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Created: March 24, 2003
Latest Update: March 24, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

A Psychoanalytic Approach to War

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, March 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

The following is a fascinating message. As you can tell, it's one from a long line of messages, it's part of an on-going discussiion. What a different perspective from most of our discussions about oil and territorial control and capital gains. All those terms tend to make this whole situation sound like something real, "the fantasy that something real is happening" as Prof. Koenigsberg points out. And of course, something real IS happening on one level. Bombs are falling, people are dying. That's reality, folks.

But there's another reality under all that. A reality of which Freud spoke, the reality of the unconscious and myth, and their role in what drives human nature. I like the way Richard Koenigsberg put it: "Everyone is paralyzed by the presumed "facticity" of the phenomenon: it is assumed that just because something is happening that makes it real."

On May 24, 2003, jeanne received an e-mail from Richard Koenigsberg on one of her listservs:

Norm Rosenblood wonders if the sacrificial phantasy that I wrote about might also subsume an "apocalyptic wish" as well. He suggests that we may be observing the acting out of the "Samson myth:" the desire to bring the Temple down on everyone. Hitler, of course, was the supreme example of this dynamic of courting defeat in order to destroy the world.

I agree with this assessment and suggest that this is precisely what is going on: an apocalyptic, sacrificial, masochistic fantasy is being acted out. What is occurring has no economic or rational meaning. We want to endow it with profound "geopolitical significance" in order to deny that an infantile fantasy is being acted out on the stage of "history" (tremble, tremble).

Of course, no one wants to talk about this because everyone wants to be caught up in the excitement, to partake in the "world historical events" (the fantasy that something real is happening).

If one calls something "politics," is the phenomena then beyond the scope of psychoanalytic inquiry? Politics is the arena in which the collective fantasies of the human race are acted out.

Everyone is paralyzed by the presumed "facticity" of the phenomenon: it is assumed that just because something is happening that makes it real.

War (a consequence of the belief in "nations") is a collective fantasy to which everyone is symbiotically bound. There is something unregenerate in the attraction to this phenomenon. One does not want to separate from one's nation or culture. No one wants to be left out (it's a family affair). "People all over the world, join hands."

How come no one has asked (or asks): "What's in it for Saddam Hussein?" How come all you hear about is Bush, Bush, Bush?

The negation of Saddam Hussein on the military level is equalled by the negation of Saddam Hussein as a subject of analysis by the "intellectuals." The same dynamic is involved: the fantasy of the omnipotence of "America."

Of course, through the dialectic of denial, negation constitutes affirmation. Because one does not wish to encounter his MIND OR MENTALITY, therefore Hussein becomes the "most famous man in the world." He is fulfilling his fantasy through the vehicle of the United States of America. He is the subject or agent that has seduced the "other" to enact his myth.

It is Saddam Hussein's apocalyptic, sacrificial dream that has been activated on the stage of reality (a faint echo of Hitler's world destruction fantasy, the repressed returning, whispering to us from a distance).

Best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg

More to come later. jeanne

Discussion Questions

1. What is facticity?

   Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search:

   Check out also: Meaning of Life "First, we exist (for Sartre, this is FACTICITY)."

2. Why do you suppose the term "facticity" is used instead of "fact"?

   Consider that "facticity" is a term used in philosophy and that it emphasizes the idea of existence of fact in terms of its tangible actual presence in a lived reality. For example, a table is there. A chair is there. Oil is there. Weapons are thre. Remember the expression "can't see the forest for the trees?" Well, the trees are there. So is the forest, but you have get some physical distance and/or some social distance to see the larger or deeper picture. We can become so fascinated and fixated on the guns and uniforms and the fireworks in the sky, that it's hard to step back from the immediate locale.

3. What's the importance of myth in all this?

   Consider myth as the story of human existence. Myth offers one way to step back from it all and see the broader, the deeper picture. Of course, the message of postmodernism is that there is no single great myth (metanarrative) that can fit all people and all infrastructures. Sometimes the knowledge of a people's stories, narratives, can aid in gaining some social distance from the immediate facticity of the situation.

4. How does myth fit in war?

   Consider that the stories that are part of our culture provide heroes and villains for a somewhat oversimplified identification of similarities of facticity to other incidents in the past. In criminal justice we sometimes find people killing one another over a pair of shoes, over a three-dollar mistake in change. Hard to see how unimportant these things really are when you're caught up in the facticity. Maybe the myths can provide a way of seeing the situation differently and of stepping back for unreasoned disaster.

5. More later. jeanne