity. But this fact does not mean that the certainty and conviction with which the Mexican-origin population believe this does not have a deeper source. Indeed, once we think more closely about the precarious and often hostile environment that the Mexican- origin population finds itself in (including the officers), it should not be surprising that complex tensions between members of this ethnic group should arise. In particular, I hope to have shown that the difficulty of coming to terms with self-identity and consolidation in this situation leads to certain damaging forms of mental organization. These psychological consequences also lead to social and political divisions. Now is not the occasion to offer political analysis of the current situation of the Mexican-origin population in the United States. But what this research should indicate is that any attempt to battle against the prejudice and discrimination they face in the United States currently cannot afford to neglect the real and deep roots of internal tensions between members of the same ethnic group. Any defence against prejudice and discrimination in this context must face the barriers to solidarity.7

Notes

1. I use the term Mexican American to refer to individuals whose ancestry is Mexican and whose family has been in the United States for a considerable time, or to people of Mexican descent who were born in the United States. Mexican immigrants refers to individuals born in Mexico but now reside in the United States. ‘Instead of Trying to Help You, They Try to Screw You’... 127

2. Term commonly used by Mexican-descent people residing in Arizona to describe dark-skinned Border Patrol agents. 3. The interviewees’ names have been changed for ethical reasons. 4. Operation Streamline is a joint initiative of the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice in the United States. It consists of a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to unauthorized border crossing by engaging in criminal prosecution of those engaging in it. 5. The word ‘gringo’ is used in some Spanish-speaking Latin-American countries to refer to an English-speaking foreigner, especially a white American person. 6. Chicano (often spelled Xicano) is a chosen identity of some Mexican Americans in the United States. The term is often used interchangeably with Mexican American. 7. I would like to thank John Lumsden for his comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

References

Davids, F. (2011). Internal racism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fanon, F. (1952). Black skins, white masks. New York: Grove Press. Figlio, K. (2006). Absolutism in society and the individual. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 11, 119–143. Gómez, C. (2000). The continual significance of skin color: An explanatory study of Latinos in the Northeast. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 22, 94–103. Montalvo, F., & Codina, E. (2001). Skin color and Latinos in the United States. Ethnicities, 1(3), 321–341. Murguia, E., & Telles, E. E. (1996). Phenotype and schooling among Mexican Americans. Sociology of Education, 69, 276–289.

Natalia Hernández Jiménez specializes in psychoanalytic and psychosocial theories of identity. She has a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex, where she completed a thesis on the relationship between Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in Arizona. The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties and Defences in Times of Trauma and Uncertainty

Christina Wieland

The Feeling of Certainty and Bion’s Container

The past few years have seen an increase of extremist, quasi-fascist organisations and movements in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and a growing number of young men who join them. This calls for an urgent understanding of what drives young men to such extreme actions and ideologies. As a number of authors have shown, young men often seek a sense of identity in joining extreme organisations or in committing individual political violence (Alderdice 2002; Akhtar 2002, 2003; Varvin 2003; Chodorow 2003). Recently Breivik has demonstrated with the massacre of 77 innocent young people in Norway that his pursuit of violent political action was closely related to his pursuit for a secure masculine identity (see Cotti 2015 and also Richards’ chapter ‘Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container’). Italian Fascist and German National Socialist texts extol violence as masculine and as promoting masculinity.

C. Wieland (*) Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

Although recently there has been a great deal of attention given to the fact that more and more girls from Britain leave to join IS in Syria and Iraq, the gender gap remains constant. Out of 800 people who left the UK in 2015, only 100 were women, and these women did not go to fight but to become girlfriends and wives of the men who did the fighting (Witt 2015). This chapter is an attempt to explore further this question through the study of fascism (in its generic as well as its classical meaning). I shall use Bion’s concept of the container/contained to throw some light on the consequences of massive trauma and how it interacts with masculine anxieties and defences to create violent quasi-fascist movements and ideologies that act as containers for these primitive anxieties. (In this paper I shall use Fascism for the Italian and German Fascism of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s and fascism for the generic use of the term.) Bion’s understanding of the functioning of the human mind as a container for the processing of experience and for the creation of individual and social reality will be used as the main tool for such understanding. Bion conceptualised mental growth as a free exchange between what he called the container/contained system. The very beginning of the container/contained lies in the mother /baby interaction. Bion used the example of a baby who projects his fear of dying into the mother. The mother taking in the baby’s fears is able to ‘digest’ them, that is, apply her own alpha function to understand them and make them meaningful. When she gives them back to the baby, they are in a form that the baby can accept and make use of. In this sense the baby re-introjects his own fears in a manageable form after they have been made meaningful by the mother. But more importantly the baby introjects not only his fears transformed but also the mother’s capacity to do so, that is, the mother’s alpha function. The development of alpha function in the baby leads to the development of an internal container which makes sense of emotional anxieties as well as of new experience. This is an optimal state of development in which container and contained grow together to the benefit of both. The growth of the mind and of the individual as a whole is the result of this continuous exchange between the container and the contained. When this kind of container/contained relationship is not possible at the beginning of life, or when it is destroyed through massive trauma, other types of container will be sought where the exchange between the container The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties… 131 and contained does not lead to growth. A rigid container, for instance, does not allow new experience, and the benign cycle of projection-introjection is disturbed (Bion 1962a: 90–94, 1970: 16, 96, 107). The term ‘container’ implies an image of a safe, enclosed space, where development takes place. One is invited (but never explicitly told) to think of the original container of human beings—the mother’s body. The term and the image evoked imply that we never quite outgrow our origins in our mother’s body, our origins in being part of a bigger whole and contained within it, but that we grow by developing ever more sophisti- cated containers through which, if we are lucky, we can grow and thrive and reproduce. The idea of a human being without a container is unthink- able—it is maybe the stuff of nightmares. For human beings the container can only be the human mind in all its ability to represent and make meaning of the world in various degrees of accuracy or in various degrees of illusory thinking. This includes the creation of the human mind in social, political and economic structures and their institutions. The creation of the human mind as a container is related to, but not the same as, the internal good object described by Melanie Klein. The internal good object that Bion describes is an ‘understanding’ object—an object that has a mind and a willingness to be the receptacle of primitive anxieties as well as possess the capacity to digest them. The baby, who has projected her primitive anxieties into the mother, can then introject an understanding object—a thinking and feeling object. With this, the baby introjects the mysterious function that creates meaning out of experience—the alpha function (Bion 1962a: 115, b: 25, 38, 39, 59). A mother’s alpha function is her capacity to create meaning out of the chaos of experience. The ability to create links, symbolise, dream and even to go sleep and wake up are part, as Bion saw it, of the alpha function working on the raw experience (Bion 1962a: 6, 7, 21, 22, 59). This capacity to create meaning out of the incoherence of a stream of consciousness is, perhaps, what makes us human. We could say that in the human DNA there is a capacity to develop this mysterious function (which we know only by its failure) that creates a mental world out of a physical environment. Bion showed that the creation of meaning and the development of the individual are aspects of this mental world and that at the centre of this world lies the ‘link’ (Bion 1962a: 43, 44–45, 47). 132 C. Wieland

The link between mother and baby, between subject and object and between objects—conscious and unconscious—lies at the heart of a world of meaning that is forever shifting and changing and yet has a certain degree of stability. Bion presents us with the model of a large organism where nothing is ever static as long as the organism is alive, and yet the organism as a whole is a stable system. Despite constant changes in the mind of the individual, one can identify oneself. One has an identity. As long as changes are meaningful, or can be made meaningful, changes affect the whole in a way that enhances both the self and identity. They result in what we commonly call growth. This is a model of what Bion calls ‘learning from experience’ which includes a benign and dynamic oscillation between PS and D—with PS standing for the paranoid-schizoid position and D standing for the depressive position and with arrows going in both directions: PS <−> D. In practice this means that a new experience will plunge the individual into incomprehension, a kind of chaos and back to PS until it is worked through by alpha function and can be made meaningful and be integrated into D (depressive position). Remaining in D forever would mean a stable but rigid personality who has closed its eyes to everything new and challenging. This oscillation between PS and D is essential for reality testing and for growth of the container (1970: 124). With the growth of the container a feeling of certainty develops without which ordinary human existence would not be possible—the certainty, for instance, that when one goes to sleep the world (and the self) goes on existing; or when the mother goes away, she will come back; the certainty that the sun will rise again next day, or the certainty that despite changes in oneself, physical and psychological, one continues to be the same person, one has an identity. In other words, ordinary human existence consists of a deeper belief in the continuity of being and of identity, of society and of the world despite constant change. This basic certainty is part of a secure sense of self and a secure sense of identity. In psychoanalytic terms we can speak of Winnicott’s ‘continuity of being’, Erikson’s ‘basic trust’, Klein’s ‘good internal objects’ and Bion’s continuous growth of the container to accommodate the contained, as a basis for a sense of certainty and a secure sense The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties… 133 of identity. A sense of certainty can be linked to a sense that the world ‘makes sense’, that the world has meaning, which in turn is linked to an exchange between container and contained that leads to the growth of the container. When this ‘ordinary’ sense of certainty is disturbed, or worse, when it has never been securely established, various degrees of disturbance may develop such as phobias, obsessional symptoms, chronic anxiety or in more severe cases loss of reality as in psychosis. In other cases, a sudden disturbance of certainty as in trauma, or an inadequately developed sense of certainty, may lead to adopting an exaggerated sense of certainty, a super-certainty, a rigidly held identity that is a total identification with an omnipotent object. We are dealing here with totalitarian phenomena of total identification with a leader, an idea or an ideology. In this case the omnipotent identification protects the individual from fears of fragmentation of the self and of loss of identity. Growth is arrested and a rigid container is established that restricts the free exchange of container/contained. A super-certainty develops that allows no doubt and no interaction with new knowledge. A quasi-religious state of mind is established. The world once again ‘makes sense’ but in a simplified way which only the faithful share. Certainty is restored but it is now related to a lack of change and a lack of exchange with the environment. In this paper I shall refer to the ‘ordinary’ sense of certainty as a state of mind whereby the container is functioning adequately to digest new experience and transform it into meaning in a way that leads to the growth of both the container and the contained. On the other hand, an exaggerated sense of certainty would result in a lack of growth, that is, into a rigid, frozen state where exchange with the world is minimum. In the latter case, the perception of reality is tenuous and as a consequence negative growth will develop where both container and contained are engaged in a self-destructive process. Bion described negative growth and the negative container in the last chapter of his book Learning from Experience (Bion 1962a: 95–99). I shall examine these themes in relation to trauma and the defences against it which includes the creation of the primitive container of fascism with particular emphasis on male anxieties and defences. 134 C. Wieland

Trauma, the End of Certainty and the Smashing of the Container

Trauma was described by Freud first as a breach in the ‘protective shield’ that normally regulates the amount of excitation that the organism is exposed to. A sudden breach in this protective shield exposes the organism to too much stimulation which cannot be processed. In this case the organism is flooded with too much excitation which then produces intolerable anxiety (Freud 1920). Secondly, in 1926 Freud described trauma in terms of the ego’s defences against anxiety. It is now the ego and not the organism that is in danger of being overwhelmed by intolerable anxiety (Freud 1926). This reflected Freud’s development of the tripartite structuralisation of the personality into id, ego and superego (Freud 1923). When a sudden traumatic event occurs, ordinary defences against anxiety are overcome and the ego is rendered defenceless and prey to universal anxieties. Freud distinguished five universal anxieties: birth, castration, loss of object, loss of object’s love and annihilation anxiety (Freud 1926). Caroline Garland describes trauma as an event that ‘overwhelms existing defences against anxiety in a form which also provides confirmation of those deepest universal anxieties’ (Garland 1998: 11). Garland also talks about the collapse of meaning and the collapse of the trust in the protective function of one’s internal good object (Garland 1998: 11). To connect the above with my discussion of Bion’s container, I argue that Bion’s container/contained is primarily an instrument for making sense of experience, both internal and external, and as such is a powerful defence against anxiety. What Freud and Caroline Garland are describing can also be described as a sudden smashing of the container so that it is rendered temporarily unable to process experience. In other words, when experience exceeds the capacity of the container to ‘contain’ or digest it, that is, to create meaning out of it, we speak of traumatogenic experience. When the mind has stopped being able to digest experience, the world is rendered meaningless, frightful and alien. The benign cycle of projection and introjection operated by the container/contained is disrupted or even worse, destroyed. What the individual assumed until now to be ‘common The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties… 135 sense’ does not exist anymore. The safe environment is destroyed and with it the feeling of certainty is destroyed. The individual is flooded with feelings and anxieties that he cannot make sense of. This leads to a state of helplessness, accompanied by fears of annihilation. A state of meaninglessness prevails. However, this would be a short- lived state, as human existence without a container cannot be imagined. The terror of the fragmentation of the personality and of the loss of identity that ensues leads to powerful new defences and to defensive or pathological organisations. A more primitive container will then be established by the individual or society, either in a total or in an encapsulated form. For some individuals, death might be such a container, as death is often imagined as a return to a prenatal world of oneness and security, a primitive container that creates an illusion of security out of fears of annihilation. The weekend dream of a patient might serve to illustrate this need for a container during the weekend and the desperate attempts that the mind of this patient made to find one during the weekend. In the dream he was pursued by Zombies. It was a nightmarish dream in which he could hear the Zombies coming up the stairs and he knew that they will get him—they will get him because he was already taken over by paralysis, by an inability to move and by a strange lethargy as if he were already under their power. Since he could not move, he was bound to be taken over. He felt a strange pleasure in this lethargy. To say that this patient expresses a wish goes against all common sense, and yet that’s what I maintain. I shall try to explain, but before I do this I shall present another weekend dream from another patient. In the dream, the patient is put out at night by his parents as if he ‘were a dog’. He feels that he will die from cold and from unknown dangers. He sees the light of a house and goes there where it is obvious that a witch who lives there will eat him up. Nevertheless he knocks at the door. He wakes up in terror. That both these dreams are attempts to find a container—whatever the container might be—was obvious from the patients’ associations to the weekend as abandonment, being left to die without food or care, being exposed to unknown dangers and wanting to be ‘somewhere inside’. In this sense the second dream seems to be more obvious than the first. Being eaten up and ending up in the witch’s (mother’s) belly is both a 136 C. Wieland wish and a terror. It is a kind of death wish as well as a wish for a utopia, being in a place where no need and no fear exist. The first dream is more difficult to understand, but I think what gives the meaning away is the strange feeling of pleasure the patient feels in this lethargy that takes him over. There is also the fact that Zombies turn everybody they are in touch with into a Zombie. It is as if this dream is an illustration of Earl Hopper’s process of massification (Hopper2003 ) which I will examine in the next section. Being the same, being part of a mass, is a bit like dying—one’s individuality and separateness dies out— both a wish and a terror. This is a new container, more primitive and less adaptive to the environment, that creates a new feeling of certainty.

Groups and the Destruction of the Container

In the previous sections I have connected the feeling of certainty to the adequate functioning of the individual container/contained system as formulated by Bion. I shall now examine how the destruction or threat of destruction of the social container—the community or the state—is experienced by individuals as a threat to their identity and their feeling of certainty. The destruction, or threat of destruction, of the social order or social institutions, the collapse of the state, defeat in war, followed by national humiliation, have the same meaning in the unconscious as a collapse of basic trust, a loss of good internal objects or a collapse of the container,1 ultimately a collapse of the feeling of certainty. Anything can now happen. Fears of annihilation threaten to overwhelm the individual, the group and society as a whole. This is because the nation state is a powerful container that not only protects the citizen against external and internal aggression but one that is also closely woven into the individual’s feelings of belonging and into the individual identity. As Benedict Anderson argues, the nation state is a powerful entity in the minds of people because it makes them imagine strong affinity to others although they might not be related to them and might in fact be very different from them (Anderson 1983). In other words, the abstract notion The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties… 137 of the nation state becomes, through powerful projective mechanisms, an extension of the family and the community. When the state collapses, an alternative container is sought urgently. The primitive fears that overwhelm the population make sure that a primitive container will develop. Out of the loss of certainty that traumatic experience ushers in, a sense of absolute certainty is sought, based on an omnipotent type of mass experience (Hopper 2003). As I argue below, fascism is such a primitive container where omnipotence and absolute certainty prevail. In this case the feelings of ordinary certainty which the nation state promotes are substituted by the absolute certainty and omnipotent control that mass experience and the primitive container convey. Earl Hopper describes the phenomenon of massification as the consequence of traumatogenic experience in groups (2003). In addition to Bion’s three basic assumptions,2 Hopper presents a fourth basic assumption which he relates directly to traumatogenic states. The fourth basic assumption that Hopper adds is incohesion which is a direct consequence of the fear of annihilation. In his book Traumatic Experience in the Conscious Life of Groups, he describes incohesion as ‘a manifestation within the ‘external’ world of the fear of annihilation which, in turn, is a product of traumatic experience within the context’ of traumatogenic processes and within a wider and trans-generational social context’ (Hopper 2003: 53). Traumatised individuals are likely to form groups that are characterised by incohesion and its two manifestations of aggre- gation and massification. He writes:

Aggregates and masses are the two most primitive social formations. They are not merely collections of people, but they are not groups. They are not merely crowds, but nor are they audiences. An aggregate is characterised by a minimal degree of mutual attraction and involvement among three or more people who are neither interdependent nor in sympathy with one another on the basis of shared beliefs, norms and values. In contrast, a mass is characterised by a maximal degree of mutual attraction and involvement among three or more people who are neither interdependent nor in sympathy with one another but who share the illusion of solidarity with respect to beliefs, norms and values, usually for a brief period of time. (ibid.: 67) 138 C. Wieland

Hopper goes on to describe the mass as having the illusion of the ‘perfect group’ and as having some characteristics of Freud’s description of group psychology (Freud 1921).

A mass is characterised by the common investment of ego-ideals into the same person, ideas and values (Freud 1921). By definition this person becomes the leader, and his ideas and values become dominant. On this basis the leader is likely to be the ‘archaic father’. However, more fundamentally the leader is likely to be the ‘archaic mother’. (ibid.: 67)

Hopper goes on to invoke Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s theory of totalitarianism (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1986) and sees the mass, or the illusion of the ‘perfect group’, as representing the mother’s ‘smooth, white womb’ where the members of the group/mass seek absolute safety. The group as the archaic mother has also been explored by Didier Anzieu who talked about ‘the narcissistic omnipotence projected onto the mother/group’ to create the ‘group illusion’ (Anzieu 2001: 57) and by Werner Bohleber (2001) who describes the fantasy of the regressed group as one of narcissistic fusion with the primary object, the mother. It is this last characteristic of the group/mass as representing in the unconscious the safety and perfection of prenatal life and of the mother’s ‘soft belly’ that I would like to explore in relation to masculinity and to primitive masculine defences to do with fears (and wishes) of feminisation and their contribution in the development of fascism both as a state of mind and as an ideology as well as a social and political formation. My main argument is that if massification evokes the mother’s body as a defence against fragmentation and annihilation, it would feel dangerous for men whose identity is already shaken by trauma, unless it is masculinised—unless a masculine overlay of muscle and war machine and of masculine posturing is substituted for a mother’s soft belly. The new primitive container that is created, the sea of steel manifested in the Nuremberg rallies, for instance, is a disavowal of all the fears of feminisation that a resort to the maternal body would create in the mind. The over-masculinised army under a male leader is a guarantee against any hint of softness or weakness—it both embraces the wish to be in the mother’s belly and at the same time denies it (see Wieland 2014). The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties… 139

The Fascist State of Mind and the Feminisation Phantasy

Fascism, as it developed first in Italy and then in Germany in the twentieth century, was based on an ideology of the regeneration of the nation. The concepts of rebirth and regeneration of the nation were central to the ideology of both Mussolini and Hitler. But the rhetoric around the regeneration of the nation had another subtext: the regeneration of masculinity, the making of ‘real men’ out of ‘degenerate’, ‘feminised’ ones. Militarism, violence and war were seen as ways of creating real men and fascist and proto-fascist writers extolled them as ‘beautiful’ and ‘aesthetic’. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the great poet of Italy who was one of the most important ideologues of Italian Fascism (although not directly involved with it), created, like Marinetti, a whole aesthetic of war and violence. ‘I adore war’, he wrote to a friend early in October 1918. And to another friend he wrote ‘For me and for you and for those like us, peace today is a disaster’ (Quoted in Hughes-Hallett 2013: 445). Similarly, Marinetti wrote in his famous Futurist Manifesto: ‘We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. We want to demolish the museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice’ (Futurist Manifesto). But it was not just D’Annunzio, Marinetti and the fascists. We can say that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the European zeitgeist was firmly on the side of violence and war as energising, cleansing, creative, regenerating. George Sorel wrote Reflections on Violence where he extolled ‘the symbolic power of violence and the creative potency of mass hysteria and mob action’ (Hughes-Hallett 2013: 349). In Germany, Thomas Mann praised the collapse of peace at the beginning of World War I and Rainer Maria Rilke extolled war as ‘deadly enlivening’ (ibid.: 353). Mussolini called himself an ‘apostle of violence’ and celebrated the ‘moral force’ generated by war. And this ‘moral force’ was certainly the male domain. He wrote: ‘War is for man what maternity is for woman’— meaning what? That a man is only fulfilled if he becomes a warrior? That war is a fertile, creative act? Maybe both of these things. Italian Fascism’s 140 C. Wieland preoccupation with the glory of Rome and Hitler’s idealisation of the heroic, chivalric medieval Germany are both instances of the quest for heroic masculinity, unadulterated by the ‘softness’ of democratic and feminist values. There is no doubt however that this whole masculine ‘aesthetic’ of war and violence was there before Fascism and even before WWI. The causes are complex and concern fears of loss of masculinity and potency that reflected the sociological changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the loss of paternal authority, the rise of feminist values, sexual liberation and the removal of sexual taboos. Although women were still under the domination of their fathers and husbands, the sexual liberation of women had already begun. In fin de siècle Vienna the ‘femme fatale’, the sexual woman, was seductive, allur- ing and extremely threatening. It seems that without taboos woman’s sexuality becomes dangerous, even deadly. She threatens man with annihilation. As Karen Horney writes in ‘The dread of woman’:

Men have never tired of fashioning expressions for the violent force by which man feels himself drawn to woman, and side by side with his longing, the dread that through her he might die and be undone. I will mention particularly the moving expression of this dread in Heine’s poem Lorelei, who sits high on the bank of the Rhine and ensnares the boatmen with her beauty. (Horney 1971: 134)

Horney mentions also Schiller’s poem ‘The Diver’ which describes a squire who dives into a dangerous whirlpool to win a woman but he is struck by horror as he encounters ‘the perils of the deep by which he is doomed to be engulfed’ (ibid.: 133). In Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, love, sexual attraction and death are closely entwined as in many other late romantic operas, novels and poems where Liebestod becomes a deeply seductive idea that draws men away from life and their ‘manly’ duty. The ‘femme fatale’ exposed man’s deepest desire and most acute fear. Sexual love and the merging of the lovers together exposes the vulnerability of masculinity and the male’s deep wish/terror to disappear into the female body (see Wieland 2005).3 The fear of being swallowed up by the sexual woman was coupled with another fear that emerged at the turn of the century—that of feminisation. The fear of feminisation, together The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties… 141 with misogyny and anti-Semitism, has been a theme that preoccupied the European male of the late nineteenth century. Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character, with its blatant misogyny and anti-Semitism, is a lasting monument to the zeitgeist of the day. Weininger proposed that femininity and Jewishness are closely linked and saw the ‘effeminate Jew’ as an image of degeneration (Weininger 1906). For a while, following his spec- tacular suicide in the house where Beethoven died, Weininger became a cult hero, and a spate of suicides by young men followed. I would thus claim that fears about masculinity and its survival were projected onto the Jews who were seen to undermine the male heroic masculinity that would withstand the allure of passivity and femininity. Sander Gilman (1993) has adequately documented these nineteenth-century beliefs in the ‘degenerate’ and ‘feminised’ Jew. As Eric Santner (2000) writes, referring to Gilman’s research on the nineteenth-century association of Jewishness, feminisation and degeneration, ‘The degeneration of the male Jew in particular, as Gilman’s research has amply documented, was, in scientific and popular literatures, obsessively figured as correlative to his feminization – that is to his status as a man not quite at home with his masculinity…’ (ibid.: 108). And a little later, he quotes Gilman discuss- ing the case of Schreber whose psychotic illness had been analysed by Freud: ‘Daniel Paul Schreber was afraid he was turning into an effeminate Jew, a true composite of Weininger’s images of the Jew and the woman’ (quoted in Santner 2000: 109). My main point is that fears of feminization were part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and formed, in disguise, the ideology of fascist ideas of the regeneration of the nation. In Nazi Germany these fears and images were used to create a paranoia that saw Jews as ‘poison- ing’ and ‘infecting’ the pure blood of the nation. Democracy itself, with its ‘soft’ ways, was blamed for the degeneration of the nation and of masculinity. And democracy was a Jewish creation according to Hitler. Consider the following extract from Mein Kampf:

Confronted with the Jewish-democratic idea of a blind worship of numbers the army sustained belief in personality. And thus it trained what the new epoch most urgently needed: men. In the morass of a universally spreading softening and feminisation, each year three hundred and fifty 142 C. Wieland

thousand vigorous young men sprang from the ranks of the army, men who in their two years training lost the softness of youth and achieved bod- ies hard as steel. (Hitler 1925: 255, italics mine)

And consider the speech of Ludolf von Alvensleben, a General Lieutenant in the Nazi ranks addressing militia squads in West Prussia: ‘You are now the master race here. Nothing was yet built up through softness and weakness… That’s why I expect, just as our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler expects from you, that you are disciplined, but stand together hard as Krupp steel’ (quoted in Kershaw 2000: 231, italics mine).

Trauma and the Primitive Container of Fascism

I have defined trauma as the smashing of the container—individual, social or political—and I have described the consequences of trauma as the exposure of the individual to unmanageable fears of disintegration and annihilation. I have also examined the social and individual reactions to these fears, and I have, following Earl Hopper, looked at the process of massification as a reaction to the above fears. My contribution to Hopper’s thesis is to explore the massification process as a feminisation phantasy. My argument is that if the (passive) wish to be absorbed into a bigger whole, or to merge with the ‘perfect group’, is experienced in the unconscious as a wish to be absorbed into the mother’s body, then the mother’s body becomes a pollutant, a source of further phantasies of feminisation and loss of masculinity. That these fears are also wishes makes the whole problem extremely complex. On the one hand, there are fears of annihilation and fragmentation, while on the other hand there are also fears of feminisation and loss of masculinity, as the new container (mother’s body and mind) becomes a source of polluting presence in the mind. Fascism offered a solution for these masculine anxieties by providing a new primitive container that claimed to take care of all the above anxieties. However, Fascism seemed to have solved two problems at the same time—it provided the perfect, homogenised group where merging with the leader and merging between the members of the group was promised as a solution to fears of disintegration and annihilation, while at the same time it promised its members a masculinity ‘hard as Krupp steel’. A mother’s The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties… 143 soft belly became masculinised within a homogenised male group and under a male leader and an ideology that preached violence, war and extermination of the out-group. Humiliated men who could not provide security for their women and children sought a new authority and an absolute and total merging with a male leader and a male ideology that promised a new order and a new perfect container, a steel container that would last a thousand years—the thousand-year Reich. This thousand-year Reich is a place where no ‘learning from experience’, and therefore no growth, is possible. Despite, or rather because of, its illusion of absolute durability and safety, ultimately absolute certainty, it is an expression of an uncontrolled disintegration. It is an example of a negative container characterised by minus K (−K) (Bion 1962a). The minus container is only open to a series of further defensive manoeuvres that take it further and further away from the reality principle. Its function, as Bion put it, was to misunderstand reality and omnipotently attempt to re-create it. The minus container however has not got rid of all anxiety. The prom- ise of no anxiety is possible only in death, so death becomes idealised. This death game becomes now the main mental activity. The projection of the death instinct outwards, as Freud showed us, meant death to the out-group and a mechanical life to the in-group. Achieving a state which is ‘neither life nor death’ is a state where feelings and emotions do not exist and links are abolished. In the absence of links, any coming together is achieved by merging together. Bion called this phenomenon ‘agglom- eration’, which is a gluing together, a merging, that abolishes object relations. Death is now instrumentalised, and aggression is mechanised. The container/contained continuous interchange is abolished. The subject contained forever within the object evokes claustrophobic fears and fears of pollution by the mother’s body. To keep the illusion of the perfect group, these fears are projected outside leading to fears of contamination and of being overwhelmed by alien objects all projected to an outside group—in Nazi Germany the Jews. The negative (minus) container/contained evokes images not of life and pregnancy but of paranoia, claustrophobia, contamination and persecution. In order to preserve the purity of the in-group, the creation of an out- group where all contamination is projected becomes a necessity and the 144 C. Wieland persecution of such a group becomes inevitable. In Nazi Germany this out- group was the Jews, in Soviet Russia it was the peasants or later all the potential enemies of the regime. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, it was the intellectuals. Difference is constructed as a deadly virus that will penetrate the perfect body of the group and contaminate it. Paranoia prevails and where paranoia prevails destructiveness becomes a never-ending negative spiral as Hannah Arendt described in her description of totalitarianism. (Arendt 1951)

Conclusion

I have argued that in times of massive societal trauma the internal and external containers are smashed and ordinary certainty is destroyed. In this case the individual and the group are dominated by fears of annihilation and fragmentation, thus triggering processes of ‘massification’ as described by Earl Hopper. Through massification certainty is restored but in an absolute sense that allows no doubt and no change. As Hopper argues, the process of massification expresses itself as a phantasy of the ‘perfect group’ or ‘perfect place’. This perfect place is ultimately the mother’s ‘smooth belly’ as Chasseguet-Smirgel, Werner Wohleber and Didier Anzieu have argued. I argue that taking refuge in the mother’s body evokes fears of feminisation and castration, whereby the mother’s feminine body is experienced as contaminating with the consequence that masculinity is felt to be in continuous danger. A twofold response might then develop (as in German Fascism): on the one hand, the fear of contamination becomes projected into a minority group—in this case the Jews who are seen as effeminate and degenerate; on the other hand, measures are taken to masculinise both the container and the contained. Mother’s belly and her sons have to be masculinised. Violence and war become the new aesthetic, and the virile posturing of fascist and other totalitarian organisations, the exhibition of the ‘hard as steel’ men in Nuremberg rallies and the exhibition of the war machinery and other paraphernalia of militarism in various parades are guarantors of masculinity. The merging of men together in this huge Brotherhood creates a super-masculinity and a super-certainty. However, masculinity has to be continuously defended and its survival guaranteed because part of the primitive fears (and wishes) include its abolition The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties… 145 through the merging phantasy or the massification process which has the meaning of a return to the mother’s body and destruction of difference. This dynamic of omnipotence and paranoia propels fascism towards a never-ending slide towards more violence and more destruction, the creation of ever new enemies and new ways of destroying the enemy which becomes unstoppable until the bitter end. As Hannah Arendt has so poi- gnantly expressed it in describing totalitarianism:

The category of potential enemies outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement; new potential enemies are discovered according to changing circumstances: The Nazis foreseeing the completion of Jewish extermination, had already taken the necessary steps for the liquida- tion of the Polish people, while Hitler even planned the decimation of certain categories of Germans. (Arendt 1951: 402)

Bion in his discussion of the negative container (1962a) describes a similar situation of a dynamic disaster spiralling into ever more negativity and delusion. Growth becomes negative growth, cancerous growth, as the lie at the heart of the organisation spirals into delusion. There is evidence that such a spiralling self-destruction was unleashed in the last few months of German National Socialism as the death instinct gained momentum and the destruction of Germany was ordered by Hitler himself. Ian Kershaw (2012) and Hans Mommsen (2001) in examining the last stages of National Socialism in Germany describe the destructiveness that was unleashed during the last few months of the regime.4 In this sense the psychotic anxieties that were unleashed by the traumatic experience come back to destroy the primitive container and its promises of painlessness and complete certainty.

Notes

1. The idea of institutions as containers for anxiety has been explored by Menzies-Lyth, I. (1992), Jacques, E. (1955) and Turquet, P. (1975). 2. Bion talked about three basic assumptions operating in groups represen ting the psychotic mechanisms that operated within basic assumption groups. The three basic assumptions are ‘dependency’, ‘fight or flight’ and ‘pairing’ (Bion 1961). 146 C. Wieland

3. Freud disagreed with Adler on ‘masculine protest’ because he saw masculine protest not as a quest for power but as a defence against the wish to be feminine—both in the negative Oedipus complex and in perversions, in paranoia and in masochism. For a full discussion of Freud and feminine wishes in males, see (Wieland 2014, chap. 4). 4. The German historian Hans Mommsen argues that in the last stages of the war the Nazi regime was on the course of self-destruction and that ‘… an internal dissolution accompanied its military setbacks’ (Mommsen 2001: 109) and that part of this process of dissolution was the ‘utter atro- phy of the political system which was completely paralyzed and unable to resist the suicidal course of the Nazi leadership’ (ibid.: 123). Ian Kershaw describes a similar impulse to self-destruction at the last stages of the war as Hitler ordered the destruction of Germany (Kershaw 2012).

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Christina Wieland is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice and a training therapist, teacher and supervisor. She is a visiting Fellow of the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. She is author of The Undead Mother: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Masculinity, Femininity and Matricide (Karnac) and The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity (Routledge). Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime Sexual Violence

Tamaki Noro

This chapter examines gender certainty in men in relation to wartimesexual violence, with specific reference to acts committed by Japanese soldiers against Chinese and other Asian women during World War II. It argues that military discipline exacerbates oedipal conflict, including gender confusion. Sexual violence is then theorized as a defence, based on splitting off, projecting and attacking in enemy women the feminine aspects of the self, in order to regain certainty from this undermined masculinity. Previous researchers have tended to attribute the motivation of sexual violence against women to aggressive and dominant traits of masculinity. Hague, for example, states that ‘the rapist’s mentality operates from a masculine position, arguing that rape is an alliance of masculine sexuality’s aggressive, violent and dominating position with respect to femininity’s allegedly inherent passivity’ (Hague 1997: 51). Taking such a trend in thinking as a background, an unaddressed question stands out: why would ordinary men who would not rape in peacetime be tempted to rape women in a war situation. My view is that sexual violence in the military,

T. Noro (*) Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, Tokyo, Japan

© The Author(s) 2017 149 N. Mintchev, R.D. Hinshelwood (eds.), The Feeling of Certainty, Studies in the Psychosocial, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57717-3_9 150 T. Noro and more so in war, should be distinguished from that in civilian life and in peacetime, and in this chapter I will single out two distinctive aspects of this difference: that men are subject to military discipline in the army, which is both masculinizing and feminizing; and that wartime offers an occasion for projective relief from internal conflict between masculine and feminine aspects of male soldiers by humiliating sexual abuse of enemy women. Some theories are similar to mine, but lack the precision and detailed process offered by psychoanalysis. In particular, they lack the idea of ambivalence and of masculine and feminine together, in the unconscious, which then is ‘resolved’ by projective identification. MacKinnon 1989( ), for example, says that wartime sexual violence represents a patriarchal society and male attempts to dominate and subjugate the female. Historical studies of mass rape show that soldiers not only beat, harm with weapons or murder women but rape them (or inflict sexual violence) when they encounter women in enemy lands and occupations. Coomaraswamy (2005) describes the function of sexual violence in male bonding as follows:

During wartime, sexual violence is not usually a private crime. It is often committed in public, in front of fellow soldiers and the family of the victim. This public spectacle is aimed at instilling terror among the population, but it also strengthens bonds and comradeship among fellow soldiers or militias. The public acts are meant to harden the warrior and to create shared experiences among the men. Studies into the lives of perpetrators have clearly shown that this element of male bonding is an essential aspect of rapes during wartime. (Coomaraswamy 2005: 55)

Thus, sexual violence has been explained as the strategy, not only to threaten the enemy but also to consolidate and harden the image of the male to himself and others. Recasting this observation in psychoanalytic terms, public scenes such as the one described above create a group in which splitting is intensified, pulling men into identification with each other, and women into a combined object into which femininity is projected (Freud 1921). My core point is that military discipline exacerbates a confusion of masculine and feminine positions. It encourages masculine confidence, but it Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime... 151 also forces them into a submissive, feminine role. It both masculinizes and feminizes soldiers, resulting in a conflict of gender identity. I argue that such a conflict brings men back to the experience of the Oedipus complex in which a boy struggles with ambivalence towards the father and, at a more primal level, is also drawn regressively to identify with the mother. Becoming a man involves managing gender confusion and ambivalence, and that struggle is intensified in the army. In what follows, I use case studies of the Rape of Nanking, the comfort women system and a vignette of a Japanese soldier to bring out this oedipal conflict and the use of cruel, humiliating violence as a defensive ‘resolution’.

Psychoanalytic Understanding of Masculinity

The Oedipus complex, as Freud theorized it, is not only a struggle towards self-discipline and bearing a sense of guilt but also a means of rescuing oneself from a shaky, confused and even absent gender identity. In Freud’s thinking, the incestuous wish for the mother is linked with a wish to return to primary narcissism through the close connection with the mother. In such a phantasy, the recognition of reality is experienced as an obstacle. ‘Obstacles, which evoke anxiety, the barriers against incest, are opposed to the phantastic return to the womb…Their representative is evidently the father, reality, the authority which does not permit’. The boy’s wish to return to the closest connection with the mother obstructs his achieving masculine identity. The father’s role is to liberate the boy from such a seduction and to be an obstacle to it. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984) has further developed the idea of the conflict between masculinity and the wish to return to the mother and, ultimately, to primary narcissism. In her thinking, such a wish, combined with maternal seduction, undermines the secure development of masculine gender identity.

The mother’s attitude of seduction may, however, destroy in her child this wish to be big and grow up and prevent him from experiencing this admiration for his father who becomes his model for identification, the bearer of the child’s Ego Ideal. (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1984: 29) 152 T. Noro

Thus, the boy is threatened by two levels of the castration complex—an advanced one (castration by authority of the father as a punishment for incestuous wish towards the mother) and a primitive one (castration by the woman, experienced as the seduction of feminizing unity). For Chasseguet- Smirgel, the seduction of feminizing unity is, ultimately the regressive pull of primary narcissism, in the phantasy of a return to the smooth interior of the womb, undisturbed by the father’s presence. It is

a universe without obstacles … entirely smooth … an interior to which one has free access…The phantasy of destroying reality confers on the fantasy of emptying the mother’s belly its primordial role. It is the contents of the belly which are equivalent to reality, and not the container itself. The empty container represents the unfettered pleasure. (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1986: 77)

For Sandor Ferenczi, incest, castration and feminizing merger come together, in that the urge to merge with the mother through ejaculation is a form of self-castration (1924: 29). In Wieland’s formulation of male oedipal ambivalence,

the Oedipus complex concerns not only a working-through of incestuous love, but also an identification with mother…. The battle here is not entirely about giving up mother as love object, but also about giving up mother as identificatory figure…. In this instance, I am referring to a type of ‘merging’, whereby the boundaries between self and other are blurred. In this sense the castration complex has a dual meaning; on a superficial level it concerns the threat of being castrated by the father, but it also involves a deep wish to identify with mother – to be feminine. (Wieland 2000: 60)

As a result, the recognition of reality, that is, the relinquishing of omnipotent unity with the mother, is conflicted. It is perceived as a traumatic experience, while it also disconnects the boy from the danger to gender identity. The dissolution of the Oedipus complex constitutes an ‘“ending” … as a sudden violent psychical event which does not involve mourning, or feelings of loss, but – instead – feelings of persecution and terror’ (ibid.: 40). The repression or destruction of the relationship with the mother is experienced as an equivalent to psychic matricide, and it creates a retaliating, Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime... 153 persecuting ‘undead mother’, repeatedly reawaking throughout life and projected into other women. In order to overcome the persistent terror of the ‘undead mother’, Wieland envisages that men form a masculine organization, as in an army (ibid.: 60). In addition, Wieland postulates a kind of masculine womb as a shared male phantasy that captures an identification with the mother inside a masculine structure, which can serve as a masculine ideal. With respect to Nazi Germany, she proposes the theory that the ‘fascist group acts both as a womb and as its denial’ (2015, p. 42; Wieland’s emphasis). In this chapter, I build on Ferenczi, Chasseguet-Smirgel and Wieland, but I also bring attention to the more intense dilemma faced by male soldiers in armies based on extreme discipline and hostility towards wartime enemy nations. Soldiers face the oedipal conflict with the father and within themselves, in which the confusing mother-father army is a masculine model, a castrator and a feminizing structure and in which the army’s task includes the subjugation of captive territory women, whose femininity can be invaded, brutalized and destroyed. There is a crucial difference in this psychoanalytic line of thinking from previous interpretations based on enemy women as spoils of war, in the centrality of oedipal conflict, especially of a primal nature, which involves splitting, projection and enactment. In my analysis, men—the masculine army—project the ‘undead mother’ into the mother country of the enemy. The more they attack it, the more it threatens them, and the more they have to attack it. In so doing, they shore up a masculine hard core, which, nonetheless, is simultaneously eroded. They attack it at every level: the attack on the country merges with the attack on women; the army attacks the country as the enemy; the soldiers attack the women; together they attack the undead mother in the persecuting maternal enemy. The attack on enemy women easily takes a sexual form, rather than simply killing or hurting, because, as Wieland argues, the phantasy of the ‘undead mother’ includes a fear of women together with an attraction towards them. The fear follows from the attraction, because the intense longing derives from an identification with the mother of infancy, and the anxiety that accompanied it. Being away from home and sexually deprived intensifies, but does not cause, the longing. ‘Thus the paradox: 154 T. Noro the ultimate expression of maleness – the sexual act – entails fears of loss of masculinity’ (Wieland 2000: 62). In my analysis, based on gender confusion in oedipal conflict, sexual violence towards women aims to eliminate femininity, to attack the father and to identify with the father, in order to resolve the primal oedipal conflict of being in the army, away from home, in a fearful state. The attack is more than aggressive: it is primitive, humiliating, mutilating; that is, it would aim to injure ‘femaleness’ itself as well as degrade the father as a castrator and as a protector of the mother and daughter. I will attempt to confirm this hypothesis in a later case study. First, we must analyse in more detail the ‘mother’ in male phantasy.

Splitting of the Maternal Imago as a Defence Against the Oedipal Wish

I have argued that there is a primal oedipal conflict, which, in the adult male, involves a misogynistic defence against the seductiveness of the primary narcissistic unity with the mother. With Wieland, I suggest that the reaction to such seductiveness becomes an aggressive terror of the ‘undead mother’, who will continually threaten men in retaliation for their aggression and in their gender identity thorough their lives. The formation of an army, with its identification with the father, the regressive feminization through unifying discipline and the attack on enemy lands, including its women, symbolize the male’s defence against this terror. Thus the conflict is at first internal, but military discipline, intensified by war, opens channels for projection. The conflict then explodes into a discharge by sexual attack on a demeaned, feminized object. We need to refine this analysis. Enemy women more readily and intensely become objects for projection through a splitting of the maternal imago. In ‘A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men’ (1910), Freud says that men’s object choice and way of behaving in love ‘are derived from the infantile fixation of tender feeling on the mother, and represent one of the consequences of that fixation’ 1910( : 168–169), not just purity and nobility but also the seductiveness and lust of a prostitute: Madonna or whore. Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime... 155

Brutal pieces of information, which are undisguisedly intended to arouse contempt and rebelliousness, now acquaint him with the secret of sexual life and destroy the authority of adults, which appears incompatible with the revelation of their sexual activities…When after this he can no longer maintain the doubt which makes his parents an exception to the universal and odious norms of sexual activity, he tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing. (Freud 1910: 170–171)

Split into ‘mother [Madonna]’ and ‘prostitute [whore]’, each component of the maternal imago exaggerates the difference from the other, and those exaggerated component imagoes will be projected into other women. The women at home represent the admired, overvalued, unique and irre- placeable mother. The prostitute-type woman, on the other hand, represents the boy’s oedipal jealousy against the mother. The suppressed mixture of phantasies of desire and thirst for revenge towards her will be projected into the women who are debased by him. In wartime, enemy or colonized women and land easily become the prostitute-type woman who both seduce and are debased by soldiers. I suggest that they also become the ‘undead mother’. And finally, they become the repository of his projected, hated femininity, which at base is his unconsciously wished-for regression to primary narcissism. In summary, I have formulated a psychoanalytic understanding of the motivation of sexual violence against women by soldiers. I focused on the conflict of masculinity in the army by means of various phantasies of Oedipus complex, beginning with a primal oedipal conflict. The Oedipus complex is the prototype and centre of object relating through one’s life and can be awakened and intensified in army life. In other words, the soldiers’ excessive desire to violate women might be enhanced by the ambivalence towards the army, in which a man is deprived of an active role in an oppressive hierarchy while being given forceful power towards civilians, certainly, including women. As a result, controlling a woman by sexual violence helps a man to confirm his masculine confidence as well as by being physically accepted by her, even if by force. This provides him with comfort and a narcissistic unity, even in these are achieved through violence. As the oedipal phantasies vary, ranging from aggressive to 156 T. Noro

comforting, all of the attitudes are still the reflection of his primal wishes and feelings regarding the mother. Bringing these hypotheses forward, I will now demonstrate how they are applied to the case of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Military Discipline and Sexual Violence in the Japanese Imperial Army

Previous researchers have argued that the Japanese ideology in which all civilians were the emperor’s subjects and were honoured to sacrifice themselves was hammered into students at school and as soldiers in the army. It was not difficult for commanders to indoctrinate soldiers in this way because individualism was traditionally considered an indecent concept in Japanese society. According to an inquiry carried out by the US army, Japanese children were taught to obey their parents as members of the family and to dismiss their own ‘selfish desires’ in order to maintain the bond (US War Department 1944: 8). ‘This system of obedience and loyalty is expanded to the community and Japanese life as a whole…till finally the whole Japanese nation is imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, obedience, and loyalty to the Emperor’ (ibid.). Therefore, the soldiers who had been educated in militarism were easily induced to believe that the absolute obedience was ‘a supreme virtue’ (Chang 1997: 31), replacing individualism by totalitarianism. I would suggest that such treatment resulted in two types of attitude: masochistic submission and reluctant submission. With respect to masochistic submission, it is important to stress how proud the soldiers were to be members of the army regardless of the merciless treatment. But although the army inherited a totalitarian social system in the name of the Emperor, it also had a different mentality from other institutions. While there were hereditary class lines, the army drafted men from across the country and from all classes. The aristocracy remained in Japanese society, while the army was made up of peasants. ‘[D]espite its brutal discipline, it was a step up from their rigid stratified civilian life and struggle for survival’. Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime... 157

With regard to reluctant submission, not all soldiers accepted mistreatment positively. Many were disgusted by it even though they were still proud of being a member of the military. The discipline of Japanese soldiers had been analysed by the US War Department, which published a handbook on Japanese Military Forces (1942/1944), to help the USA learn about their enemy. The handbook describes the difference between seniors and juniors towards the ideology of the army. It observed that ‘even though his officers appear to have an ardour which might be called fanaticism, the private soldiers are characterised more by blind and unquestioning subservience to authority’ (ibid.: 9). Thus, reluctant submission reveals another dimension of army life. Although obedience was consistent with the conventional ideology of an Emperor society, the soldiers’ obedience was more likely to represent a response to the practical orders and oppression of authority. In addition, punishment in the Japanese army extended to humiliation, such as ‘forcing a man to crawl between beds imitating the call of a “warbler in the valley”, to climb up a pole and imitate a cicada, or to run on the spot while holding a spike between his forehead and a post’. And where there was a matter of honour, as Beevor states, ‘[s]oldiers … tended to fight for the honour of their family and local community, not for the emperor as Westerners tended to believe’ (2012: 60). Thus, although Japanese soldiers followed absolutely any cruel and hard orders as a virtue, the oppression of the army tormented them at the same time. Strict discipline, linked to cruelty and humiliation, undermined masculinity as it also hardened it, producing the conflict between masculinization and feminization. It was this conflict that sought resolution by attacking enemy women, not only with aggression but with cruel destruction of the women as the soldier’s projected feminine side. Broader cultural influences added to this savage attitude towards women. In addition to the traditional totalitarianism and masochistic and reluctant submission, the army reflected the impact of westernization from the nineteenth century. Inspired by the economic power and prosperity of the West, Japan had separated itself from Pan-Asianism, rejecting friendly relationships with other Asian countries (Hicks 1995). The firm ideal of westernization can be seen in the title of the article, published in 1885 by Fukuzawa Yukichi, the prominent theorist of modernization: 158 T. Noro

‘Abandoning Asia and Joining Europe’ (ibid.: 11). The policy of westernization had been intensified by the victories in the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War as well as the successes of the munitions industry during World War I (ibid.). The global political and economic power of this westernized Japan reinforced a sense of superiority over China and other Asian countries and was reflected in soldiers’ looking down on Asian people, with the consequence that they became the main victims of the brutalities by the Japanese army (Weixing 1997). Japanese belief in its superiority, however, did not apply only to Asian people, as was commonly believed. The US War Department pointed out that due to the successes of the past wars, ‘the Japanese soldier is apt to adopt a superior attitude towards conquered people and to forget the strict instructions given him during military training’ (1944: 9). It can thus be argued that there was the tendency for Japanese soldiers to demean any conquered people. In the next section, I take up a specific example of this brutalization, the rape of Nanking and the system of comfort women. I argue that this incident enacted the dual aspect of the Japanese army which included submission to rigid discipline, which was then pushed onto a conquered people rendered helpless and brutalized.

The Rape of Nanking and the Comfort Women System

The mass rape in Nanking—the former capital of China—was an example of Japanese disdain for conquered people and of the brutal treatment of women. The Nanking Massacre was a mass murder, genocide and large- scale rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city on 13 December 1937 (Brook 1999; Rabe 2000). Due to the vast number of rape cases, the Nanking Massacre is also known as the Rape of Nanking. During this period, hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered, while women, ranging from young girls to elderly women, were raped by Japanese soldiers (Brook 1999: 2). Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime... 159

Japan’s undeclared war on China started in 1931 with its occupation of Manchuria. The Japanese army advanced southwards, attacking Beijing in July 1937. A month later, the army opened a second front at Shanghai. The victory in Shanghai was not as easy as in Beijing since the Japanese army met strong resistance and suffered heavy casualties. In the second week of November, however, the Chinese defence broke. On 1 December 1931, the headquarters ordered the army to capture Nanking. Under heavy fire, the Chinese government and its defending army withdrew. As a result, the soldiers of the Japanese army marched into the city on 13 December 1937 (ibid.). For six months the occupying troops brutalized the civilians by murdering, raping and looting them and by burning the city. The sexual violence committed by the Japanese army was not only random rape. There were military brothels controlled by the army, in which many Asian women were forced to work. Although the system of military brothels was developed following the Nanking Massacre, it had already been established in Shanghai. The leadership of the Japanese army had been puzzled by its soldiers’ unofficial brutalities against the civilians. The Commanders were concerned in particular with rape, since it would debase the honour of the army, provoke the local civilians into resistance and spread venereal disease. These ‘comfort women’ consisted of Japanese professional prostitutes and of Koreans who had been residents in Japan (ibid.). At this stage, the ‘comfort women’ system did not specifically aim at exploiting Asian women. However, once the troops invaded Nanking in December 1937, with the widespread cases of rape, the demand for ‘comfort women’ suddenly increased (Beevor 2012). Another 3000 women were needed, in addition to the more than 2000 women already sent from the city of Soochow (ibid.). A large number of young women were seized from across East and Southeast Asia, especially from Korea, then a Japanese colony (Wood 2008). 3.5 million Japanese soldiers were sent to China and Southeast Asia during the war, and an estimated 90,000 women were mobilized. Hence, the ‘comfort women’ system was characterized by the exploitation of Asian women, who were regarded as inferior. Japanese men distinguished between Japanese women and other women. Although there were Japanese comfort women who were professional prostitutes, Japanese women, unlike the young and physically pure 160 T. Noro

Korean women, were ‘to bear and bring up good Japanese children, who would grow up to be loyal subjects of the Emperor’, rather than to satisfy the soldiers’ sexual urges. One veteran explained his anger with the situation when he met a Japanese comfort woman. He did nothing to her, then left because ‘Yamato Nadeshiko [the eulogistic notion for a modest, humble Japanese woman] was not supposed to be a whore’ (interview by author, 2010). As this statement suggests, Japanese soldiers perceived Japanese women separately from other women; the former as Madonnas, the latter as whores, in Freud’s terminology; the former an ideal, the latter the repository of projected, denigrated femininity and ultimately regressive narcissism. To my mind, the rape of Nanking enacted the masculine defence that I proposed above. In a situation in which soldiers were endangered, both by the violence of war and by having lost masculine confidence through the rigid environment of military discipline attempted, they violated and debased Chinese women. In my analysis, these women were sexually attacked as the projection of the ‘undead mother’. Unlike Japanese women, who were to bear and bring up ‘good’ Japanese children, other Asian women in the conquered countries were perceived as coarse—not Japanese—so that soldiers felt no guilt in raping them. These women were not mother-type women, but debased women who could serve as contemptible and lustful objects to the soldiers as well as the ‘undead mother’ who has to be attacked. Rape of conquered women as the masculine defence, which I have proposed, would be more than aggressive: it would be brutal and humiliating intent on destroying femininity and any paternal defence of it. I have argued that military discipline sets up an oedipal conflict that, at base, is also a gender confusion. I have also argued that war provides an opportunity to ‘resolve’ this conflict by projecting the soldiers’ feminization into conquered women and, in that way, to maintain their identity as strong men, like the ‘father’ (army) who oppressed them. This ‘resolution’ is aided by splitting the maternal imago into Madonna (women at home) and whore (conquered, inferior women). The fear and violence of war, in this model, contribute to sexual violence, but they function also as opportunities for projection and denigration. Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime... 161

The following vignette, which comes from a confessional diary written by one Japanese veteran (Kobayashi 1998), illustrates the complex dynamic of masculine aggression, confused gendered subject positions and sexual violence. In it the narrator, Kobayashi, depicts an encounter between him and his fellow soldiers, and a Chinese father and daughter in Nanking. The soldiers, according to Kobayashi, decided to drive the father from the room first. Although they ordered the father to get out from the bed, he was too ill to do so. The soldiers were annoyed by that and beat him up. The crying daughter never released her hold of him. While their violent crush continued for a while, the daughter showed resolute attitude towards the soldiers, saying that he could not sit up and he was ill. ‘I [Kobayashi] became impatient and dried the sweat that was running down my forehead with my cuffs. Then, with a quick movement I pointed my shining sword at the woman’s chest’ (ibid.: 32–33). Her face turned pale with fear but still tightly held her father. However hard they beat the father up, the bond between the father and daughter would never be broken. The soldiers lost patience, and then Murakami, another soldier, took her legs to drag the woman away from her father. When Kobayashi took the father’s leg, he kicked him violently. Kobayashi became furious and kicked the father back again and again. In the end, the father closed his eyes and weakened. Kobayashi took him to the back yard. Just after that, Kobayashi heard some angry voices, screams and sounds from the house. Then, the father’s eyes suddenly opened and glared at him. In response to the father’s vindictive gaze Kobayashi continued to attack him, until, in the end, he spontaneously killed him (ibid.: 33–34). Murakami, who raped the girl first, came out from the house breathlessly, and Kobayashi entered the house in turn. The injured girl was glaring at him with hostility. Nonetheless, he raped her. When he came out to the yard, Murakami asked him to go to find another prey together. Without their having noticed it, the daughter had come out and was crying beside her father. She held his body looking at his bloody chest. Glaring at them, she swore ‘Japanese monsters!’. ‘We [Kobayashi and Murakami] both ran away, shaking because of the extremely fierce look on her face’ (ibid.: 34–35). I want to draw attention to the excessively humiliating actions of these soldiers towards the father and daughter, in addition to raping her. In my 162 T. Noro view, it enacts a vicious attack on a projected, feminized aspect of themselves and on the castrating and protecting father, as a result of the primal gender confusion and oedipal conflict in the army. They became impatient since they were not able to control the father and daughter. Judging by the reaction of the Japanese soldiers, I would argue that the situation ‘reminded’ them, unconsciously, of their feminized role in the army. As a result, the excessive violence against the sick father and attack on the daughter, the feminized and demeaned objects, would be instigated to replace the demeaning nature of their own feminization. As further evidence, I draw attention to the abrupt change from savage aggression towards the daughter to fear as an instantaneous reaction to her fierce visage, upon which they ran away. Here we see the retaliatory ‘undead mother’, actualized in the daughter’s glower.

Conclusion

I have proposed a theory of sexual violence in warfare that differs from accounts based on hard masculine aggression or the rationale of military strategy. I have drawn attention to a masculine defence against oedipal conflict, especially at a primal level in which there is gender confusion. In addition to paternal castration anxiety, the oedipal child is confronted by the regressive pull of identification with the mother and the lure of primary narcissism. Achieving some degree of gender certainty entails fighting against both paternal and maternal castration anxiety and against the pull of feminine regression. It is supplemented by staving off the retaliatory parental imagoes, especially the endless reappearance of the ‘undead mother’. I have further shown how military discipline intensifies this oedipal conflict and war opens channels for resolution by splitting the maternal imago, as Freud proposed, between a protected ‘Madonna’ mother at home and a degraded ‘whore’ in conquered women and territories. Otto Fenichel observed that ‘[i]n all wars … there have been and are cruelties that are far in excess of tactical necessities and of the amounts of hatred actually mobilized in the single individual’ (1939: 149, Fenichel’s emphasis). I have argued that sexual violence towards women is one very savage example of an excess cruelty and hatred. The wartime situation, in Gender Certainty as a Defence: Oedipal Conflict in Wartime... 163 which men belong to the army, cynically brings about both confidence and danger of masculinity. It builds on the ambivalence and gender confusion instilled by military discipline itself and provides opportunities for discharge through brutality towards enemy women. I conclude by returning to the theme at the beginning. The sexual violence provoked by military discipline and war seems on the face of it to demonstrate certainty, in this case, the certainty of gender identity of the male, of the powerful, of the conqueror. But this apparent certainty is not a sureness gained from evidence, but rather a defensive cynical and sadistic assertion that tries to resolve and make up for the doubt and confusion engrained in militaristic masculinity.

References

Beevor, A. (2012). The Second World War. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Brook, T. (1999). Documents on the rape of Nanking. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Chang, I. (1997). The rape of Nanking: The forgotten holocaust of World War II. New York: Penguin. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1984), The Ego Ideal: A psychoanalytic essay on the malady of the Idel. London: Free Association Books. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1986). Sexuality and mind. New York: New York University Press. Coomaraswamy, R. (2005). Sexual violence during wartime. In H. Durham & T. Gurd (Eds.), Listening to the silences: Women and war (pp. 53–66). Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Fenichel, O. (1939). Trophy and triumph: A clinical study. In H. Fenichel & D. Rapaport (Eds.), The collected papers of Otto Fenichel, Second Series (pp. 149–162). New York: Norton, 1954. Ferenczi, S. (1924). Thalassa: A theory of genitality. Psychoanalytic quarterly. Albany, NY and London: Karnac Books, 1989. Freud, S. (1910). A special type of choice of object made by men. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI (1910): Five lectures on psycho-analysis. Leonard Da Vinci and other works (Vol. 9, pp. 163–176). London: Vintage. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. S.E., XVIII, 65–143. 164 T. Noro

Hague, E. (1997). Rape, power and masculinity: The construction of gender and national identities in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In R. Lentin (Ed.), Gender and catastrophe (pp. 50–63). London: Zed Books. Hicks, G. (1995). The comfort women: Sex slaves of the Japanese imperial forces. London: Souvenir Press. Kobayashi, T. (1998). Carnal desires: The killing of a sick father and the gang- rape of his daughter who was nursing him. In T. Ebato (Ed.), The Journal Chukiren (No. 6, pp. 30–35). Tokyo: Chukiren. MacKinnon, C. (1989). Toward a feminist theory of the state. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rabe, J. (2000). The good man of Nanking: The diaries of John Rabe. New York: Vintage, Reprint edition. U.S. War Department. (1944). Handbook on Japanese Military Forces. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, Reprinted by Greenhill Books: London. Weixing, W. (1997). The exploration of Japanese soldiers’ psychology during the time of Nanking Massacre. In China Academic Journal Electric Publishing House, original text in Chinese, Trans. Mei-Tzu Ho in 2012. Wieland, C. (2000). The undead mother. London: Rebus Press. Wieland, C. (2015). The Fascist state of mind and the manufacturing of masculinity: A psychoanalytic approach. Hove, East Sussex and New York: Routledge. Wood, J. E. (2008). Sexual violence during war: Toward an understanding of variation. In S. Kalyvas, I. Shapiro, & T. Masoud (Eds.), Order, conflict, and violence (pp. 321–351). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tamaki Noro was born and grew up in Tokyo. After graduating at Chuo University in Tokyo, she left for the UK to study psychoanalysis at the University of Essex, where she earned a PhD in 2014. She is currently working for the Tokyo-based think tank Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation as a researcher on a project about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container

Barry Richards

This chapter discusses one of the most high-profile recent cases of contemporary terrorism—that committed by Anders Breivik in Norway in 2011. Drawing on the work of Karl Figlio (2006, 2012 and the chapter in this volume ‘Introduction: The Feeling of Certainty, Towards a Psychosocial Approach’), I will consider Breivik’s relationship to nationalism and conclude with the suggestion that while nationalist feeling is often linked to political violence, it may also be seen as a potential antidote to violence. Extremist political violence is typically enacted by people who are certain of the necessity of their violent actions. On the surface, this necessity is a moral one: the violence is believed to be necessary to deal with a threat to something good. This conviction is held within a deeply split view of the world as either good or bad. Such fundamentalist belief in absolute moral certainty is usually a necessary condition for political violence, because it creates an absolutely bad object which deserves violent attack,

B. Richards (*) Centre for Politics and Media Research, Bournemouth University, Poole, UK

© The Author(s) 2017 165 N. Mintchev, R.D. Hinshelwood (eds.), The Feeling of Certainty, Studies in the Psychosocial, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57717-3_10 166 B. Richards but this is not a sufficient condition. The moral certainty of the violent actor is not just a simple assertion of a black-and-white distinction and of moral superiority. It rests also on another kind of certainty, one based on the perception that some collective interest which represents the idealised ‘good’ is under attack, such that the very existence of that collective (a group with which the actor is strongly identified) is at risk. The certainty is that annihilation is coming; catastrophe is around the corner, or indeed may already have begun. So the certainty that violence is necessary is an existential judgement as well as a moral one. When the fundamentalist moral certainty is compounded with the dreadful certainty that the idealised self-object is under threat of annihilation, the psychic preparation for violence is basically complete. This understanding of the most common psychological driver of extremist violence will be developed and tested here in an examination of the Breivik case. My starting point is Figlio’s paper on collective memory and German national identity (Figlio 2012). In that essay, he examines the enormous difficulty faced in post-WW2 Germany by those Germans who were trying to rebuild their society, materially and morally, after the horrors of Nazism. He sees the separation of Germany into East and West, two nations on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, as providing an opportunity for citizens of both to distract themselves from the task of remembering and working through their shared guilt about Nazism. Each nation could focus on the perceived evil of the other in the present, as embodying the foe of capitalism or communism. Figlio argues that this kind of defensive ‘splitting’, whereby all badness is projected into our perceptions of other groups, is our standard modus operandi in international relations, indeed in any area of politics where collective identities are involved. While endlessly threatening us with the eruption of actual conflict between us and them, this defence actually acts as a stabilising influence, because it enables us to lodge our anxieties, guilt and aggression into an Other(s). That feels more manageable than having to deal constantly with such forces inside ourselves, and so bestows on us a certain kind of liveable normality. Figlio calls these stable yet fragile organisations of collective feeling ‘psychosocial enclaves’. Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 167

The kinds of internal forces with which we have to deal collectively will differ between different collectives, just as the inner worlds which individuals inhabit differ between us individually according to early experiences and subsequent life events. The circumstances of Germany after 1945 were as difficult as any that could be imagined, given the scale of destructiveness that had been unleashed and of guilt that inevitably followed it. That destruction in turn sprang from a very primitive psychic source, which Figlio (building on the work of the psychoanalyst José Bleger) identifies as a psychotic fear of annihilation. He suggests that a special quality of anti-Semitism as a state of mind is its connection with a fear of collapse into the Other, of dissolution into undifferentiation. The Jew was a profound threat to German identity (as experienced by some Germans) not because Jews were intolerably different but on the contrary because they could be indistinguishable from non-Jewish Germans, and so could insinuate themselves and destroy from within. The ‘special service performed by the Jew’ (Figlio 2012, p. 166) for many anxious collectives was to represent a unique threat: one of insidious, stealthy merger with otherness and an inexorable death of the self. That is a universal human anxiety, though one which does not normally exert much direct influence on our actions, and one which cannot easily be represented by or converge with a threat in the external world. Hence the wide historical utility of anti-Semitism, across different socio-historical contexts. We will not here be looking in depth at the Norwegian and European contexts of Breivik’s attacks—the demographic consequences of globalisation, as shaped by immigration policy and its management, the rise of ‘Far Right’ populism and so on. The focus will be on the internal world of a perpetrator of terror, it being assumed that in a different societal context his destructiveness would have assumed a different form, perhaps a non-ideological ‘rampage’ killing, or may even have been diverted from its expression in mass murder. The detailed interactions in Breivik’s case between inner and outer worlds, individual and collective, would require another essay which looked more closely at socio-cultural change in Oslo this century, and at the ideological voices Breivik was influenced by (see p. 9). 168 B. Richards

Anders Breivik: Ideology and Psyche1

The Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik has sometimes been described as a Nazi or neo-Nazi. That may not be strictly accurate in terms of some of his political and ideological positions, and he was not driven by anti- Semitism. Psychologically however there appears to be a strong similarity between Breivik and Nazism. After many months of preparation, on 22 July 2011 Anders Breivik detonated a van bomb, one similar to that used by Timothy McVeigh to attack federal offices in Oklahoma City in 1995. It was parked in an Oslo street adjacent to the office of the Norwegian Prime Minister. He then got into another vehicle and travelled about 40 km to the small island of Utoya, where the ruling Norwegian Labour Party was holding its annual youth summer camp and where he roamed for over an hour shooting people on sight. Breivik is often thought of as being primarily an anti-Islamic fanatic. There are good reasons for seeing him in this way, as being driven by a hatred of Islam. Nearly half of the sprawling 1500-page document he refers to as his ‘Compendium’ is devoted to attacks on Islam. The title he gave this document2, 2083, is a reference to the Battle of Vienna in 1683, in which the forces of European Christendom defeated those of the Ottoman Empire. Breivik believes that by 2083 the second and final defeat of Islam in Europe will be nearing completion. He is, it would seem, obsessed with Islam, and with what he sees as its increasingly successful strategy to destroy the West (or more specifically, ‘Europe’) and its culture. An angry fear of ‘Islamification’ is often the most obvious feature of extreme ethno-nationalism, a term we can use to refer to some contemporary ideologies which focus on the tensions between traditional national cultures and the effects of globalisation. But behind this fear there lies an experience of a world in which the powers that be are felt to have failed generally in their duties to protect their citizens, and even to have connived actively in the humiliation of those who have put their trust in them and who depend on them. This generates a rage, directed at the liberal democratic governments which are seen to have abandoned Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 169 their own people. This is a prevalent theme in the propaganda of today’s insurgent ethno-nationalists and their predecessors.3 In Breivik’s case, this humiliated rage is coupled with the central importance in his make-up of two other factors which are, we might hope, less prevalent amongst the general population and which therefore help to explain his capacity for murder. These are an extraordinarily fragile gender identity, which led him to create a make-believe masculinity, and yet also a grandiosity which enabled him to believe he could transcend humiliation and restore both his culture and his manhood. Evidence for this perspective on the Utoya massacre can be found in an analysis of key documents relating to the Breivik case. These are, primarily, 2083, his statements to court, and the psychiatric reports on him commissioned by the court. A psychologically oriented reading of these documents points to an understanding of his most basic motive which shifts the focus away from anti-Islamic ideology and the hatred of Islam, real though that is. Through this analysis of these documents, we can place his ideology in a psychological context as well as a societal one. The question that will be asked is the same as one which the Frankfurt School and other scholars asked about twentieth-century Nazi ideology: what internal state of mind does Breivik’s ideology express? Reading an ideology as a state of mind, as will be attempted here, can enable us to add to the understanding of Breivik’s motives and also those of people who admire him and may be prepared to act in a similar fashion.

The Feared Catastrophe Is Already Here

Central to his ideology is the belief that the societies of Europe are under attack from within. Reviewing Freud’s analysis of anti-Semitism, Figlio (op. cit., p. 166) describes a Nazi phantasy of Jews as ‘a massive, centrip- etal force, threatening to implode German national and ethnic character’. We are in similar territory when we begin to explore Breivik, with the Muslim playing a similar role for him as the Jew does in Nazi anti- Semitism. However, as I have suggested, there is a further step to take in identifying the core dynamic of Breivik’s dread. 170 B. Richards

2083 was at the core of Breivik’s project. He emailed it to over 1000 addresses (a list which he had built from many hours of research) just before he went out to commit the murders which he described as a ‘mar- keting operation’ for it. The ‘Introduction’ to it is a piece of gross plagia- rism, largely copied almost verbatim and without acknowledgment from a document called ‘“Political Correctness”: A Short History of an Ideology’. This collection of short essays by its editor William Lind and three others was published by an organisation called the Free Congress Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank. Indeed, much of the Compendium as a whole is cut and pasted from other sources, sometimes with and sometimes without referencing. Yet Breivik’s choice of that 2004 publication as the Introduction to his magnum opus means we should pay particular attention to it as a guide to his preoccupations. Readers of 2083 might know or guess that much of the material following the Introduction will be about the ongoing ‘Islamic colonisation of Europe’, so might expect that the Introduction will at least in part address that topic. However, it says nothing about Islam. It is a polemic about ‘cultural Marxism’, which it argues is now the dominant ideology of the West, and how it developed across the twentieth century. Its fundamental premise that Western societies are now dominated by Marxist ideology is, one might say, psychotic (we will shortly return to the question of sanity), but this is not the Marxism of the Communist Manifesto or of Das Kapital. There is no sign here of the theory of wage labour as alienation, of the means of production or commodity fetishism. Indeed, there is no discussion of any core component of Marxist theory, with only a passing mention of the proletariat and class struggle. The key criminals in this story are the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, who sought to broaden the materialist, economic analysis of classical Marxism into analyses of culture and of individual personality. This ‘cultural turn’ in Marxism, in response to the failure of the proletarian revolution to occur as predicted, is seen as a hugely successful strategy. Instead of violent class warfare, it prescribed a long march through the institutions of society and culture which, it is asserted, has resulted in Marxist ideology now standing ‘like a colossus’ in hegemony over Western Europe, able to impose ‘political correctness’ and ‘multiculturalism’ everywhere, and in so doing to destroy Western culture. This colossus is said to include thinkers as diverse as Theodor Adorno and Abraham Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 171

Maslow, Erich Fromm and Jacques Derrida, all of whom and a number of others are given bit parts in the single unified conspiracy which has achieved ideological conquest. This Introduction gives a partial answer to a key question which in all the commentary and debate on Breivik has often escaped close attention: why a man apparently possessed with fear and hatred of Islam should choose as his crowning act to murder scores of young people most of whom were not Muslims. Of course at one level the answer is that given to us by Breivik himself: his victims were trainee members of the ‘Marxist’ political elite that he holds responsible for ‘Islamic colonisation’. Yet it is hard to see how that perception in itself could generate sufficient logic to demand their murders. As the Introduction proceeds, if we subject it to a psychological reading of its ideological content, we can see that there is more to the causes of his actions than a simple deduction of the culpability of his victims as the products and future leaders of the ‘cultural Marxist’ establishment. A recurrent theme is sexual politics. The text conveys horror at the breakdown of male domination. ‘Ladies should be wives and homemakers, not cops or soldiers. [..] Glorification of homosexuality should be shunned’. (Breivik is however ambivalent about homosexuality; elsewhere he described his position as ‘pro-gay’.) The ‘critical theory’ of the Frankfurt School (in partnership with linguistic theory) is responsible for ‘the deconstruction of gender in the European culture’, following which ‘the distinction between masculinity and femininity will disappear’, to be replaced by androgyny. Feminism (a branch of cultural Marxism) has sought to ‘destroy the hegemony of white males’ and secured the ‘feminisation of European culture’. Aided by the Frankfurt School concept of the authoritarian personality, which is ‘a handbook for psychological warfare against the European male’, feminism has denied ‘the intrinsic worth of native Christian European, heterosexual males’ and pursued their emasculation. Indeed, such men are seen in cultural Marxism as ‘evil’, and in keeping with the ‘matriarchal theory’ of this dominant ideology, their patriarchal order is to be replaced by a matriarchy (the nature of which is not enlarged upon). Two theorists particularly implicated here are Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, who advocated ‘liberating the powerful, primeval force of sex’, an advocacy which has brought us to ‘moral chaos and social anarchy’ and to the 172 B. Richards triumph of the erotic over reason. Marcuse understood that ‘the way to destroy Western civilisation … was not through abstruse theory, but through sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’. At this point the polemic loses whatever grasp of superficial logic and order it might at other times achieve in the text. It slips into a primitive vision in which a monolithic fusion of feminism, feminisation, matriarchy, androgyny and homosexuality threatens to engulf the Christian European heterosexual male, the hero of history who is now an object of contempt and hatred. Breivik’s choice of Utoya as his target can be understood in this context: here he could see sexually free young people, brought together on an island summer camp to enjoy themselves, to cel- ebrate their permissive ideology and to plan its continued success. Breivik arrives in a police uniform (albeit home-made) to put an end to their sexual free-for-all, to reassert the heroic figure of the patriarchal male who offers exemplary resistance to the tide of soft, corrupting pleasure which is washing over his civilisation and dissolving its core categories. So Breivik is possessed by a fear of humiliating subjugation to a dominating force which has the power to destroy his masculinity and his identity. Although some of his own pronouncements tend to foreground the belief that this threatening force is Islam, it appears from his text that the basic source of his fear is more diffuse and all-encompassing. What terri- fies him is the prospect of his brittle, besieged masculinity being engulfed in the flux of detraditionalised society, where sexuality and gender no longer take the clear and predictable forms they might once have done. These uncertainties of post-modern culture are the societal roots of Breivik’s rage, more fundamental psychologically than the rise of multiculturalism and the increased immigration of Muslims to Northern Europe.

Reversing the Catastrophe

For Breivik, Islam as he sees it (especially in relation to gender roles) actually embodies the simplicity and rigidity which he admires and craves. He knowingly imitates some of the characteristics of jihadism, as he struggles to create a military solution to his core problem. For him that Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 173 problem lies in the rise of ‘matriarchy’ and the annihilation of received identities, especially gendered identities. And the most concrete representation of what he is threatened by is the liberal state, which he sees as responsible for these social changes. Hence his targets and victims on the 22 July were the Norwegian state in Oslo and the politically active young people on Utoya who represent its future. And hence he predicts that in the struggle to come, heroes like himself will carry out WMD terror attacks in Europe on behalf of jihadist organisations, on the grounds that they have a common enemy in European governments. He does not explain why jihadists should be so hostile to governments who according to him are the agents of the Islamification of Europe, but we should not expect comprehensive logical consistency in what is overwhelmingly a delusional system. A common view of Breivik is that he is the tip of an iceberg of Islamophobia and that the murders he committed were simply extensions of the virulent attacks on Islam to be found in the extremes of ethno- nationalist and neo-Nazi cyberspace. However, there are important dis- continuities between him and most of the large body of anti-Islamic opinion. There is a dimension to his agenda which is relatively unusual: his fascination with the Crusades, his love of military regalia and rigma- role and his highly elaborate fantasies about post-revolutionary scenarios. These reflect his attempt to reverse what he feels to be the destruction of masculine identity; they also point to another essential factor in his capacity to commit mass murder, namely, his omnipotent grandiosity. He claims that he and eight others from various European countries attended a meeting in London in 2002 at which they re-formed the medieval military order of the Knights Templar, dedicated to the fight against the Islamification of Europe, as the original Knights Templar had been part of Christendom’s crusade against Islam in the Middle East. The members of this revived order are Justiciar Knights, self-appointed warriors of various ranks who will bring justice to those who are tyran- nising the indigenous peoples of Europe. His document contains 250 pages of detail on topics such as the armour and weapons a Justiciar Knight needs, and the decorations that can be given to members of the order. These include the Liberation of Southern Nigeria Service Medal and the Distinguished Wielder of the Furious Scimitar Commendation 174 B. Richards

(a hint there perhaps of his admiration for the traditions of violence which he associated with Muslim and Arabic cultures).4 There is a Traitor Classification System, and an estimate of how many Class A and B traitors there are. (Note there is no such operational interest in who the Muslim enemies are.) There is a list of priority targets, most of which are governmental, media and academic organisations. Muslim targets come some way down the list, and even then partly because of their value in provoking Muslims into returning violence which will strengthen the popular revolt against the liberal government. There are detailed discussions of WMDs and how they might be used. As just one example of the grandiosity involved, take Breivik’s explanation that a deadline of 1 January 2020 will be given to all Western European regimes to capitulate to the demands of the Knights Templar. If they do not, ‘Operation Regime Ender’ will be implemented, which would be a nuclear attack on a nuclear reactor. He proceeds to calculate the financial consequences and the casualties of such an attack, in just the same obsessional way that he specifies the exact kind of paper on which a (non- existent) national right-wing newspaper should be printed, or lists the legislative changes necessary to recreate (‘within 20–70 years’) traditional patriarchal family structures. His father had moved to another country when his parents separated, when he was around one year old, and though he saw him occasionally, it seems he grew up basically without a father. In that context it is interesting that he wanted to begin his programme of social legislation with a law guaranteeing paternal custody of children in the event of divorce. While grandiose delusions are the staple fare of all tiny extremist groups, these long sections of 2083 (all, it seems, written by Breivik himself) are remarkable for the depths of their cold omnipotence. Notwithstanding the Norwegian court’s final decision that Breivik is sane, his grandiosity can be called psychotic. Along with the extreme intensity of his fear of domination, this is perhaps what made Breivik a mass murderer and not just another bitter keyboard warrior on the digital battlefields of hate. He coped with his fear of annihilation by believing he could vanquish the socio-historical source of the threat to his besieged self. But being driven by psychotic delusions does not necessarily take someone out of the field of politics; there is plenty of room in most Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 175

ideologies for departures from reality. And much of the time, Breivik remains capable of conducting rational (or at least pseudo-rational) discussion, and large parts of his political outlook are shared by many other people. This was taken by the court to mean that he was not ‘deluded’, and therefore not psychotic, a judgement based on the false proposition that a delusion is by definition a uniquely held perception, and so shared beliefs cannot be delusions.

External and Internal Milieux

Politically it was desirable that Breivik be judged sane and therefore responsible for his actions, or else even the forgiving Norwegian public might have felt that justice would not be done. The first psychiatric report on Breivik concluded that he was psychotic both at the time of the murders and during examination (Husby and Sorheim 2011). A further report was commissioned (Torrissen and Aspaas 2012); this returned a verdict of personality disorder, which does not absolve the defendant of responsibility. Of course Breivik himself did not want to be found ‘insane’, convinced as he was of the supreme rationality and necessity of his actions, and not wanting to compromise or lose the hero status he believed he had won for himself. At the same time, in common with all other terrorists, he would see ultimate responsibility for his actions lying with his victims, for their part in the order of things in the current world, a world which must be destroyed. Amongst those appalled by his crimes, responsibility for them is sometimes seen as shared by him with some other people. It is a widely held view that Breivik, though he was a lone operator (unlike some ‘lone wolves’—see Gable and Jackson 2012), felt free to act as he did at least partly because of the wide currency of extreme anti-Islamic propaganda; for example, 2083 carries many long extracts from the writings of the blogger ‘Fjordman’. Breivik’s belief that he will be regarded in the future as the hero who led Europe to salvation could not have derived in any direct way from the writings of such bloggers and others whose work he re-published at length, but it could well have been indirectly nourished by them, in that their work implied a need for a leader to emerge who 176 B. Richards would lead Europe onto a different path. Much of that anti-Islamic material gains influence amongst working-class communities from its address to their everyday experiences of social dislocation and cultural disinheritance; the appeal of ethno-nationalist polemic is usually based in part on some social realities and not just on unprovoked meanness of spirit. (Of course deciding which parts of reality are relevant, and what has produced them, is a controversial business.) But Breivik was, on the surface, in the position of being a young man with a reasonably comfortable and secure life and the usual opportunities open to members of the European middle classes. So his own fears were not at root those of the post-proletarian dispossessed class unable to find a secure and respected place in the globalised world, and there is no evidence that he identified with people in that position. Rather, he experienced the alleged Islamification of Europe as a direct threat to himself, representing as it did to him an annihilatory dissolution of his identity, specifically gender identity. From within this internal milieu of catastrophic anxiety, Breivik sought to find some way of acting in the external world that would give some escape from the threatened—indeed, the actual—catastrophe. The spectre of Islamification came to represent the catastrophe for him, as a massive dramatisation of the castration and obliteration of the white European male, who was disinherited and abandoned by his father government, and consequently unable to prevent his homeland from being invaded. Conceivably, a sense of the mysterious otherness of Islam, and of its alien sensorium, also represented to Breivik something of the terrifying otherness and castrating power of the mother in subjection to whom he had been left by his father. Similarly, the Norwegian liberal democratic state, especially as embodied in the ruling Labour Party and in the social and cultural consequences of its policies, could represent for Breivik both elements of the hated parental couple. It is a treacherous father, who cares nothing for his son and his struggle to be a man, preferring instead to give his love to others. It is also a corrupt and corrupting mother, who demands that the son drown himself in her world of perverse feminisation, where a toxic fluid- ity has destroyed all boundaries. He needs a world where this sort of thing does not happen, a world where the government would ensure that fathers and sons are together Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 177 within a firm castle of maleness. Instead his father had betrayed him, leaving him in a feminised environment with a depressed and disturbed mother whose very presence around him threatened his sense of identity and safety. He had taken to wearing surgical face masks at home in the belief that his mother carried infections which she might pass to him. The solution he found was to immerse himself in a collective identity that enabled him to feel he could escape these intolerable relationships with internal parental objects by attacking the external representations of those objects. This collective identity claims to be that of all the indigenous peoples of Europe, but it exists in this conscious, highly elaborated and malignant form only in the minds of the relatively few individuals who have sought an ideological escape from similar catastrophic internal worlds. It is an identity which offers salvation from the dissolution of gender identities and links that hope with a loud and pernicious preoccupation with Islam and the fear of Islamification. It cannot be said on the evidence of the Breivik case alone whether this gender anxiety is at the heart of the ‘Islamophobia’ expressed by many of the people who feel themselves to be part of a wider cultural precariat, or whether it is specific to the thankfully much smaller group of people willing to undertake or sanction violent action. The latter seems much more likely, given that— as noted earlier—Breivik’s fantasies of the future are unusual. However, Figlio’s concept of a psychosocial enclave, a defensive space where an ambivalence is managed but which can be an antechamber to a collapse of the self, invites us to look carefully at the porosity of the psychic borderland between the everyday prejudices of a broad precariat and the deep malignancies of a Breivik. This borderland is the subject of some key political debates. It is often understood as a continuum, such that the implicit xenophobia of a national newspaper is seen as differing only in degree from violent hate crime. However, a psychodynamic analysis may point to some discontinuity along this dimension of negativity, at the point where psychotic processes emerge. But there is certainly common ground between Breivik and the Nazis. The work of Klaus Theweleit (1987) offers an analysis of the writings of men centrally involved in the development of Nazism in the 1920s. While Breivik is too much of a twenty-first century character to be accurately called a Neo-Nazi, Theweleit reveals the unconscious dimensions 178 B. Richards of Nazism in hyper-defended, perverted masculinity, which suggests some deep connections with the ‘Justiciar Knight’. The analysis by Christina Wieland (2014) of the psychodynamics of Nazism (see also the chapter ‘The Primitive Container of Fascism: Masculine Anxieties and Defences in Times of Trauma and Uncertainty’) also stresses its origins in gender-linked defences against terrifying phantasies of maternal power. We can also see a further link with Nazism as outlined by Figlio in his discussion of post-WW2 German identity. While Islam as enemy takes visible forms to which objection can be raised, the incremental decay of gender boundaries and sexual orientations is (apart from certain social performances of gayness) more of an invisible enemy within, a type of ‘Jewish question’ concerning a subtle, insidious form of sabotage. The rise of ‘matriarchy’, meanwhile, is easily passed off as a social good, a righting of historic wrongs against women, which only people like Breivik will understand as the culturally corrosive force which it is. So for him, the ‘sexual revolution’ and gender plasticity present as silent a threat to Europe as did Jews to the Nazi. Without clinical evidence from direct work with Breivik, it is difficult to complete the case for the analysis offered above of the meanings of his texts and the drivers of his actions. But there is no doubt, as the studies of his biography and early family life by the writer Aage Borchgrevink (2013) and the journalist Asne Seierstad (2016) have shown, that this most destructive of ‘lone wolf’ terrorists emerged from a background of deep emotional damage. His psychological development had been flagged up by at least one professional as a matter of serious concern when his very disturbed family were on the radar of the mental health services. Breivik was five at the time; the team involved was not able to conduct a sustained intervention with the family or to follow up on the vulnerable boy. While no mental health system can capture and intervene successfully in all cases of serious early disturbance, we might wonder whether some kind of intervention at that stage may have enabled him to manage his fears better later in life. Such speculations aside, and whatever the developmental history in any particular case, a psychosocial analysis of terrorism can legitimately seek to clarify the current state of mind which is expressed in the terrorist ideology. An analysis of Breivik’s polemics on Islam suggests that beneath Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 179 them there is an unconscious phantasy that his masculinity is under threat and is on the point of annihilation. Like all unconscious phantasy, this internal fear may bear little correspondence to any external reality past or present. But hence his abhorrence of contemporary sexual freedoms, with their threat as he saw it to the sovereignty of the patriarchal male, and his unmanageable hatred of the liberal state that in his view promoted these freedoms. To defend against his inner sense of weakness and vulnerability, he developed an extremely grandiose and omnipotent state of mind, medals, world-historic missions and all, wrapped up in a massive idealisation of European/Western civilisation. To save himself, Breivik not only had to merge himself with this collective identity, he also had to be its saviour, to protect it from the dire threats which it/he faced. Inserting him into Figlio’s analysis of Nazism, we see a pattern in which defences against an internal annihilation of the self require a catastrophe being visited on others in the external world.

The National Ideal

This pattern testifies to the power of a collective identity to hold the self together, in Breivik and similar cases through a pathological organisation which masks internal dissolution. But, as Figlio (op. cit., p. 161) points out, even when not psychotic in nature, collective identities are ‘inherently unstable’, always tending towards self-idealisation and the accompanying projection of badness into other groups. As we noted earlier, that may create the relative stability of a ‘psychosocial enclave’. But it may lead to violent conflict with another collective. Or, when the outward projection of bad objects cannot for whatever reason be sustained, a faction or component within the collective may be identified as a bad object, and splitting will threaten the continued existence of the whole. In his paper on the ‘absolute state of mind’, Figlio (2006) examines the dynamics of identities found in fundamentalist groups. Drawing on the writings of Chasseguet-Smirgel and a number of other psychoanalytic theorists, he stresses the role in these identities of an absolute form of idealisation, involving the total projection of the ego ideal into the collective, its leader or some totemic aspect of it. He notes the 180 B. Richards unsuitability for receiving this kind of projection of ‘the secularism of liberal society [which] mixes values that are espoused by one sector but reviled by another sector’ (op. cit., p. 10). In mixing good and bad in this way, liberal society endangers the good object for all those of its citizens whose good object has to be idealised and isolated from the bad to protect it from destruction through contact with the bad. Idealised good objects must be protected from destruction or damage through being linked with the bad and thereby attacked along with it. It is also necessary to protect the subject from guilt at having damaged the good in phantasied attacks on the bad within a mixed object. The strongest internal bulwark against idealising and fundamentalist states of mind is therefore a robust internal good object, one which is not idealised but which is nonetheless a reliable source of goodness. External objects which reflect this sort of internal good object have flaws which can be acknowledged and criticised, but the subject’s relationship to them is basically trusting and constructive, while also subject to constant reality testing. This familiar psychoanalytic model of a good object relationship matches widely held conceptions of how citizens relate to a well-functioning liberal democratic state. In reality, of course, many liberal democracies do not function well, but if we stick for a moment with the idea of one that does, and try to picture its realisation, we probably find that we are thinking in terms of a national polity. It could be argued that this is simply a lack of imagination and that we default to the nation-state only because that is currently the dominant form of polity around the world. This chapter will conclude with the suggestion that there may be more positive reasons for turning to the nation as an appropriate platform on which to place a robust good object as the core of a large-group identity, and thereby as an important element in the psyche’s relationship with the reality of the external social world. As Vamik Volkan has persistently argued (e.g. 2004), large-group identities are core to our sense of self and its coherence. As Figlio (2012, p. 161) says, ‘“Successful” collective identity is less collective, and more tempered by the disenchantment delivered by historical debate in a political forum that sustains it, as in a democracy’. Thus defined, an example of ‘successful’ collective identity could be a nationalism in which there is a deep unconscious (while also consciously Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 181 emotional) attachment to an idea of a particular nation, which may on occasion edge into a mode of sentimental or idealising veneration, but which is basically amenable to evidence-based debate about the rights and wrongs of the nation in question. Following Figlio’s observations on the kinds of collective identity likely to be developed around liberal and democratic societies, we can suggest that a nation organised as a liberal democratic state is the entity most likely to provide a vehicle for such a collective identity. Aside from its organisation as a polity, the nation-state is also an empirical community in which the demands and advantages of getting on together will press on its citizens in a way that they do not when the collective is a categorical one perhaps spread across the globe. There will be more numerous opportunities to know each other—not interpersonally, but in the sense, perhaps related to George Mead’s (1934) ‘generalised other’, of a familiar collective. In Breivik’s document 2083 there are 222 references to Norway. Remarkably, none of these involves any discussion or even mention of Norway’s national identity, nor is there any allusion to Norwegian nationalism. There is one bland comment on his own national feeling, where (in the interview he conducted with himself and which is at the back end of the work) he responds to a question about why he chose a pan-European group (the fictional Knights Templars) by saying ‘My choice has nothing to do with the fact that I am not proud of my own traditions and heritage’. His wording here conveys the opposite of what must have been his conscious intention, one to assert the fact that he is proud of his heritage.5 However we do not need to seize on that possibly Freudian slip to make the case that national feeling means little to Breivik. His discussion of Norway shows that for him it is simply another European country the government of which has capitulated to the Marxist-feminist onslaught. Nearly all the references to Norway are examples of the cancer of Islamisation; the nation of Norway is a blank slate on which Breivik has written ‘Western civilisation in decay’, or is a statistic of some sort to illustrate the spread of the disease attacking that civilisation. Breivik is 100% an internationalist; he seems to have failed completely to cathect Norway, its symbolic and material culture, and its people. This is one of the similarities between him and the European neo-Nazis to whom he is in some respects similar, whose polemic also typically omits 182 B. Richards any substantial reference to specific national identities. This characteristic is also shared with violent takfiri Islamists such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, though their ideology goes further to identify all nations and nationalisms as evil, since a nation must cut across and challenge the supremacy of the caliph and the caliphate. Their hatred of liberalism and democracy means that for them the liberal democratic nation-state is a perfect combination of evils. Of course we know that nationalism can be implicated in other kinds of violent fundamentalism. And not all of the most perverse and violent extremisms eschew a ‘national’ discourse, as in the case of Timothy McVeigh and other US ‘patriots’. However, the radical American separation between state and people, between ‘government’ and ‘country’, enables a highly sentimental and idealised nationalist fervour to flourish in tandem with a homicidal stance towards anyone representing the liberal democratic nation-state. Still, many European countries are currently seeing racist forms of nationalism gain strength at the extremes of the parliamentary spectrum. Nonetheless, where nationalism is at odds with racism, and remains bonded to a respectful acceptance of the democratic nation-state, we may see it as a potential containing force. As a recognition of shared space and to some extent shared fate, it could serve as a restraint on an impulse to attack fellow nationals, even those who are not accepted as such (though in-country terrorist attacks do not discriminate much when selecting their targets). A collective identity, national or other, may function as part of a narcissistic structure wherein it rests heavily on the projection of the ego ideal into an idealised community, often using the parental imagoes which the ego ideal incorporates to produce regressive images of mother- land and fatherland. Or it may incorporate projected and re-introjected elements of more complex and mature internal objects. In the latter form, a national identity—and any other version of a core, large-group identity, to use Volkan’s term—may include elements which support the individual in tolerating differences, even minor ones, without resort to splitting. This would be a form of nationalist sentiment which can fully acknowledge the ‘impurity’ of the nation—its shortcomings internally and on the world stage—while also being able to imagine it as a vital source of personal identity and public emotional capital. Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 183

Anders Breivik is a combination of a catastrophically fearful and humiliated masculine self with a capacity for unchecked grandiosity and omnipotence. (For psychoanalysis this is of course no paradox: it sees such narcissistic grandiosity as a defence against the fear of inner collapse.) This occurred in a person with the material resources and practical competence to execute a mass murder. While this tragic fusion of qualities may be relatively rare, there is no reason to believe that it will not recur elsewhere. And there are other forms of catastrophised internal worlds which are the psychological drivers of other terrorists. Hence the important role for mental health services in counter-terrorism, even though that role may be impossible to plan for or to specify in advance. We cannot know in advance which amongst the many cases of frightened and angry children will turn later to a violent fundamentalism as a way of managing their catastrophic internal worlds. Overall, however, given that most people do not come within the purview of mental health services, the quality of our national civic cultures is the main defence against the risk that inner disturbances of the kinds that Breivik and other terrorists present may become mobilised in violent form. A universal refusal of all coercive fundamentalisms and a commitment to the liberal nation-state’s role in protecting and nurturing its citizens are essential elements of that defence. These aims might both be supported by a reconstructed nationalism based psychologically on the projection of strong repaired objects and aspects of the benign superego. National sentiment with its psychic origin in contained disenchantment would—like Figlio’s model of liberal democracy as an internal object—in itself be an antidote to all absolute states of mind, and so counteract the tendency for tension to build up in the ‘psychosocial enclaves’ of everyday politics.

Notes

1. Some of the material presented in the following analysis of Breivik’s ideology was used in an article in the American Sociological Association’s journal Contexts (Richards 2014). 2. In identifying himself as the author of this document, Breivik used an anglicised version of his name - ‘Andrew Berwick’. 184 B. Richards

3. See an earlier study by the present author of British National Party propaganda—Richards (2013). 4. There seems to be some continuity here with one of Breivik’s occupations before he committed himself to inflicting terror. He made a significant amount of money, which subsequently funded his time and his prepara- tions, in an online business selling fake diplomas and degrees. 5. And in any case, elsewhere in the document (p. 1400) in the only other reference to his pride in his heritage, it is referred to not as Norwegian but as ‘Viking’.

References

Berwick, A. (2011). 2083. A European declaration of independence. Retrieved from https://info.publicintelligence.net/AndersBehringBreivikManifesto.pdf Borchgrevink, A. (2013). A Norwegian tragedy. Cambridge: Polity. Figlio, K. (2006). The absolute state of mind in society and the individual. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 11(2), 119–143. Figlio, K. (2012). A psychoanalytic reflection on collective memory as a psychosocial enclave: Jews, German national identity and splitting in the German psyche. International Social Science Journal, 62(203–204), 161–177. Gable, G., & Jackson, P. (2012). Lone wolves: Myth or reality? London: Searchlight. Husby, T., & Sorheim, S. (2011). Anders Behring Breivik psychiatric report 2011- 11-29. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/breivikreport/documents/anders-breivik-psychiatric-report-of-2011 Mead, G. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Richards, B. (2013). Extreme nationalism and the hatred of the liberal state. In N. Demertzis (Ed.), Emotions in politics: The affect dimension in political tension (pp. 124–142). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Richards, B. (2014). What drove Anders Breivik? Contexts, 13(4), 42–47. Seierstad, A. (2016). One of us. The story of a massacre and its aftermath. London: Virago. Theweleit, K. (1987). Male fantasies. Cambridge: Polity. Torrissen, T., & Aspaas, A. (2012). Anders Behring Breivik psychiatric report 2012-4-10. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/breivikreport/documents/anders-breivik-psychiatric-report-2012-04-10 Collective Identities, Breivik and the National Container 185

Volkan, V. (2004). Blind trust: Large groups and their leaders in times of crisis and terror. Charlottesville, PA: Pitchstone. Wieland, C. (2014). The fascist state of mind and the manufacturing of masculinity: A psychoanalytic approach. London: Routledge.

Barry Richards is Professor of Political Psychology at Bournemouth University, UK. He was formerly Professor of Human Relations at the University of East London. His books include Disciplines of Delight: The Psychoanalysis of Popular Culture (Free Association Books), Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror (Palgrave) and the forthcoming What Holds Us Together (Karnac). Index1

A Anzieu, D., 138, 144 Abraham, N., 53, 54 Arendt, H., 24, 144, 145 Absolute obedience, 156 Arizona, 115–119, 124 Adorno, T. W., 170 Asia, 158, 159 Africa, 55, 129 Assembly, 66 Agency, 2, 3, 31, 32, 37, 70, 97 Austen, J., 56 Ahearn, L., 31 Alpha function, 16, 130, 131 American Sociological Association, B 183n1 Baraitser, L., 56 Anderson, B., 136 Bashevis Singer, I., 52 Anglos, 116, 118, 122 Bauman, Z., 2 Annihilation, 34, 134–145, 166, Beck, U., 2 167, 173, 174, 179 Becoming, 49, 57, 58, 101 Anti-Semitism, 53, 59, 74, Beethoven, 141 89n2, 141 Beevor, A., 157, 159 Anxiety, 2, 5, 9, 21, 26, 34–40, 71, Benjamin, W., 56 74, 77, 81–88, 133–136, 143, Bewilderment, 50, 52, 56, 58 151, 153, 162, 167, 176, 177 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 49

1 Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refers to notes.

Bible, 50, 53, 63, 64 Conrad, J., 56 biblical book of numbers, 50 Contained, 94, 130–137, 143, Deuteronomy, 62 144, 183 Black problem, 88, 116, 124, 125 Coomaraswamy, R., 150 Bleger, J., 167 Countertransference, 75–77, 82, 83, Bohleber, W., 138 87, 89n2, 102 The Book of Heroic Failures, 110 Crusades, 173 Borchgrevink, A., 178 Cultural conflict, 105 Border Patrol, 116–118, 120–122, Cultural identity, 57 125, 126, 127n2 Cultural marxism, 170, 171 Borderland, 177 Breivik, A., 5, 9, 129, 165–183 British National Party, 184n3 D Brooks, D., 73–75, 82, 83, 87, D’Annunzio, G., 139 88, 89n6 Das Kapital, 170 Burton, R., 4 Davids, M. F., 5, 7, 23, 25, 84, 88, Butler, J., 32, 55, 56, 58, 60, 66 116, 124, 125 De Saussure, F., 38 The Dead Fiddler, 52 C Dead fish, 107, 108, 110 Cambodia, 144 Death, 23, 33, 34, 41, 135, 136, Canaan, 51, 54 140, 143, 145, 167 Castration complex, 152 Death instinct, 34, 143, 145 Chagall, M., 60 Defence mechanism, 35, 40 Chang, I., 156 Dependence, 2, 3, 36, 86, 95, 96, Chasseguet-Smirgel, J., 138, 144, 99, 101, 104, 108, 111, 145n2 151–153, 179 Depressive position, 34, 84, 132 Chicanos, 120, 124 Depth psychological, 6 China, 158, 159 Derrida, J., 53, 171 Chinese, 149, 158–161 Destructive narcissistic Christian organization, 17 Anglican, 87 Diaspora, 58 Catholic, 87 Diasporic, 7, 54, 57, 58, 66 Cohabitation, 55, 66 Difference, 4, 5, 13, 18, 23, 24, 31, Collective identity, 177, 180 61–63, 78, 79, 81, 86, 145, Colonialism, 55, 57 150, 153, 155–157 Comfort women system, 151 Discipline, 75, 149–163 Commitment, 111 Discrimination, 122–125 Communist Manifesto, 170 Divine, 41, 61 Index 189

DNA, 131 Fonagy, P., 70 Doubles, 51 Formulations on the two principles Doubt, 2, 7, 11–13, 35, 42, 45, 51, of mental functioning, 17 77, 82, 115, 123, 133, 140, Foucault, M., 32 144, 155, 163, 178 Frankfurt School, 169–171 Dybbuks, 50, 51 Freud and the Non-European, 53, 55 Freud, S., 2, 7, 12–26, 27n2, 27n3, 33, 34, 36, 49–65, 74–77, 83, E 94–99, 134, 138, 141, 143, Ego, 3, 15, 16, 23, 24, 33–37, 44, 150, 151, 154, 155, 160, 51, 52, 70, 84, 86, 96–100, 162, 169 110, 111, 134, 138, 179, 182 Fromm, E., 171 The Ego and the Id, 16 Frosh, S., 6, 7, 35, 51, 56 Ego-ideal, 44, 97, 98 Frustration, 19, 20, 26, 44, 109 Ego-syntonic, 99 Fundamentalism, 3, 6, 24, 36, Emperor, 156, 157, 160 182, 183 Ethnicity, 77, 81, 86, 126 fundamentalist ideal, 60 Ethnography of Islam, 42 Futurist Manifesto, 139 European, 54, 55, 102, 106, 123, 139, 141, 167–182 External object, 19, 95, 104, 105 G Gaddini, E., 17 Garland, C., 134 F Gender identity, 9, 151, 176 Far Right, 167 Generalised other, 181 Fascism, 4, 8, 9, 130–145 German National Socialist, 129 Feeling of certainty, 12 Germany, 111, 139–145, 153, Feminism, 171 166, 167 Fenichel, O., 162 Ghosts, 50, 52, 56 Ferenczi, S., 3, 34, 152, 153 Gilman, S., 141 Festinger, L., 4 God, 23, 24, 40–45, 54, 60, 63–65, Figlio, K., 3, 7, 20, 21, 23–26, 75, 118 35, 36, 41, 45, 69, 70, Golden Calf, 61 116, 125, 165–167, Gordon, A., 50 169, 177–183 Grandiosity, 9, 36, 99, 169, 173, Fjordman, 175 174, 183 Flashing up, 56 Gringos, 119–121 Fletcher, J., 54 Group ideal, 98, 99 190 Index

Group illusion, 138 Islamic extremism, 5 Group Psychology, 36 Islamic State (IS), 130 Guilt, 11, 26, 35, 83, 88, 94, 151, Israelites, 50, 64 160, 166, 167, 180 Italian Fascist, 129

H J Hague, 149 Jacob, 52, 54 Hall, S., 57 Japan, 2, 157–159 Haunting, 49, 52, 53, 58 Japanese Military Forces, 157 Heimann, P., 76 Japanese Imperial Army, 156–158 Hernández Jiménez, N., 8 Joseph, 52, 54 Hicks, G., 156, 157 Judaism, 54, 59, 60 Higgitt, A., 70 Jewish, 87, 104, 141, 145, 178 Hinshelwood, R. D., 5, 7, 16, 34, 36 Jews, 52–63, 74, 75, 141, 143, Hirschkind, C., 41 144, 167, 169, 178 Hitler, A., 139 Jung, C. G., 4, 7 Hollander, N., 55 Holocaust, 40, 53 Hopper, E., 136–144 K Hughes-Hallett, L., 139 Kant, I., 26n1 Human mind, 130, 131 Kershaw, I., 145, 146n4 Khanna, R., 50 Khusuak, 44, 45 I Klein, M., 7, 17, 33–37, 43, 84, 95, Identity, 4, 5, 23, 26, 32, 38–40, 131, 132 52–60, 100, 101, 104, 106, Kleinian language, 33 116–126, 129–138, 150–154, Knights Templar, 173, 174 160, 163, 166–169, 176–183 Knowledge, 7, 12–14, 24, 35, Ideology, 37, 39, 42, 43, 133, 138, 60–66, 93, 94, 133 139, 141, 143, 156, 157, anti-knowledge, 12 168–172, 178, 182, 183n1 Kobayashi, T., 161 Individualism, 39, 156 Korea, 159 Internal world, 13, 15, 17, 26, 84, Krupp steel, 142 89n3, 95, 99, 100, 167 Iraq, 130 Irish, 87 L Iron Curtain, 166 Lacan, J., 7, 33, 37–40, 42, 43 Islam, 40–44, 168–179 Laidlaw, J., 41, 42 Index 191

Lamarckian, 53, 59 Mexico, 117–120 Language, 13, 32–43, 58, 62 Mexican, 115–126 Laplanche, J., 16 Queretaro, 120 Lawrence, Stephen, 7, 72 Middle East, 41, 102, 129, 173 Le Bon, G., 96, 97 Migras, 116, 118, 122 Learning from experience, Militarism, 8, 139, 144, 156 85, 132, 143 Minangkabau, 42 Liebestod, 140 Mintchev, Nikolay, 5, 7, 33, 37 Likierman, M., 35 Minus K, 65 Lind, W., 170 Mommsen, H., 145, 146n4 Little Hans, 49 Moore, G. E., 13 Love, 12, 34, 61, 62, 75, 98, 134, Moore, H., 21, 32, 33 140, 152, 154, 173, 176 Moral force, 139 anti-love, 12 Moses and Monotheism, 49, 53, 58, 62 Luckhurst, R., 50 Moses und Aron, 58, 60, 63, 64 Mother, 18, 33, 84, 86, 130–132, 135, 138, 142–144, 150–156, M 162, 176, 177 MacKinnon, C., 150 archaic mother, 138 Macpherson, W., 74, 87 Mother’s baby, 131 Madonna, 154, 155, 160, 162 Mother’s body, 138, 142–145 Mahmood, S., 41 Mourning and melancholia, 17 Maimonides, 64 Murakami, 161 Main, R., 3 Mussolini, R., 139 Manchuria, 159 Mandela, N., 55 Mann, T., 139 N Marcuse, H., 171 Nachträglichkeit, 51 Marinetti, F. T., 139 Nationalism, 9, 54, 165, 168, 180–183 Maslow, A., 171 Nation state, 136, 180–183 Massification, 136–138, 142, 144, 145 Natural world, 16 Matter and Motion, 15 Nazis, 59, 74, 75, 145, 177, 181 Maxwell, J. C., 15 Nobus, D., 65 McNay, L., 31 Nogales, 119 McVeigh, T., 168, 182 Noro, T., 8 Mead, G., 181 Norway, 9, 129, 165, 181 Meltzer, D., 36, 96 Numinous, 4 Metropolitan Police, 72, 74 Nuremberg, 138, 144 192 Index

O Prejudice, 5, 70, 98, 106, 116, Object-relations, 32–45, 125 125, 126 Oedipus complex, 17, 18, 146n3, Projection, 7, 12–26, 75–81, 86, 151, 152, 155 116, 124, 126, 131, 134, 143, Oklahoma, 168 153, 154, 160, 179–183 Omnipotence, 3, 20, 21, 34, 36, 42, Projective identification, 75, 76, 70, 94, 99, 137, 138, 145, 79, 150 174, 183 Promised Land, 64 Omniscience, 20, 36, 94, 99 Psychoanalysis, 12, 21, 22, 27n2, 32, On Anxiety, 39 33, 49, 51, 65, 95, 112, 150, 183 Orientation, 115 Psychosocial enclaves, 166, 183 Ortner, Sherry, 31 Psychosocial perspectives, 6 Oslo, 167, 168, 173 Psychotic delusions, 174 Otto, R., 3 Outsider, 53, 54 Q Quinn, M., 65 P Palimpsest, 51, 52 Pan-Asianism, 157 R Paranoid-schizoid, 17, 34–37, 78, Racism, 5–7, 71–89, 95–112, 84–86, 132 123, 182 Paranoid-schizoid position, 35, 36 institutionalised racism, 72 Pathological organisation, 84–86, 95, internal racist, 78, 87, 105 96, 99, 106, 179 racist mindset, 69–71, 81, 86, 95 Phantasy, 17–25, 36, 71, 80, 81, 94, racist object, 105, 111 103, 139–142, 144, 145, Rape, 149, 150, 158–160 151–154, 169, 179 rape in Nanking, 151, 158–162 Physiological model, 16 Rashi, 62 Pinheiro, T., 3 Rat Man, 94 Plato, 93 Reality, 3, 5, 11–23, 27n4, 50, 70, Pol Pot, 144 73, 74, 88, 89, 93–96, 115, Poltergeists, 50, 51 132, 133, 151, 152, 179, 180 Post-colonial, 57, 88, 116 Reality principle, 94, 143 Post-colonial theorists, 55 Recovered memory therapy, 39 Power, 32, 37, 38, 42, 57, 88, 99, Reflex arc, 16, 17 102, 108, 139, 155 Reflex model, 16, 17 Precariat, 2, 177 Reformist Islamic, 41 Index 193

Reich, W., 171 Stein, R., 3 Response, 115 Steiner, J., 20, 22, 27n4, 85, 94 Return of the repressed, 49, 51 Subjectivity, 1, 6, 7, 19, 31–45, Revelation, 51 61, 66 Revenants, 50, 51 Super-ego, 17, 24, 26n1, 97 Richards, B., 5, 9, 129, 183n1, 184n3 Symbolic order, 37–43 Rilke, R. M., 139 Syria, 130 Rome, 140 Rorty, Richard, 24 Rose, Jacqueline, 51–56 T Rosenfeld, H., 17, 86, 96 Tablets of Law, 61 Theory of thinking, 17 Theweleit, K., 177 S Torok, Maria, 53 Said, E., 52–58 Trauma, 8, 39, 50, 54, 55, 66, 130, Salecl, R., 39, 40 133, 134, 138, 142, 144 Santner, E., 141 Traumatic Experience in the Conscious Schiller, F., 140 Life of Groups, 137 Schoenberg, A., 58–65 Traumatogenic experience, 134, 137 Scots, 87 Treacher, A., 88 Sebek, M., 111 Trust, 13, 35, 80, 123, 132, 134, Secularism, 4, 180 136, 168 Segal, H., 34, 78, 84 Truth, 18, 21, 39, 44, 58–66 Segregation, 123 anti-truth, 12 Settledness, 54, 58, 66 Twelve Angry Men, 11 Sexual liberation, 140 Tyranny, 36 Shalat, 43 Shanghai, 159 Signifier, 37, 38, 45, 52 U Simon, G., 42 The Uncanny, 49 Sinai, 51 Unconscious phantasy, 18, 33, 70, Social container, 136 80, 179 Sodré, I., 2 Undead mother, 153–155, 160, 162 Sorel, G., 139 United States Border Patrol officers, South Americans, 107 116 Spillius, 76 Urrea, L. A., 121 Sprechgesang, 63 The Devil's Highway, 121 Standing, G., 2 Utoya, 168, 169, 172, 173 194 Index

V In the Wilderness, 50 Viana, D., 3 Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories Violence, 8, 23, 50, 79, 81, 95, 103, of a Childhood, 39 105, 129, 139–144, 162, Wittgenstein, L., 7, 13, 14, 21, 35 165, 166, 174 Wohleber, W., 144 sexual violence, 149–163 World War II, 9, 149 Volkan, V., 180, 182 Von Anvensleben, R., 142 Y Yerushalmi, Y., 53–65 W Yukichi, F., 157 Wagner, R., 140 Weininger, O., 141 Welsh, 87 Z Whore, 154, 155, 160, 162 Zinn, J., 2 Wieland, C., 4, 8, 140, Zombies, 135, 136 152–154, 178 Zornberg, A., 50, 64, 65