Socio-ideological fantasy and the Northern Ireland conflict

The Other side

Adrian Millar

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719066962
• eBook ISBN: 9781847795878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Conducting a Lacanian-inspired psychoanalysis of some of the most candid interview materials ever gathered from former IRA members and loyalists, the author demonstrates through a careful examination of their slips of the tongue, jokes, rationalisations and contradictions, that it is the unconscious dynamics of socio-ideological fantasy, i.e. the unconscious pleasure people find in suffering, domination, submission, ignorance, failure and rivalry over jouissance, that lead to the reproduction of antagonism between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. In the light of this, he concludes that traditional approaches to conflict resolution which overlook the unconscious are doomed to failure and that a Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding of socio-ideological fantasy has great potential for informing the way we understand and study all inter-religious and ethnic conflicts. Whether you find yourself agreeing with the arguments in this book or not, you are sure to find it a welcome change from both the existing, mainly conservative, analyses of the Northern Ireland conflict and traditional approaches to conflict resolution.

1

Psychoanalytic theory

Introduction

Psychoanalysis plumbs the depths of how we imagine ourselves, how we establish worldviews and values, and how we relate out of these.¹ According to Anthony Elliott, psychoanalysis ‘powerfully accounts for the … essential and primary foundations of all human social activity’,² namely representation, fantasy, identification and pleasure. It ‘highlights the fantasmatic dimension of cultural practices, social institutions, political norms’.³ For this reason, Elliott is correct in his contention that one must consider the place of the psyche in our understanding of human subjectivity if one is to bring about social and political transformation.

For Elliott, the social world will never be the same again after reading Lacan because ‘his theories capture something of the strangeness that pervades the mundane and familiar in daily life’.⁴ Lacanian and post-Lacanian analyses have helped evaluate the self and society, connecting the self to political domination and exploitation. They have also focused on rethinking and deconstructing the possibilities for political emancipation and autonomy. The approaches of the Lacanian and Frankfurt Schools ‘highlight that modern social processes interconnect in complex and contradictory ways with unconscious experience and therefore with the self’.⁵ Unconscious processes affect social relationships, contemporary culture and all attempts at conceptualisation.

In light of the above, it would be hard to argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis has little to say about socio-ideological fantasy, the denial which it involves, and the conflict it gives rise to, a contention that is strengthened by Lacan’s remark that psychoanalysis ‘rests on a fundamental conflict, on an initial, radical drama’⁶ at the psychic level.

Lacanian psychoanalysis⁷

For Lacan, conflict and domination are not marginal deviations from normality but part and parcel of society’s basic structure. There is no pre-established harmony. He understands the self, as constructed in the West, to be ‘an ideological construction which makes our whole civilization in a meaningful sense mentally ill’.⁸ The point of psychoanalysis for Lacan, however, is not primarily an explanatory one: it is change. Evidence the following:

Analysis is not a matter of discovering in a particular case the differential feature of the theory, and in doing so believe that one is explaining why your daughter is silent – for the point at issue is to get her to speak, and this effect proceeds from a type of intervention that has nothing to do with a differential feature.

Analysis consists precisely in getting her to speak.⁹

Add to this his development of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real orders,¹⁰ accounting for the fragmented ego and the centrality of aggressivity to this,¹¹ the constitution of the split subject caught up in the exigencies of the Other (otherwise the Lacanian unconscious, which is structured like language),¹² and rivalry over jouissance even when this involves suffering,¹³ and it becomes clear what it is that makes Lacanian analysis particularly relevant to a study of conflict and its resolution.

The Imaginary order is the realm of opposition, domination, oppression, alienation, images, mirrors, paranoia, perception, identifications with others, and identity. Paraphrasing Lacan, Fink characterises the Imaginary order as ‘the world of rivalry and war’.¹⁴ He notes that ‘[i]t is in a fundamental rivalry … that the constitution of the human world as such takes place.’¹⁵ Lacan believed that the basic natural state for mankind was that of aggression. Aggression is already present in the pre-verbal child born out of the narcissistic relation with the image and is linked to the structures of objectification that ‘characterize the formation of the ego’.¹⁶

The Symbolic overwrites the Imaginary, subordinating Imaginary relations involving rivalry and aggressivity to symbolic relations that are ‘dominated by concerns with ideals, authority figures, the law, performance, achievement, guilt, and so on’.¹⁷ The Symbolic order situates the individual in culture, the world of metaphor and metonymy. A person’s thoughts are made within culture. Thus: ‘The subject does not speak, he “is spoken” by the symbolic structure.’¹⁸ The Symbolic thus inhabits the individual and dominates him or her, imposing its law on the desiring subject, both curtailing desire and propelling its motion. So, Turkle can write that for Lacan ‘[t]he individual and the social order are inextricably bound’.¹⁹

The Real is trauma, violence, a moment of excruciating pain, pure antagonism. People construct ‘reality’ out of the Real in part to protect themselves against its pure antagonism. They recreate ‘a harmony with the real’.²⁰ Lying outside the world of the signifier, the Real ‘governs our activities more than any other’.²¹ We repeat it without recognising it: ‘the real is that which comes back to the same place – to the place where the subject in so far as he thinks, where the res cogitans, does not meet it’.²² Nevertheless, one can say something about the Real from the way the unconscious speaks where there is pain, revealing truth, which Lacan views as a function of the unconscious. In Žižek’s words, truth ‘belongs to the order of contingency: we vegetate in our everyday life, deep into the universal lie that structures it, when, all of a sudden, some totally contingent encounter – a casual remark by a friend, an incident we witness – evokes the memory of untold repressed trauma and shatters our self-delusion’.²³ This is what tells us what is really going on, what people really desire.

The Imaginary order

The ego

For Lacan the point of departure for human subjectivity occurs at the pre-verbal ‘mirror stage’. Looking into a mirror the child is captivated or ‘captured’ by its image, seeing the image as reality and concluding ‘I am that’ and ‘That is me’. In effect, the subject collapses into its object, failing to distinguish itself from the Other. It is thus in the Other that the subject first lives and registers himself or herself. The individual is alienated from himself or herself because of his or her desire for the image. It is a relation of opposition because what is established is established on the basis of what is not, i.e. an Other. Thus, Imaginary relations always involve intimidation, aggression, aggressive competitiveness, superiority, jealousy, or resentment. Lacan says that with the ‘captation of the subject’²⁴ in the mirror we have a formula for ‘the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury’.²⁵

The mirror stage is rooted in the ‘fragmented body’ (‘corps morcelé’) fantasy. According to this fantasy, the individual has a sense of bodily disarray that feeds the desire for a secure, stagnant, frozen ‘I’. The ego is condemned to perpetual torment, caught as it is between a push towards integration and wholeness as imaged in the mirror and the disintegration of the ‘corps morcelé’, which is a reminder to the individual of its lack and incompleteness.

As a result of the mirror stage, all Imaginary relations are fixated on an idealisation and an illusion, and otherness in the form of oppositions persists throughout adult life. Others always appear to have the totality and stability that the individual desires. Pulled between the desire for autonomy or identity and the identification with a rival, the ego is in a constant paranoid relation with the Other. The ego’s desire to be the Other by dissolving its otherness in this gradually becomes a desire to control the Other through which it sees itself because any change in the Other would threaten its view of itself. This is the source of human conflict. Conflict for Lacan is not the innocuous, anodyne competition or disagreement that exists between individuals or groups. It is a matter of domination and oppression – forms of violence that may or may not have a physical expression. Lacan notes that the effects of aggressive intention are ‘more far-reaching than any act of brutality’.²⁶ This understanding of conflict makes Lacanian analysis relevant to situations of communal conflict where the threat of violence can paralyse a community.²⁷

According to Lacan, the ego has a paranoiac structure and is buttressed by denial. Violence, for Lacan, is the result of ‘paranoid justifications of our own insecurity, which we project as aggressivity emanating from the others we control’.²⁸ Feelings of persecution lead to anxiety and this in turn leads the ego to express itself through negative projections onto others, throwing its own disorder and bad feelings onto them and fearing their return in the form of paranoia. When someone says ‘They are out to get me’ what they are actually saying is ‘I am out to get them’. The term ‘projection’ has many usages in psychoanalysis but it always appears as a defence.²⁹ It is best understood for the purposes of the present study as the unconscious process whereby the indivi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Psychoanalytic theory
• 2 Conflict resolution
• 3 Explanations of the Northern Ireland conflict
• 4 The republican Real
• 5 The republican Imaginary
• 6 The republican Symbolic
• 7 Loyalists
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index