In the spirit of the times... Thoughts about war
The group is inherently narcissistic...
Plague bacteria never die and can sleep for centuries. No one knows the day when she will wake up again. It can happen early in the morning... You will go to work and see an army of rats spreading through the streets of a happy city...
History will repeat itself again. And there will be with us again those who, like the doctor Bernard Rieux, will stay awake for 20 hours in a row, devotedly saving the sick, and will appear like the young Jean Tarrat, who will organize volunteer battalions to fight the "plague", and the likes of Cottard too will be - too kind and sweet to gain favor among people and cover selfish motives. And no matter how hard people like journalist Raymond Rambert try to stay away, it won't work. Because the "plague" has no borders. She will touch everyone and anyone, kill someone, and someone - who is lucky enough to survive - will change forever.
Shoshanna Felman ("Camu's The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing"), reflecting on Albert Camus' work "The Plague", writes:
"... the holocaust is a situation of "total condemnation": a situation that cannot but have a witness; an experience that requires a person to experience his own death and, paradoxically, testify to the experience of his own dying; the experience of death, which can only be truly understood and witnessed from within (from within witnessing one's own destruction); a radical experience that no outsider can witness, but also that no one can witness or remain an outsider. As an involuntary witness to the plague, Rambert eventually finds himself radically changed by the very process of his testimony. In the end, he decides to stay in the city of his own accord to join the medical volunteers…”
In his work "Unrest in Culture" in 1930, Freud writes that the grouping of people was not only for the purpose of confronting the powerful forces of nature, but also for the fight against psychological threats - above all, in order to connect the destructiveness of one person against another We can love one another, he wrote, provided there are strangers we can hate.
Later, representatives of the psychoanalytic school, in particular Bion, reflecting on the behavior of groups, put forward the idea that groups, just like an individual person, can form and have psychotic fantasies, anxieties and corresponding defense mechanisms. A group may have traits that, if manifested in a person, would fall under the category of psychosis or insanity.
Usually the group is narcissistic, it idealizes itself, and treats others with paranoid mistrust and suspicion. Coping with conflict and aggression in the middle of the group helps projection onto another, external group. In private life, we have to reckon with the demands and prohibitions of the Superego, which limits our destructiveness. But if we hand over the personal Super-I into the hands of the common group Super-I, we will be able to create horrors without feeling guilty, which we would hardly be able to endure in our separate existence. I think that the degree of dehumanization that we have to face in such group acts as wars and genocide, we can only observe in a specific person if he is a criminal psychopath.
When these mental mechanisms get out of control, the group, instead of restraining psychotic functioning, encourages their practical implementation, and we get such irrational behavior as wars and genocide.
Groups can adhere to views that in an individual person can be considered madness ( Denazification in Ukraine. - M.D. ).
… I don't know how many Muslims believe they will go to heaven after being killed in a holy war. As individuals, they are not all crazy. But it is natural for a group to support the crazy beliefs of individual members. And here everything will depend on the leader. We like to trust him because it's part of our sense of security in the group. According to Bion, in the group of the basic assumption ( The type of group dominated by primitive fantasies, magical thinking and the corresponding behavior. - M.D. ) is dominated by a psychotic complex of fantasies, impulses and defense mechanisms, such a group spits out a leader who is better than everyone else represents this psychotic complex (Hitler, Stalin).
About creating an enemy
Creepy in me...
Machiavelli advised rulers to start preventive wars every time there was growing dissatisfaction with the government or conflicts within the state. The role of the ruler in this case is not to create aggressive tension, but to divert it to the outside.
Even Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, not only incited his enemies, but also helped them to become more threatening and dangerous in order to consolidate his own state in this way.
Artificially creating an enemy, diverting the people's hatred to him is one of the many ways to at least somehow hold on to the throne. It can be attributed to the psychological factors of war (in addition to political, economic, religious, demographic, etc.).
Aggression of the people, which accumulated in relation to the ruler, spills out on the one whom the authorities will propose as the culprit in all their troubles. The deadly impulse will find an outlet in any case, it looks for an excuse and will accept anything that can justify its sinister forms. So, why not invent chemical and biogenetic laboratories on the territory of a neighboring state. Or the presence of secret military bases.
Why not create a threatening image of a neighbor so as not to suffer from a sense of guilt for your cruel, violent aspirations.
The attackers always have a sense of guilt, deep, unconscious, indescribable, but it is there, because any war, regardless of the motive, is about killing. The attacker (the people who declared war) cannot understand the reason for this oppressive feeling, does not find a cause-and-effect connection and projects it again on the one whom he considers his enemy, with whom he justifies his sadistic fantasies. Then it turns out that "it's not me who hates, it's me who hates", "it's not me who wants to destroy, but they want to destroy me."
Projection is one of the mental mechanisms characteristic of paranoia.
In her book "Parents Who Live Through Me" (2010), Yolanda Hampel describes the constant coexistence of two "background images" characteristic of Holocaust survivors and other victims of collective violence: one is the "image of security" and the other is " the image of the creepy." According to Gampel, children whose parents died in the Holocaust had to witness the unexpected destruction - both physical and emotional - of their parents; they were left with estranged parental figures, with frozen, lifeless bodies. As a result, a "spooky background" appeared (Gampel 1999). From that moment, this background, which is a container of losses and simultaneously performs the function of their denial, expresses its existence in the form of a "psychic hole". In an article devoted to multiple mutations, Gampel and Mazor (2004) write about the following traumatic encapsulations:
"This is what is real, das Ding, and chaos. It destroys the narrative of life. Creates a semantic hole that does not fit into anything else. It does not enter into the continuum of the biographical narrative, because the new experience comes across a hole, a gap, a threshold, and therefore cannot become part of the continuum and change the dialectic within the individual. A new scary background is created, which does not allow experiences to enter the previous background."