A Psychoanalytic and Socio-Cultural Exploration of a Continent

Europe on the Couch

Anna Zajenkowska, Uri Levin, Anna Zajenkowska, Uri Levin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429594205
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This important book gathers a set of influential international contributors with psychoanalytic and group analytic knowledge to provide a wide-ranging critical analysis of the present state of Europe.

Europe is facing huge challenges: waves of immigrants are reshaping its identity and testing its tolerance; Brexit is a destabilizing factor and its outcomes are not yet clear; economic crises continue to threaten; the resurgence of nationalism is threatening an open-borders one-continent ideology. This book tackles some of these challenges. Divided into two parts, the first analyses the current social, political, cultural and economic trends in Europe using psychoanalytic and group analytic concepts, while the second concentrates on existing applications of psychoanalytic and group analytic concepts to help manage national and international change in individual countries as well as on the continent as a whole, including groups for German, Ukrainian and Russian participants; groups organised in Serbia in order to overcome the recent, traumatic past; and the "Sandwich model", developed to enhance communication in situations of conflict, trauma and blocked communication. When we feel threatened, we cling to our in-group and its members. We want to think the same and be the same as our neighbors, but this group illusion of homogeneity conceals the fact that we are different. While homogeneity offers stability, it is diversity that offers freedom.

This book will be of great interest to researchers on the present state of Europe from across a range of different disciplines, from psychoanalysis to politics, sociology, economics and international relations.

PART ONE
General reflections

1
Learning from History? The Crisis and Future of the European Project

Aleida Assmann

Can we learn from history? I am sure you are all familiar with the standard answer to this question: All we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. Thinkers as different as Hegel and George Bernhard Shaw agreed on this point. Reinhart Koselleck later added a specific reason for this negative answer: We cannot learn from history because modernity is a dynamic process propelled by constant innovations and radical change. The effect is that old lessons can no longer be applied to new problems (Koselleck, 1989). Paul Valéry also belonged to those who could not imagine that history was a teacher of life. In 1931, after the First and before the Second World War, he observed how the European nations geared up their past, transforming it into an explosive weapon of propaganda.

History is the most dangerous concoction that was ever created by the chemistry of the intellect. Its effects are well known. It makes the nations dream, transports them into ecstasy, creates fabulations, heightens their reflexes, keeps their wounds open, stirs them from their rest, leads them to megalomania, and is the cause that nations become embittered, boasting, obnoxious and vain.

And he continues: “History justifies whatever you like. It does not teach anything, because it contains all and provides examples for everything.”¹

Learning from history after 1945

Valéry did not live to see the end of the Second World War. I want to argue that Europeans did indeed learn from history after the war, but the lessons that were absorbed differed with shifting contexts. When we think about learning lessons from history, we have to be aware of the fact that these lessons change over time. For this reason we need to pay attention to the historical contexts and frames in which they develop. The emergence of a new value system is a complex, continuous and contingent process that is facilitated by internal developments and pushed by sudden shifts and external pressure. To better understand the long-term project of the EU, I shall retrace some of the steps to observe more closely which lessons from history the EU has heeded at what time.

After 1945, all energies were focused on the forging of a new beginning. Elementary principles of justice were re-established in the Nuremberg trials. With these trials, the allies cleared the ground and granted West Germany the license for a new start. To achieve this goal of a new beginning, one had to look forward. Looking backward was not an option, as Churchill clearly explained when he spoke to young students in Zurich in 1946:

We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past and look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years to come hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past. If Europe is to be saved from infinite misery, and indeed from final doom, there must be an act of faith in the European family and an act of oblivion against all the crimes and follies of the past.²

It is important to understand these words in their historical context that jar today with our historical sensibility. After 1945, the politicians did not argue for a memory culture. On the contrary: The first lesson from history that Churchill learned after the war was to forget. He was aware that the Germans had turned what they called ‘the shame of Versailles’ into a propaganda memory that mobilized hate and resentment which helped Hitler to fanaticize the Germans and lead them directly into the Second World War. Historical memories therefore were deemed highly dangerous. Like Valéry, Churchill considered them as a toxic element in the chemistry of the spirit and as explosive fuel unleashing further violence.

The first lesson to be learned from history after 1945 was to create peace among Western European neighbors and the way to consolidate this peace was through a pact of silence and a culture of forgetting. The framework of this peace was not very peaceful however; it was the Cold War that called for a strong Western military alliance against the Eastern alliance of the Soviet Union. The Western alliance started in 1950 as a European community of coal and steel. There was a clear aim in this economic and political collaboration, which was the taming of Germany. What had to be avoided at all costs was a Germany that would once more build up a heavy industry and start another war. The economic community of the six member states, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxemburg and the Netherlands, was installed to secure peace. Germany, which had started the Second World War and unleashed so much excessive violence across Europe, had to be contained and controlled in this process of integration.

The Western European community saw rapid economic growth thanks to the American investment of the Marshall Plan, its integration into NATO and a strong Western Alliance. The nations were quickly modernized in this period of economic boom when the past was forgotten and all energies invested in the future. ‘Development’ was the magic word of the time; growth seemed endless and the words ‘future’ and ‘progress’ were synonymous.³ The rapid modernization process, aimed at economic prosperity and the enlargement of the EU market, continued in the 1970s. Through the accession of Denmark, Ireland and England, the number of member states grew to nine. By the 1980s, the last West-European dictatorships, Portugal, Spain and Greece, had turned into democracies. With their membership, the political zone of the European market was further homogenized and enlarged.

Learning from history after 1989

This continuous development was crossed by an historical event that nobody had anticipated. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain in Europe, the politics of the Cold War came to an end. This led eventually to the unexpected growth of the EU beyond its Eastern borders. In 1995 three more Western European states joined the EU, Finland, Austria and Sweden, and a decade later in 2004 and 2007, twelve Central and Eastern European states followed. What Putin registered in 2005 as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century could equally be called the greatest success story in the second half of the 20th century, spanning the Cold War and the new millennium. This perspective, however, has not really been rooted in the minds and hearts of Europeans. The EU has been reluctant when it comes to expressing a clear-cut self-image, let alone a notion of its identity. We have to come back to this historical moment to discover the foundational values of the EU that can serve as the yardstick for its development and orientation. The EU was not only enlarged after the fall of the wall, it was also genuinely reshaped and reconstituted in a rapid and deep process of transformation. This was a moment when old lessons from history were confirmed and new ones were added. Let us focus on these lessons, which to my mind create the frame and foundation of the European project.

The European dream

Nation states, as Ernest Renan already knew, are held together by a ‘national myth’ (Renan, 1882). Myth in this sense is not the opposite of factual history but a foundational narrative. Such a narrative may be grounded on the past or on a vision of the future. American literary critic Leslie Fiedler has emphasized that in contrast to the British or French nation the American nation is not unified by a common memory but by a shared dream. “As Americans,” he wrote, “we are inhabitants of a shared vision and not of a common history” (Fiedler, 1988, p. 73). This vision is the ‘American Dream’, which is promised to Americans as individuals and not as a collective. He or she who works hard can get ahead and rise to the top of the social hierarchy.

Thinking along the lines proposed by Fiedler we may say that the Europeans are inhabitants both of a common history and a shared vision of the future. Past and future are directly linked in what I call ‘the European Dream’. It is no less remarkable than the American dream because it is addressed to both individuals and nations. It refers to two impressive transformations:

• – From war to peace, showing how deadly enemies can be transformed into friendly neighbors and collaborating partners.
• – From dictatorships to democracies, showing how totalitarian coercion cedes liberty and individual rights.

Indeed most of the 28 EU member states have had experience with dictatorships, of the fascist and the Stalinist version. These two transformations have entered the DNA of the EU, but they could be much deeper anchored in the consciousness of its citizens who tend to take these gifts and achievements thoughtlessly for granted. The European dream should be clearly defined and recognized by everyone for what it is: a high good and prized asset those generations of young Europeans have enjoyed and profited from, growing up into a region without menacing borders, offering not only individual mobility but also intellectual and cultural liberty and transnational exchange. Recent regime changes in Hungary or Poland have shown, however, that democratic structures are not written in granite but a precarious good that needs to be defended and protected. The uniformity of state-sponsored media, the return to an autocratic legal system, the monologic message of public monuments and museums and the growing infringement of citizen participation – these are alarming signals that the gifts of democracy can easily be taken back step by step.

Two more lessons

Form war to peace and from dictatorships to democracies – these lessons from history were learned already after 1945 and re-confirmed after 1990. What is less known, however, is that after 1990 the EU learned two more lessons that are as central for its constitution and have also become part of its DNA. These lessons have become manifest in two new phenomena that reinforce each other: the adoption of a new ‘memory culture’ (Erinnerungskultur) and the implementation of a human rights regime.

(1) A new memory culture

When the wall came down and communism ended, voices were heard that proclaimed ‘the end of history’. It was not history, however, that came to end, but the time regime of modernity, which received a severe blow. Together with the expectation of a bright future, the vision of progress, steady growth and reliable resources faded.⁴ As the future lost its glamor, the past returned with a vengeance. Not only in West Germany, the informal consensus to turn one’s back to the dark past came to an end. The time obviously had come for the EU to learn a new lesson from history. While after 1945 the lesson had been to forget, the lesson was now to remember.

The new German ‘memory culture’ (Erinnerungskultur) was a historical novelty in that it was based on the ‘negative memory’ of excessive violence that Germans had perpetrated on innocent victims and civilians during the Second World War. It focused on the atrocities of the war that were now perceived as an unfathomable crime that had to be remembered. Forgetting suddenly appeared as a second murder that happens when the nameless dead that had been murdered are forgotten. The genocide should not be followed by a ‘mnemocide’. Framed by the new concepts of responsibility, accountability and empathy, a transnational memory of the Holocaust was inscribed into the constitution of the EU.

In the late 1980s and 90s, a phrase was often repeated that expressed a temporal paradox, and perhaps even a temporal pathology: ‘The further the Holocaust is retreating in time, the more closely is it approaching us’. Traumatic violence is impossible to process; it silences both the victims and the perpetrators. While the victims, however, regained their voices and developed forms of a memory culture, the perpetrators profited from the social consensus of forgetting and ‘communicative silence’. In Germany, this pact of silence was broken when the ‘generation war’ stepped back and their sons and daughters, the 1968 generation, took over responsibility and offices in the 1980s and 90s. Trauma has been defined as “a past that does not pass”.⁵ If trauma is silenced, time itself does not dissolve it. It warps time and chronology, leaving a black hole that disrupts the linear flow of time. Instead of disappearing with time, trauma produces periods of latency after which the past suddenly returns and invades the present with undiminished impact.

The memory of the Holocaust returned in the 1980s and 90s as the unacknowledged aftermath of the Second World War. It had been given a name in the 1960s, but it had not yet found a place in Germany’s political system and in the general consciousness of the society. The shared transnational memory of the Holocaust was inscribed into the DNA of the EU with the Stockholm declaration in 2000 and a further UN-declaration in 2005. What had been forgotten, dropped, repressed and silenced eventually returned with a strong affective impact.⁶ While there are no direct links between the history of the Holocaust and other events such as slavery or colonialism, the discursive framework of the latter was taken over as a template to articulate also other historical wounds and traumas. In the wake of the recovery of the memory of the Holocaust, the task of taking responsibility for crimes against humanity in the course of their national history has spread also to nations all over the globe who are currently in the process of transitioning from autocratic regimes to democracy. This cumulative effect caused a shift in the construction of national memory and identity from heroic to post-heroic narratives.

Some historians saw their professional authority endangered by the new memory boom. This new memory culture, however, did not challenge, let alone repeal the standards of historical scholarship. On the contrary, historical research took an active part in the effort to recover a previously ignored or denied historical truth. The moment for facing the historical truth had come for Germany immediately after the War together with the opening of the concentration camps and the global publicizing of the shameful atrocities. For other European countries, it came after 1990 with the opening of hitherto sealed Eastern European archives.⁷ Archival documents, historical research, historical commissions and the collection of oral testimonies enlarged historical knowledge and increased the scope and complexity of Holocaust memory, challenging some firmly established national self-images and causing the revision of national narratives. Here are a few examples: New documents about Vichy and the history of anti-Semitism in East Germany put an end to the self-image of France or the GDR as pure resistors; after the scandals about the Nazi past of Austrian president Kurt Waldheim and information about a Polish pogrom in Jedwabne, Austria and Poland were no longer able to claim exclusively the status of victim, and even the seemingly neutral Swiss was confronted with its own ‘sites of memory’ in the form of their banks and borders. In contact with the crime of the Holocaust, national memories became more dialogic, integrating also negative instances of the past into the national narrative.

(2) The re-implantation of human rights

This shift in memory politics was framed by the human rights regime, which is the other new lesson to be learned by the EU from history after 1990. Human rights had of course been declared various times at the end of the 18th century and also after the Second World War, but it is important to note that they were implemented and claimed by new historical actors only in the 1980s. After a long rhetorical and declarative incubation period, the active history of human rights stated with NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who systematically observed human rights violations and used new communication technology to mobilize a larger public in the digital global arena. One of its first manifestations wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the contributors
• Europe on the couch: the breaking of a homogeneous group illusion
• PART ONE General reflections
• PART TWO Particular understanding
• PART THREE Practical interventions
• Index