Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics

Fatherlands in mothers' hands

Eszter Salgó

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317962106
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers' hands is a playful exploration of how people's desires, fantasies, and emotions shape political events and social phenomena. It highlights the mythical sources of today's political projects, the power of political imagination, and the function of symbolism in political thought. Eszter Salgó argues that the driving force for the formation of political communities is fantasy – 'illusions' in a Winnicottian sense, 'phantasies' in a Lacanian sense, 'phantoms' as described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and 'dreams' as interpreted by Sándor Ferenczi. She introduces the metaphor of the 'fantastic family' as a symbolic representation of political communities, both to reflect on people's deeply felt desire to find in public life the resolution, love, and wholeness of early childhood, and to unveil the political elite's readiness to don the mask of the 'ideal parent'.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part of the book explores the theories of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan: the matrimony on the stage of politics between the 'good-enough mother' and the Symbolic Father which inaugurates the story of democracy's 'fantastic family'. The second part presents the 'fantastic families' of selected countries such as Hungary, Italy, and the world community to explain the proliferation of cosmogony projects, and to document the failure of the political elites to offer a satisfactory performance of their maternal and paternal functions.

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers' hands presents a new way of considering the art of politics, based on the understanding that people perceive reality through imagination and unconscious fantasy. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, and academics from across the disciplines of politics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literature, and art.

Part I
The stage

Chapter I
In-the-name-of-playful politics

In between politics and psychoanalysis

The idea that politics can be perceived as an ‘art of theatre’, and political communities presented as ‘fantastic families’ performing on the stage of politics, is based on my conviction that a deep and intimate (but not evident) tie exists between politics, psychoanalysis and anthropology. As Thomas Mann observed, mythical interest is as native to psychoanalysis as psychological interest is to creative writing; its penetration into the childhood of the individual soul is at the same time a penetration into the childhood of mankind, the primitive and mythical (1938: 111). Psychoanalysts, politicians and anthropologists all work with myths; their willingness, in the case of psychoanalysts and anthropologists, to understand people’s nostalgia for Paradise, and the enthusiasm with which some identity entrepreneurs capitalize on this, constitutes the kernel of their professions.

Psychoanalysis and politics also share what Cassirer and Walzer described as the fundamental integrative function: analysts assist their patients in their efforts to unite those parts in their personalities which, as a result of shock, fright or trauma, became split and fragmented. As Freud explains in his second drive theory, out of the two basic impulses which drive people’s behaviour, Eros and Thanatos (life and ‘death drives’), the aim of the former is to ‘bind together’, to ‘establish ever greater unities’, ‘so preserving life’ (1940: 148). Concerning politics, as Madame de Staël observed, ‘to divide, in order to rule, is a sign of weakness in political power’ (Dorsey 1961: 231).

Playing the role of parents constitutes another bond between psychoanalysis and politics. Transference is the process by which emotions and desires, originally associated with a real or a perceived parent, are unconsciously shifted to the analyst and also to the politician. Identification, too, is a concept central in both realms. Vital in the process of the construction of the self, identification doesn’t disappear with age, but quite the reverse – it remains constitutive of socio-political life. The fact that adults identify with political ideologies, political leaders and other socially constructed objects has brought most psychoanalytic theoreticians to regard the social as the psyche’s depositary of representations, the place that provides objects of identification. In this sense, according to Yannis Stavrakakis, ‘instead of identity politics we should speak of identification politics’ (1999: 30). Unlike replication, which refers to an exterior reproduction of someone else’s behaviour, identification entails a change, a metamorphosis in the subject.

According to Herbert Marcuse, psychoanalytic categories do not have to be ‘related’ to social and political conditions; ‘they are themselves social and political categories’ (1970: 44). For Freud, individual psychology is at the same time social psychology; ‘only rarely… is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent’ (1921: 69). In writing this book I felt encouraged by Lacan’s (enigmatic) supposition as well:

In its treatment of the individual, psychoanalysis has discovered relational tensions that appear to play a fundamental role in all societies, as if the discontent in civilization went so far as to reveal the very joint of nature to culture. If one makes the appropriate transformation, one can extend the formulas of psychoanalysis concerning this joint to certain human sciences that can utilize them.

(1950: 14)

Antony Elliott (2002) situates psychoanalysis in a political context. From his standpoint, the political significance of psychoanalysis consists in its ability to help to understand better the emotional dimension of civilization, the human facet of a society, how political and social connections condition human subjectivity and unconscious passion. He provides a powerful synthesis of a wide variety of psychoanalytic approaches to demonstrate that ‘from Sigmund Freud to Jean Laplanche, psychoanalytic theory has been intricately interwoven with political values and ideological assumptions’ and that psychoanalysis has challenged the ideology of subjectivity itself, ‘bringing the question of the subject back to political issues of desire, gender, language, history and society’ (2002: 175).

The Greek psychoanalyst and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis was particularly interested in shedding light on the intimate bond that connects psychoanalysis and politics. Freud’s aforementioned comment – that psychoanalysis, politics and pedagogy are three ‘impossible professions’ – brought him to reflect on their common features. Psychoanalysts, politicians and pedagogues, Castoriadis asserted, aim to enhance individuals’ ability to live an autonomous life; they engage in poetical activities (i.e. they are creative) and refrain from promoting utopian projects. For Castoriadis, psychoanalysis ‘belongs to the great socialhistorical stream of and struggle for autonomy, the emancipatory project to which both democracy and philosophy belong’ (1997e: 131), because it aims to help the individual form his/her own open project for life through altering the relationship between the Id and the Ego. The purpose of ‘good politics’ in this sense is to institute an autonomous society through the instauration of another type of relation between the instituting and the instituted society, between the given laws and the reflective and deliberating activity of the body politic. Castoriadis calls autonomous a society that not only knows that it has created its own laws, but that has instituted itself so as to free its ‘radical imaginary’ and enable itself to alter its institutions though collective, self-reflective, and deliberate activity. On the other hand, heteronomous societies attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (God, the state, ancestors, historical necessity). By ‘radical imaginary’, he doesn’t mean the ‘fictive’, the ‘illusory’ or the ‘specular’ (1997d: 84), but rather the creative constellation of representations, drives and desires; the ‘creation and evolution of language, family norms, mores, ideas’ (1997e: 131) through which self and society are constituted and reproduced. Just as in psychoanalysis, where the purpose is not a conflict-free inner life, the goal of ‘good politics’ is not to enable the emergence of a fear-less, hatred-less, and thus utopian society. Neither aim to bring happiness, but to help the individual endure living on the edge of the abyss, within an ‘ultimate double bind: live as a mortal, live as if you were immortal’ (1997e: 136).

I renounce the idea of comprehensively illustrating psychoanalysts’ reflections on politics and society and political scientists’ interest in psychoanalysis. Yet my goal remains ambitious – I will attempt to unearth Hans Morgenthau’s and Sándor Ferenczi’s secret passions – the former’s hidden attraction toward psychoanalysis and the latter’s strong interest in politics. Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980) is known as the father of the modern realist theory in international relations; Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) as the ‘mother’ of the psychoanalytic movement. While Morgenthau has inspired all theoreticians of the various realist schools of thought, Ferenczi laid down the basis for psychoanalytic object-relations theory, with a massive (often unrecognized) impact on the British Psychoanalytical Society. Both thinkers’ ideas have been interpreted in many ways and both are still at the center of debate in their own scientific circles. My purpose is not to provide a breadth of their theories or to summarize the full implications of their thoughts in a few pages. My aim is to analyze – a word deriving from a Greek verb meaning ‘to loosen’, ‘to untie’ or ‘to set free’. I hope to untie these two thinkers’ hidden interests from their moorings. It seems to me that the Hungarian psychoanalyst was not at all neutral about politics; nor did the architect of political realism hesitate to bring in extra-rational factors (human psyche, emotions, drives, defence mechanisms) in his rational calculations of political behaviour.

Much research has focused on Central European psychoanalysts’ cosmopolitan worldviews, while their strong attachment to their country and their striving for a free, tolerant and autonomous society seem to have attracted little attention. According to my hypothesis, Hungary’s traumatic history of the inter-war period had a significant impact on Sándor Ferenczi’s technique: the elaboration of his ‘maternal technique’ and his trauma theory could be interpreted as an attempt to mourn the loss of the mother(land) (the 1920 Trianon Treaty deprived the country of two-thirds of its territory), to act out a rebellion against the self-proclaimed ‘father of the nation’ (Regent Miklόs Horthy) and his authoritarian leadership style, and to call for a maternal figure in the political realm. The violation of Hungary’s borders, I believe, was among the factors that pushed the ‘enfant terrible’ to go beyond the boundaries of psychoanalysis.

The history of Hungarian psychoanalysis is strongly connected to the sociopolitical transformations of the country. It would be impossible to understand Ferenczi, his personality and his scientific work without gaining insight into the political, economic, social and cultural milieu in which he lived. Ferenczi perceived psychic illness as a system and believed that as an analyst he had to think in a structure, placing the patient’s psychological problems in relation to his/her personality, culture, lifestyle and profession. Following this logic, the psychoanalytic technique which Ferenczi developed in the 1920s could be viewed as a result of the interaction of different layers of his own life experience: the personal, the professional and the political. In my view, the development of his new methods is intimately linked to his disappointment not only with the classic Freudian technique, but also with Hungary’s political transformation.

According to András Sziklai (2009–10), while Ferenczi in the early twentieth century had been highly sensitive to the possible social implications of psychoanalysis, his attitude following the Great War became more and more similar to the prewar escapist Freudian stance. I suggest that, on the contrary, Ferenczi chose confrontation – a symbolic struggle – and not withdrawal. Instead of opting for emigration or a retreat into solitude, he manifested his interest in and criticism of social and political life in a veiled manner, through the elaboration of a new psychoanalytic technique. In a period when he experienced a series of losses and traumas, deprived of the possibility to express himself and to work through his pains openly, he anesthetized himself with writing. He resorted over and over again to analysis as a tool; psychoanalysis became the means by which even the hidden and unutterable could be brought to light and put into words.

Jose Brunner (2001) presents a political reading of Freud’s writings, highlighting politics on the surface of Freud’s texts as well as in their underlying logic. For Brunner, politics provides the largest repertoire of Freud’s metaphors and analogies, and it is politics that structures Freud’s depiction of the family and sexuality, his hypothesis on the development of the psychic and social structure, and the groundwork of his therapeutic practice. Brunner argues that by depicting rulers and leaders as father figures whose dominance and authority are necessary to keep society together, Freud’s Oedipal perspective legitimizes and promotes patriarchy and authoritarianism: ‘whenever Freud advocated authoritarian rule both in the psyche’s internal world and in external social reality, he depicted it as the only form of government capable of pursuing a mediating middle-way between two opposed but dialectically interrelated extremes’ (Brunner 2001: 177).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, political involvement on a social and national level was common to all segments of the Hungarian intellectual and artistic environment. However, unlike Freud’s Vienna, Ferenczi’s Budapest became the epicentre of a reformist generation of intellectuals, united by a progressive spirit and motivated by the aspiration to modernize and to democratize all aspects of the national life. Péter Hanák rightly argues that the goal of emancipating Hungarian society from its feudal remnants transformed the slogan of Viennese secession, ‘Liberty to art’, into ‘Liberty to the people’ (1998: 24).

Ferenczi showed great sensitivity and determination to fight against social repression; he was convinced that physicians, and particularly psychiatrists, had a role to play in this struggle. As he wrote to Freud about a year and a half after they had first met:

I would like to recommend to you another point for consideration (in case you haven’t come upon it yourself). That is the sociological significance of our analyses in the sense that in our analyses we investigate the real conditions in the various levels of society, cleansed of all hypocrisy and conventionalism, just as they are mirrored in the individual.

(1910a: 153)

For Ferenczi, as for Morgenthau, we may gain insight into the functioning of social structures through the better understanding of human nature. According to the Hungarian analyst, the same mechanisms – survival and pleasure impulses – that drive individuals’ feelings and actions also constitute societies’ engine. He views society as an organism with ‘selfish’ and ‘libidinal tendencies’, and asserts that: ‘The “panem et circenses” meets even today, as it did in the time of the ancient Romans, all the demands of society; its transformations, that is to say a greater complexity relating to “panis” and “circus”, are purely quantitative’ (1913b: 8).

According to Ferenczi, while parents are also responsible for the health of a society – ‘if there is a place where war can be defeated, without a doubt, it is the children’s room’ (1918a: 292) – the primary responsibility lies with the political elite, because ‘we may expect real progress only from the evolution of social organizations’ (1913b: 8). It would be stupid as well as senseless, he contends, to take away from the individual more liberties than that which public interest so demands (1913b: 9). Ferenczi was convinced that the father (and the political leader) ought to descend from the almost divine construct of his omnipotent and indestructible throne:

One should not fear the destruction of the social order as a result of the reduction of parental authority … If, instead of imposing dogmas in an authoritarian manner, we would allow for the free expression of people’s faculty of independent judgment that is inherent in every individual but is, at present, in great part, repressed… perhaps a new social order could arise, which would not necessarily be based on the interests of a few powerful individuals only.

(1913b: 10)

Many perceived the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a debacle; the day when the Hungarian nation lost its historical motherland, St. Stephen’s

Besides the loss of the motherland, the instauration of the authoritarian fathertype Horthy regime signified the beginning of a new series of traumas. As Ferenczi described the dramatic situation on 28 August 1919:

After the unbearable ‘Red terror,’ which lay heavy on one’s spirit like a nightmare, we now have the White one… the ruthless clerical-anti-Semitic spirit seems to have eked out a victory. If everything does not deceive, we Hungarian Jews are now facing a period of brutal persecution of Jews. They will, I think, have cured us in a very short time of the illusion with which we were brought up, namely, that we are ‘Hungarians of Jewish faith’. I picture Hungarian anti-Semitism – commensurate with the national character – to be more brutal than the petty-hateful type of the Austrians… Personally, one will have to take this trauma as an occasion to abandon certain prejudices brought along from the nursery and to come to terms with the bitter truth of being, as a Jew, really without a country.

(Ferenczi 1919: 365–6)

The Trianon Treaty, which in 1920 deprived Hungary of 67 per cent of its territory, signified the beginning of the painful ‘Trianon trauma’ of Hungarian society. At the precise moment that the treaty was signed, Hungarian church bells tolled and all traffic came to a halt, symbolizing national mourning. St. Stephen’s kingdom was for many the symbol of Paradise. Metaphorically speaking, the death of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy connoted the loss of the idyllic infanthood, the nation-family’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the mutilation of the mother’s body, the violent destruction of the mother–child unit, the intrusion of the Father, the symbolic castration (see Chapter 3). The revolutionary period did not end with the collapse of the communist regime on 31 July 1919. Rather than heal the wounds and look to the future, the neophyte Horthy regime tried to legitimize itself by playing continuously on the sentiments of revenge, hatred and suffering, preventing the settling down of negative emotions. The nation’s self-proclaimed father perpetuated the national grief for political reasons and promised a kind of resurrection for St. Stephen’s Hungary: he adopted an authoritarian parenting method, rejecting the mourning of the lost mother(land) and offering up the illusion of a return to Paradise through the revisionism of borders. Instead of allowing for the working through of the collective trauma, the counter-revolutionary regime perpetrated further aggression on Hungarian society.

At the end of August 1918, Freud was convinced that the center of the international psychoanalytic movement was to be established in Budapest; for this reason, in September he facilitated Ferenczi’s nomination to president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). After the arrival to power of the communist Béla Kun regime on 21 March 1919, Ferenczi became a university professor and was granted authorization to give birth to a public clinic. The beginning of the Horthy regime, however, signified the end of Ferenczi’s academic career – he was fired from university on 8 August 1919, from the Hungarian Association of Medical Doctors on 28 May 1920, and became more and more marginalized in the international movement, being replaced as IPA president in 1920 by Ernst Jones. Nevertheless, Ferenczi did not follow Freud’s advice to withdraw his libido from his country; he remained in Hungary in the 1920s and only apparently retreated from socio-political life. His desire to help his patients and his willingness to contribute to heal the pains of Hungarian society remained (at least) as strong as before.

Ferenczi perceived political tendencies as an expression of the human psyche (1922: 155). Though he refused to identify himself with any political party or movement and tried to keep psychoanalysis independent from political interests, he did conceptualize good government in the form of what he called ‘socialist individualism’. This kind of political system, from his point of view, would accept natural differences between individuals, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The stage
• Part II The protagonists
• Bibliography
• Index