"But the Zionist has to want to change."
On the Psychopathology of Zionism, Cont.
When a Jew (or an American) gets invited to a British conference on Colonialism, it’s usually so he can play the role of Uneducated Savage to his betters. Since my scheduled presentation on November 11 was cut off mid-sentence I’m offering the paper here. Naturally I’ve kept changes at an absolute cosmetic minimum; I plan to modify, to add footnotes and a bibliography, and to expand some more. So much to say, so many children murdered.
“But the Zionist has to want to change.” On the Psychopathology of Zionism.
I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to discuss a sensitive topic if there ever was, the Psychopathology of Zionism. So much the more so as I’m aware, as I’m sure you are, of Freud’s closing aside in Civilization and its Discontents:
“The diagnosis of communal neuroses is faced with special difficulty. In an individual neurosis we take as our starting-point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be 'normal'.”
This is far from the “somber conclusions” fantasized by Carl Schorske, so much the more so as — in spite of Schorke’s absurd anachronistic claims — the not-quite perfect society in which Freud situates himself is not the diseased bourgeois society of fin-de-siècle Vienna, which had collapsed twelve years earlier, but the optimistic atmosphere of Red Vienna, with its dream of a New Red Man in harmony with the Society of the Future: overly optimistic to Freud among others. If Freud was a social conservative in 1930 it was only relative to the disintegrating promise of Austro-Marxism. Nor, in 1930, was Freud’s pessimism directed only, as often assumed, toward the inability of human cultures to escape the ravages of Eros, the Life-force, but on their inability to transcend the Death Drive, destructive of self and others.
Ten years earlier, in a more optimistic social setting, Freud had taken on a more positive tone, testifying for the prosecution at the war-crimes trial of Julius Wagner-Jauregg in December, 1920. Only by the criteria of a pathological society like that of Austro-Hungarian Empire, he argued, could the drive to allow oneself to be sent off to kill or be killed in the service of the Nation appear normal. Paradoxically, 1920 is also the year that Freud’s began to articulate the concept of the Death Drive as a universally valid explanatory tool for human behavior. The Death Drive might be a universal norm; it need not be normative, as Wagner-Jauregg had implicitly argued.
The challenge, as Freud describes it ten years later in the concluding paragraphs of Civilization and its Discontents, is as follows: the normative behavior against which the shared pathologies of the group are judged must be defined according to criteria beyond that particular society. One must revert to the claims of universal drives and universal values in order to supersede the claims of cultural relativism. Unfortunately those metapsychological elements are not subject to definition, let alone to treatment, as they are not interchangeable with the individual psychic processes identified and addressed by Psychoanalysis.
“After all, we are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved.”
Freud’s difficulty, as he freely admits, is a methodological one.
In 1928 in Vienna, Robert Musil made a similarly cautious evaluation, most likely inspired by his own therapist, Hugo Lukács, who was active in the Socialist Administration’s youth programs: Psychoanalysis was not ready to assume or reject claims to some sort of universally applicable “science.” Psychoanalysis, rather, was a tool, similar to the crude tools of other disciplines “for which there are practically no rules but instead an unusual abundance of phenomena and correlations.” The ad-hoc eclecticism of the psychoanalytic approach is paralleled by the ad-hoc eclecticism of Austro-Marxist theory and practice at the time.
Not tools, actually but a toolbox. As the anthropologist Ruth Benedict pointed out, the human toolbox — “the great arc of potential human purposes and motivations” — may be universally applicable; it is not universally applied. That same “great arc is far too immense and too full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize even any considerable portion of it,” adding, “There is no fixed constellation,” but many possible configurations. What Benedict proposes, in effect, is the socio-political equivalent of the “multi-axial diagnosis” we know from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [DSM]. Sometimes, and despite Freud and his detractors, crude analogies have their use.
Late April through early May of 1945. The Allies are mopping up the last vestiges of Nazi resistance. All over Germany tens of thousands of civilians choose to kill themselves or their loved ones by poison, bullets, hanging or drowning. Choose is misleading: a substantial number of deaths are of children murdered by their parents, or family members shot or drowned by others family members; here as elsewhere there’s no firm line between suicide and murder. The common explanation is, that Germans killed themselves and their loved ones out of a single-minded fear of the Bolshevik hordes, similar to those Zionists for whom the designated enemy represents such a threat that they would rather kill themselves and their own than allow them to fall into their enemies’ hands, hashtag Hannibal Directive,.
Except, in 1945 these murder suicides were spread all over Germany, irrespective of Russian presence or imminent threat. A more valid explanation then, is that Germans were reacting as ordinary Germans would to the collapse of their happy world; plain-vanilla Germans so cruelly disappointed that they saw no other way out. This is no different from other societies where social collapse leads to massive dejection and suicide, like those ordinary Aztecs who in the days after the Conquista begged to be admitted to the charnel house, the “Place of Shards,” driven by “Tlacolmiquiztli, which means, ills caused by love and desire… in excess or in lack of fulfilment… […] and “netepalhuiliztli, which means, dependence on another or rather, the ills caused by dependence.” This last assessment could have come from Freud’s essay on “Mourning and Melancholia” in which the two afflictions are conjoined and yet distinct. Mourning is “normal” inasmuch as it involves a process of grief, reparation, healing and eventual acceptance of the reality of loss. Melancholia is a perpetual limbo from which the subject is unable to heal or to move on, an Inability to Mourn, to quote the title of a 1965 book by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in which the two German psychoanalysts tackled the emotional blockage of Germans unable and unwilling to come to terms with their own investment in Nazism; so unable to find a replacement for their lost love object, that they felt themselves to be hollow, eternally lacking, not at all dissimilar from the inability or unwillingness today of Jews and Germans alike to come to terms with the Churban, commonly called the Shoah by those who have fixated on its pornocratic power as a political strategy.
There’s an old rabbinical saying that every Jew must be made to feel themselves to have been present in person at Mount Sinai. In the new social and political dispensation every Zionist, every German must feel themselves to have been present, in person, at Auschwitz, a suffering monad. In Goethe’s Faust, on Easter Morning, the community as a whole offers reparation as a form of self-fulfillment and social readjustment to Faust’s troubled soul. For Austrians and Germans today, the community offers nothing but forgetting and displacement. A high-ranking German politician recently called for a ban on Muslim men wearing underwear when they shower at the gym, in order to prevent a “relapse into the old repressive philistinism,” adding. “I don’t want a repressed Germany.” The vision of Jews herded into showers returns as a call to liberation from repression. What Freud would call “hallucinatory wish-fulfillment” is no longer the function of the Id. Instead, as Marcuse observed, it is nurtured by the superego functions, that is the functions of the State as liberator from sexual repression. For Zionists, meanwhile, the intolerable image of naked Jewish matrons by the pits at Babi Yar is displaced by images of Israeli soldiers joyfully parading in the lingerie of Palestinian women. The Shoah, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote, provided Zionism with a “certificate of its political legitimacy.” And this certificate, in turn, plays itself down through the State’s own repositioning of individual trauma as individual liberation. Except that liberation now consists of murder and self-murder, the only form of reparation or adjustment provided.
If we’re looking for cultural comparisons, then we’re close to that participant in a Balinese trance ceremony who explains how happy he is at the moment of committing symbolic suicide. The unspoken colonialist context for this particular unfolding of the ritual is the symbolic reenactment of the Puputan, the mass suicide of the Balinese nobility confronting the Dutch invaders in 1849. Other later events, colonial massacres rather than suicides, are given the same designation, which is to say the term and its re-enactment have inescapable colonial and anti-colonial implications.
In speaking of any such event Freud would speak of misdirected libido toward an object lost or suppressed: the traditional hierarchy in Bali in the nineteen-thirties, the Führer in Germany in 1945. And, for Germans and Zionists today, the joyful restitution through suicide and murder of the lost object that continues to create an intolerable psychic hollowness in each. Freud found it necessary to raise the possibility of the existence of a Death Drive to explain repetition compulsion, of which the present Zionist activities are a clear example.
Unfortunately, traditional psychoanalytic approaches tend to overlook the fact that the psychic mechanisms they classify as operating within individuals may be deliberately deployed as tools, also to operate within the individual psyche. As Paul Federn suggests in The Fatherless Society, the visible presence of an Oedipal struggle may be as much an outcome of conscious political determination as the other way around, and this may be true of other mechanisms. This would be especially true within non-traditional, that is, invented cultures like Zionism that must construct their political unconscious from scratch.
In 2012 the Jerusalem Post accused certain parties within the State of fostering a Masada Complex, referring to the hilltop fortress where in 73 CE a group of Jewish committed suicide rather than surrender to the Roman ruler. The author had no objection to this narrative, which remains a foundation of Zionist identity and remarkably close to the narrative guiding the German suicide-murders of 1945. Instead, the author denounced the fact that the Zealots of Masada had somehow forced the Jewish population as a whole into a situation for which suicide and slaughter were the only possible outcomes.
Likewise, today, we see academics, organic intellectuals, and psychologists of various stripes invested in legitimizing a particular set of activities by assimilating these activities and values to those claimed to be the values of the culture a whole. The State and its deputies promote an active emotional investment in such activities as fraud or pussy-grabbing, and the legitimizers feel themselves under obligation to approach these activities as perfectly rational ones, and open to rational discussion. This is quite distinct from the socially specific susceptibility to authoritarianism analyzed, among others, by Wilhelm Reich and Adorno.
In effect the State rationally chooses to organize society along the lines of the Paranoid/Schizoid position, as Melanie Klein calls it: intense splitting of affect, which is directed on the one hand toward the State and its wards as the ultimate good, intense fear and hatred of the illegitimate wards as the ultimate evil, etc. All these mechanisms are in line with the bourgeois compartmentalization between affective and rational choices, dating back to Immanuel Kant. Affective compartmentalization is at once the operating logic behind the therapeutic approach, and the effect of that process.
Perhaps “therapeutic” is not the right word; perhaps we should be speaking of some kind of applied psychology designed to manipulate the narcissism inherent in each individual by the rational manipulation of supposedly irrational affect, affect repressed or misdirected. We might call such an approach hedonic psychology, which is defined as "the study of what makes experiences and life pleasant or unpleasant,” in order to divert the individual toward what the therapist, speaking in the name of Society, has determined to be socially useful goals by making pleasurable what would not ordinarily appear to be pleasurable or useful to the individual: if the Death Drive, the drive to kill or be killed for the pleasure of it were lacking, the State would be happy to provide — or, for that matter, the drive to elect a crook and a rapist to the Presidency. As many of you know, so-called “hedonic psychology” was developed by Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, who first developed his theories while organizing the selection process for recruits to the Israeli Defense Forces.
Genocide as self-care. You can’t make it up.
“Selection,“ says Benedict, “is the first requirement” for the activation of psychic mechanisms; she might have asked, who exactly is doing the selecting. Perhaps, as I’ve indicated in talking about the Balinese ritual, the concept of a society exempt from certain configurations like the Oedipal is itself a colonialist fantasy, inasmuch as it depends on defining so-called Primitive societies as lacking a consciously organized political order. Unfortunately, Psychoanalysis is designed to address the way individuals adjust to the social order, not the manner in which a social order, neurotic or not, adjusts or defines the individuals that compose it, let alone the process by which the City’s built, not by Eros but by Thanatos. To the question asked at the outset of this conference, as to whether Psychoanalysis can provide the tools, the “solvent” to this problem, Freud is constrained to answer that it can provide the tools, the crude analytical tools, but not the solvent of therapy. Psychoanalysis cannot return a sick society to health, in fact, as I’ve suggested, psychoanalysis may provide a pathway to the legitimation of sickness, but it may provide pathways to assessment, not by excluding traditional psychoanalytic procedures but reinforcing them and using them to ends that would be unacceptable to Psychoanalysis itself; making of Psychoanalysis what it once was in Vienna, a politically inclined Hilfswissenschaft. Perhaps, looking forward, we should return to a situation where the likes of Alfred Adler published regularly in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the daily of the Social-Democratic Party; where the likes of Wilhelm Reich and Anna Freud taught at the Popular University, the Volkshochschule. Or, conversely, perhaps, inevitably, a sick society like Israel or America will move on its own to self-destruction, a narcissistic end-game. The most practical use of Freud of which I’m aware is the insight that every sadist is also a masochist; every murderer is, potentially, a suicide. Can this insight be usefully applied? Perhaps and perhaps not. Or should we should fall back instead on the forlorn hope of putting every Zionist on the couch, which Freud himself rejected as impractical?(That’s an awfully big couch.)
Or, perhaps, the opposite is true, and these societies may still change from within, out of the self-awareness of the individuals who compose them, and their helpful helpers.
But the Zionist has to want to change.
WOID XXIV-25
November 30, 2012