Objectivity and Rationality, What Must be Done?
Image by Mohamed Nohassi.
Freud’s words in 1923: “I belong to the race that in the Middle Ages was blamed for all the plagues, and such experiences have a sobering effect, and they do not arouse the tendency to believe in illusions. Much of my life has been devoted to trying to shed illusions. But if there is an illusion worth believing in, at least partially, this is the illusion: that we learn how to divert the impulse of destruction from our own kind, how to stop hating each other because of trivial differences, and stop killing each other for profits. That we stop taking advantage of the achievements of progress to control the forces of nature in a way that will lead to our destruction. Without this illusion what future awaits us?” Letter to Romain Rolland, 1923
This article is an exploration of objectivity, rational thinking, and illusion, an inquiry about what is meant by “reality”. In psychoanalytic theory there are concepts about three kinds of psychological conflict: intersystemic, intrapsychic, and interpersonal. The political world is part of the interpersonal world, yet the political world is almost entirely absent in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Does not historical, objective truth fall within the concept of the interpersonal world that each individual is part of?
During the past decades I have seen omissions and shifts in psychoanalytic thinking and practice, in psychology in general and predominant views about human nature. Various new diagnoses emerge and become dominant: borderline, autism “on the spectrum”, dyslexia, ADHD. I hear that people often find some relief in these diagnoses. In professionals I often find a disregard for confidentiality.
I look in this article at the place of political reality and facts. A recent article in the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis had two articles on reality and only in one sentence mentioned one historical fact, the Spanish Civil War, while focusing on emotional, subjective truth. (Orphans of the Real – revisited by Joseph Newiirth). Within psychoanalysis, there are two predominant concepts at this time: irreducible subjectivity and neurochemical determinism. There is silence from the psychoanalytic community about threats to human existence from genocides, precarity, climate and nuclear weapons Armageddon. Does the inattention to these facts involve the zero process defenses described by Joseph Fernando: counterpressure and deflection of attention? In applications of psychoanalytic concepts to society, description is conflated with explanation and “If” is confused with “is”. Is it a free-for-all of wild analysis:
There are many schools within psychoanalysis including British and American object relations, self psychology, Lacanian, Kohutian, neo-Freudian, postmodern, attachment, the brain’s hardwiring. Psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson wrote that “unresolved problems with narcissism have resulted in a dearth of creativity in psychoanalysts and also in the establishment of separate psychoanalytic ‘schools’”. He writes “It is astonishing that a psychoanalyst can allow himself to feel that this or that idea or set of ideas can explain everything.”
Focusing here on the political, this article examines the neglect and silence by the first generation of psychoanalysts about fascism, Nazis, antisemitism, Hitler, the Final Solution.
An exception to this neglect of history and politics was the response by the international bodies representing psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, to the attacks by Hamas in October 2003. These organizations immediately condemned Hamas and sided with Israel’s right to defend itself.
The statement referred to the death instinct. From the International Psychoanalytic Association: “The IPA condemns the unprecedented massive attack on civilian territories and on hundreds of helpless people in Israel – launched by the terrorist group Hamas. At least 2000 have been wounded, more than 600 have been killed, and there is an untold number of hostages – men, women, and children – who were kidnapped from their homes and are still held by Hamas. This brutal attack on helpless persons is a reminder of the darkest moments in human history when splitting [into good and bad people] and projection [Hamas sees all Jewish people as evil] become so extreme that they lead to a complete demonization of civil populations as part of the “bad other”. It is the unrestrained release of the death instinct to cause harm to the innocent with no regard for moral standards or other psychological balancing forces.” When Freud in his late work speculated about a death instinct, he wrote that there is no “pure culture” of aggression.
From Israeli psychoanalytic organizations “asking for solidarity with our plight for the immediate release of the hostages (babies, toddlers, children, adults, and holocaust survivors, aged 9 months to 89 years) held in Gaza by Hamas, and in expressing condemnation of the atrocities and crimes against humanity that Hamas unleashed on October 7th and continues to unleash, using innocent civilians as human shields.”
These organizations espouse a talion morality, “an eye for an eye”, justifying massive, total retaliation. There is a disregard for advances in criminal law, for careful forensic investigations of evidence (see work on forensic architecture, Weizman), for the motives and background of perpetrators. See, for example, James Gilligan’s work on violent crime when he was chief psychologist for the Massachusetts prison system. He found that there are no “senseless crimes.”
Since the major organizations issued these statements, there has been no response to evidence about what did happen in October 2003, about the brutality of Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestine and other Arab countries, on the suppression of dissent in North America.
I add these observations on psychoanalytic distortions of history by a Palestinian-Lebanese-Arab-Canadian-Christian psychoanalyst George Awad: he writes that since September 11, 2001 that “groups in North America, as well in the Arab and Islamic worlds, see the situation in Manichean terms”. Awad participated in analytic discussion groups but found entrenched bias. “Finally, I wish that my analytic colleagues would begin studying Arab and Islamic history, religions, and societies before they start tellin us about the mind of a group about which they know very little. It is a dangerous state of affairs if psychoanalysis become Orientalists, because what they tell us about the minds of the “others” is nothing more than a projection of their fantasies (Said, 1978).
What are Freud’s basic discoveries about the unconscious and conscious mind:
In the Interpretation of Dreams, he described the illogic of dreams: turning meaning into its opposite, conflating human and inhuman and organic and inorganic, distortions of time and of cause and effect relationships. These same mechanisms are evident in the words of people with power and influence and are perhaps what social theorist Antonio Gramsci calls the covert hegemony of erroneous assumptions. People are spoken of as animals, as numbers. Obama spoke of nuclear weapons bombs from airplanes without mentioning the Manhattan Project or the scientists or the pilot. Words are now criminalized as things that can kill. Time has lost meaning in conflations of past and present. These times are often described as psychotic. Waelder helpfully asks how groups act in a psychotic way while individuals may not be psychotic. And now bringing the current world to the edge of human extinction. In addition, Bion writes about group processes, harder to discern as these processes are not verbalized in free association sequences and disclosures of personal histories. I participated in a number of these groups and witnessed first-hand the power of group processes and saw first hand the powerful tribal loyalties formed to protect group leaders who were criticized or challenged.
Aggression as an extinct has disappeared in psychoanalytic inquiry. Churchill said, “The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.’ Since the Napoleonic Wars, we have fought an average of six international wars and six civil wars per decade. …the four decades after the end of the Second World War saw 150 wars, involving more than 60 member states of the United Nations, and only 26 days of world peace – and that does not even include the innumerable internal wars and police actions.” (see James E. Waller in Olaf Jensen et al)
What did he see, and why did he not see the frightening situation? In fact, how come there was no psychoanalytic acknowledgement by any analysts at the time about the Nazi takeover that was right before their eyes? Foreign policy: in 1930 . 1933 prepared for withdrawal from League of Nations and rearming Germany He concealed his ambitions behind a façade of lies designed to lull the international community into acquiescence. There was a widespread feeling in the international community that such actions merely applied the principle of national self-determination to Germany and that could only be fair.
Towards the end of 1937 Hitler’s foreign policy began to lose its earlier caution and markedly increased its pace. In September 1938, Chamberlain concluded an agreement with Hitler that guaranteed, he said, ‘peace for our time,’ persuading Hitler not to invade Czechoslovakia. Within 6 months Hitler tore up agreement and invaded anyway. Securing USSR backing for his invasion of Poland, itself a violation he had signed with the Poles in 1934 and publicly confirmed in January 1939, he concluded the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, but he broke this too when he invaded the USSR in June 1941. On May 3l, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop signed a nonaggression treaty with Denmark, followed in October by a public assurance from Hitler that German-Danish relations were thus directed at an unalterably friendly cooperation. Hitler broke the agreement less than a year later by invading the country and occupaying it within a few hours. After 1933, when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, desire for unification could be identified with the Nazis, for whom it was an integral part of the Nazi “Heim ins Reich” (“back home to the realm”) concept, which sought to incorporate as many Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans outside Germany) as possible into a Greater Germany. During an attempted coup in 1934, Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated by Austrian Nazis. The defeat of the coup prompted many leading Austrian Nazis to go into exile in Germany, where they continued their efforts to unify the two countries.
In searching his letters and diary there are less than a handful of references to the historical reality of Nazism, Hitler, antisemitism, danger. To Eitingon: “There is no lack of attempts here to create panic, but just like you I shall leave my place only at the very last moment and probably not even then. (Jones, p 184) “In reality I by no means underestimate the danger threatening myself and others if Hitlerism conquers Austria.
“Hurry up, please; it’s time” (TS Eliot). This is a rational understanding of the urgency of the situation.
Marxist socialists talk about the “longue duree” for overturning the capitalist system and creating a classless society but this ignores evidence about nuclear weapons and about climate change. nuclear winter can eradicate human existence in two years even with a limited nuclear war involving 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons. Whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg writes of the loose chain of command and the irreversible Pentagon strategy of launching total war on China and Russia; he writes that it is not a matter of “if” but of “when”. James Hansen, in his 1988 testimony to the US Congress, presented incontrovertible evidence of human-caused climate change. The paleoclimate evidence showed that 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was the turning point of all ice melting on earth, with sea level rising from 3 to 5 meters in a century which would cause widespread inundation of major agricultural areas. Since his testimony, greenhouse gas concentration rose precipitously since the 1990s. In 2023, global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases reached record highs, with carbon dioxide (CO2) at 419.3 ppm, methane at 1902 ppb, and nitrous oxide at 336.9 ppb, exceeding pre-industrial levels significantly.
This is irreversible because of amplifying feedbacks and the concurrent destruction of the major carbon sinks (forests, soil, the ocean). It is known that soil and burning forests have turned these sinks into greenhouse gas emitters. It is unknown how ocean life will react to increased acidification and warming. Hansen warns of the Venus effect, the loss of oxygen on Venus – how will phytoplankton respond to ocean changes?
In terms of human existence, the “wet bulb temperature” is the combined temperature and humidity that is un-survivable by human beings.
There is no “longue duree”.
What can be done? Immediate cessation of inessential production, with extensive use of rationing and contraction and convergence (Aubrey Meyer, Stan Cox), regional agriculture and local distribution of basic essential needs like water, food, and healthcare, abolition of third-world debt (Toussaint), caps on wealth, converting military to a civilian conservation and first responders corps, cutting out international shipping and aviation still exempt under the Kyoto Accords. All this can be done without any new technology. All of this can prevent an avoidable death.
All of this requires a realistic, objective sense of time.
There is no “longue duree”.
Select bibliography. See the basic texts by James Hansen on the climate, and Dan Ellsberg on nuclear weapons, and Sigmund Freud on the Interpretation of Dreams, the Ego and the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Inhibitions Symptoms Anxiety.
Also see:
George Awad “The minds and perceptions of ‘the others’” Sverre Varvin and Vamik D. Volkan, Violence or Dialogue: psychoanalytic insights on terror and terrorism. International Psychoanalytic Association, London, 2003.
Dowling, S. (1977) Seven Infants with Esophageal Atresia—A Developmental Study. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 32:215-256
Evans “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, Penguin 2024, New York.
Gaensbauer, T. J. (1995) Trauma in the Preverbal Period: Symptoms, Memories, and Developmental Impact. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 50:122-149
Olaf Jensen et al Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: perpetrators in comparative perspectives.
Palgrave MacMillan New York 2008.
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Volume 3. New York, Basic Books 1957.
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the threshold of detectability. Zone Books, New York, 2017
