The Unconscious in Social and Political Life

Morgan, David

• Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781912691173
• eBook ISBN: 9781912691180
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Traumatic events happen in every age, yet there is a particularly cataclysmic feeling to our own epoch that is so attractive to some and so terrifying to others. The terrible events of September 11th 2001 still resonate and the repercussions continue to this day: the desperation of immigrants fleeing terror, the uncertainty of Brexit, Donald Trump in the White House, the rise of the alt-right and hard left, increasing fundamentalism, and terror groups intent on causing destruction to the Western way of life. If that were not enough, we also have to grapple with the enormity of climate change and the charge that if we do not act now, it will be too late. Is it any wonder many are left overwhelmed by the events they see on the news?

Galvanised by the events outside of his consulting room, in 2015, David Morgan began The Political Mind seminars at the British Psychoanalytical Society and their successful run continues today. A series of superlative seminars, mostly presented by colleagues from the British Society plus a few select external experts, that examine a dazzling array of relevant topics to provide a psychoanalytic understanding of just what is going on in our world. This book is the first in The Political Mind series to bring these seminars to a wider audience. The Unconscious in Political and Social Life contains compelling contributions from Christopher Bollas, Michael Rustin, Jonathan Sklar, David Bell, Philip Stokoe, Roger Kennedy, David Morgan, M. Fakhry Davids, Ruth McCall, R. D. Hinshelwood, Renée Danziger, Josh Cohen, Sally Weintrobe, and Margot Waddell. They investigate so many vital issues affecting us today: the evolution of democracy, right-wing populism, prejudice, the rise of the far right, attitudes to refugees and migrants, neoliberalism, fundamentalism, terrorism, the Palestine-Israel situation, political change, feminism, austerity in the UK, financial globalisation, and climate change. This book needs to be read by all who are concerned by the state of the world today. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts with their awareness of what motivates human beings bring clarity and fresh insight to these matters. A deeper understanding of humanity awaits the reader of The Unconscious in Political and Social Life.

CHAPTER ONE

Where have all the adults gone?

Philip Stokoe

The title of this chapter—“Where have all the adults gone?”—aims to capture the feeling many have experienced following the UK vote to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump to be president of the United States. There is an absence of adult functioning among politicians which is intimately linked to a similar state among the electorate, the people. The removal of structures within society which exist to enable countries and governments to look after the people and face reality has led to a release of anxiety about money which has a tendency to plunge us into a fundamentalist state of mind in which truth does not matter, only the certainty of escape from anxiety. This kind of behaviour, and the way that leadership and followership become caught up in something that feels like a hysterical panic, is familiar to those who have made a psychoanalytically based study of individuals, groups, and organisations.

I believe that a particular psychoanalytic way of understanding people in groups and organisations offers a way to understand how society functions which can enable thinking about the relationship between the individual and a large group—an organisation or society—whilst avoiding the most common trap. The trap is the expertise that nearly all human beings have about understanding other human beings: we are very good at reading other people’s unconscious. Indeed, this is wonderfully illustrated by our fascination with reality-based television such as I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and Love Island. The only unconscious we cannot read is our own, so the pleasure derives from predicting how the characters in the show will interact with each other and seeing how that interaction plays out. The problem is that this skill often misleads us into explaining the behaviour of groups as if it is simply down to the impact particular individuals are having; in other words, assuming group phenomena are essentially about individuals and their personalities. My claim is that it is much more often the other way round, that individuals are unconsciously provoked to express ideas of behaviour on behalf of the group dynamic. Of course, and this is what makes it so tempting to stay with the superficial analysis based on personality, the way individuals become drawn into expressing something on behalf of the group does represent a link to their personality and this will be explored later in the chapter.

In order to describe the processes that go on in groups and the way that individuals are drawn into those processes, I shall first define my understanding of how the conscious mind develops in the individual in a summary of a model of human development.

Development of the mind

We are organised by three drives: curiosity, love, and aggression (called hate by Bion). These drives enable us to be curious about reality and to relate to it by developing loving concern for others, which means we can:

Form reciprocal relationships

Absorb information

Which we transform into symbols

To enable thought and, ultimately

Undertake decision making.

This leads to the development of a sense of identity: we know who we are. In the developmental timetable, these skills are the consequence of achieving what Melanie Klein (1935) described as the “depressive position”. They are achievements of development, not inevitable qualities.

Building on Klein’s work, Wilfred Bion (1962) stressed this particularly strongly and added that these achievements require effort or work. Bion accepted Freud’s view that “Eros” and “Thanatos” (life and death instincts) were crucial to the development of the mind and he designated them “L” (love) and “H” (hate), but he argued that they couldn’t account for important stages of development on their own; he argued that the urge to know was just as important and he gave that the designation “K” and concluded that it is an innate drive. I prefer to call this curiosity. It operates as a constant internal instruction to explain to ourselves what we are experiencing. These explanations take the form of images of ourselves in relation to others or parts of others (which is why this approach is called “object relations”).

The discovery that we have such images of ourselves in relation to others preceded the more elaborate description of the development of the mind that I’m referring to, which was largely expressed by Melanie Klein. She was a leading contributor amongst other psychoanalysts following Freud who uncovered the phenomenon that such images accompanied and even organised the emotional encounters with the analyst in the consulting room. They described this “accompaniment of everyday experience” as unconscious phantasy.

“Phantasy is (in the first instance) the mental corollary, the psychic representative, of instinct. There is no impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy” (Isaacs, 1948).

These processes are unconscious, which is why fantasy is spelt with a “ph”, but the repetition of explanations, a process that Bion calls “learning from experience”, leads to the development of the conscious mind. I would say that these internal images (sometimes described as imagos), gradually accumulate and it is this accumulation that creates the conscious mind.

These hypotheses or explanations for what is happening to us can only derive from what we already know. In the light of further experience, we adapt those hypotheses; in other words, we change the internal images. Sometimes, however, these hypotheses do not change in the light of experience. Instead, they become fixed as “unconscious beliefs” and appear as facts in the conscious mind. When Ronald Britton was a little boy, another, bigger boy told him that Santa Claus did not exist. It seems that he immediately realised that he had totally assumed that Santa Claus was a fact. Now he realised that it was merely a belief, not a fact, and beliefs can be tested and shown to be either true or false. Clearly, this one was false. And he wondered what else he had assumed to be a fact, which could turn out to be merely a belief. Since unconscious beliefs are “certain”, they protect us from the need to think and, in so doing, they reduce anxiety (Britton, 1998, pp. 12–14).

Fundamentalism, the earliest state of mind

In what follows, I shall refer to the loss of adult capacity as a collapse into the earliest state of mind, described by Melanie Klein as the paranoid/schizoid position. I think that a more relevant term should be the fundamentalist state of mind.

At the beginning of life outside the womb, the baby has no internal defences. We need our defences because they act to damp down our emotional experience. Freud’s view was that all stimulus, whether from outside or from within, is experienced through the neural pathways as feelings. The very first thing that the baby does is to find ways to manage the overwhelming experience of those raw feelings and she does this through the activity of K, in the sense that she finds explanations for her experience that also serve to manage it. For example, she explains to herself that the feeling we would call hunger is actually an assault from a dangerous other. Melanie Klein described this in more detail as the baby projecting the horrible feeling into an object outside and then identifying that object with that horrible feeling. In this way, the baby has invented a defensive process known as projective identification (Klein, 1946). The baby’s experience of these horrible feelings is of the worst kind of anxiety, survival anxiety. Fortunately for most of us, the “object” into which this horror is projected (usually mother) manages to survive the experience and, by processing the feelings, arrives at an understanding of her baby’s plight and responds accordingly; in this case by feeding her baby. The baby, in turn, feels suffused with enormous feelings of love but, as before, these are too powerful to remain inside and are also projected into the same mother only this time transforming her into an ideal source of love and nourishment. The persecutory anxiety about destruction has been left in the evil hunger monster and there is an answer to all of that terror in the form of this omnipotently yummy mummy.

In these simple acts, something amazing has happened; the baby has created a complete working model of the universe. Split into two separate, emotional locations, total love and total hate, various consequences fall out. Melanie Klein called this a state of mind and gave it the name, the paranoid/schizoid position. I find that a more relevant name for it is the fundamentalist state of mind. I shall describe those qualities of this state of mind, but I want to point out that this is the first that we create as we develop. Consequently, it can be described as our default position. Whenever we are made suddenly or chronically anxious, we collapse into this view of the universe. In many ways, it makes sense for our survival because this is not a state of mind encumbered by the need to reflect or to measure one view against another, it is the place of action. It is also the state that Freud described as governed by the pleasure principle.

In terms of the drives (L, H, and K) and the achievements that result from them which I listed earlier, and which are the result of development out of the fundamentalist state of mind and into the depressive position, what does this collapse look like? In the first place, those capacities, which are higher level functions, will be annihilated by anxiety, and the primary drives will be reorganised. In the fundamentalist state of mind, curiosity is diminished, love transforms into the ideal, and hate into evil.

This state of mind has the following basic elements:

It is ruled by the ideal

Its governing principle is pleasure

Anxiety is persecutory and about one’s own survival

Language is that of blame

Mental state of choice is certainty

Solutions are all omnipotent

Threat is difference, e.g.

help

valuing

thinking

Relationships are either mergers or sadomasochistic.

I shall expand on this. In the first place, the universe is divided or split into two separate states, ideal or evil (total love or total hate), therefore the place we will want to be is with the ideal. This will be the place that has no “un-pleasure”, in other words we are driven by Freud’s pleasure principle. The threat to this isn’t just worry, it is the most massive, persecutory anxiety, total destruction. Since the only event that will require a language is a threat to our sojourn with the ideal, then that language will be the language of blame (if I’m in danger of being kicked out of the ideal nest, someone must be to blame). The only emotional or intellectual state that has any existence is certainty; doubt cannot be tolerated, it is the work of the devil. All problems are resolved through identification with the ideal, therefore such solutions are omnipotent. There is only one threat, difference, because there is only one danger, being dislodged from that nest. This doesn’t arise as an issue until there is someone different around because that immediately raises the question, “Which one of us is with the ideal?” We will be made aware of difference, that is to say, a challenge to our comfortable position of certainty and omnipotence, by a variety of experiences of which I single out three as prime examples.

1)If we are offered help, it means unambiguously that we are not ideal.

2)If someone values something about us, this is not the same as worshipping our omnipotence, so we are again threatened; thinking is predicated on not knowing, so it is absolutely abhorred.

3)As for relationships, we are in the realm of George W. Bush who, after 9/11, constantly made it clear, “If you are not with us, you are against us.” Thus the only possibilities are merger or a sadomasochistic struggle.

When this state of mind dominates and we are incapable of functioning at the higher level, based on tolerating “not knowing”, it requires us to turn off curiosity because it would only force us to challenge certainty. The fundamentalist state of mind is primitive, it is not adult.

At this point, it is worth spending a few words on the places we go for certainty. First Freud and now neuroscience claim that emotions are our link with the world, both inner and outer, and are more powerful than the more recently developed cerebral cortex. Freud’s pleasure principle, which is clearly the organising function of the paranoid/schizoid position, restores certainty by removing “unpleasure”.

An organism experiences a stimulation as an impact on itself. The stimulation triggers a feeling. You might say this “perception” stimulates an emotional response, which triggers action. This has the effect of moving away from a negative source of stimulation or moving towards one that stimulates pleasurable feelings. This kind of response has often been called “instinctive” and I think this refers to its location at our most primitive level, in contrast to a much slower system that involves conscious thinking. This is the realm of certainties: pleasure means good, pain means evil; there is nothing unclear in the split universe.

What sorts of things serve to provide certainty in the human mind? Such things will all be characterised by the same quality of “no-brainer”. We can offer three types of certainties:

1)Animal “instinctive” reactions like fight, flight, and freeze

2)Unconscious beliefs (which we will discuss later), and

3)The paranoid/schizoid or “primitive” defences.

It is appropriate at this point to say that truth requires the capacity to tolerate uncertainty: being a search, it cannot be conceptualised on the level of primitive function where the first requirement is certainty. Of course, it is possible that something that could be described as true will also be experienced as a certainty and therefore have a place in this state of mind; but if it gains this position it is not because it is true, it is only because it is infused with certainty.

Application to organisations

The question is, what carries out the same function within an organisation as in an individual? If we look at “identity” as the primary task of an organisation, then the other qualities—embracing reality, building relationship, absorbing information, and transforming it into symbols—can be linked with l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Front Cover Image
• Contents
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• About the editor and contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Where have all the adults gone?
• Chapter Two: The democratic state of mind
• Chapter Three: Understanding right-wing populism
• Chapter Four: Europe in dark times: some dynamics in alterity and prejudice
• Chapter Five: Neoliberalism is bad for your mental health
• Chapter Six: Toleration of strangers
• Chapter Seven: Inflammatory projective identification in fundamentalist religious and economic terrorism
• Chapter Eight: Psychoanalysis and Palestine–Israel: a personal angle
• Chapter Nine: Psychoanalysis and feminism: a modern perspective
• Chapter Ten: Reflection or action: and never the twain shall meet
• Chapter Eleven: “We’re all in it together”: austerity’s myth
• Chapter Twelve: A psychopolitics of the slacker
• Chapter Thirteen: Climate crisis: the moral dimension
• Chapter Fourteen: Managing difficult children: psychoanalysis, welfare policy, and the “social sector”
• Index