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A LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE PAPER
AWAKENING FROM THE NIGHTMARE OF HISTORY:
Psychological Interpretation of War and Genocide
by Richard Koenigsberg
For a complete list of Richard Koenigsberg’s essays and papers, please click here.
“I theorize that society is created by human beings, and serves a human purpose. Cultural forms exist to the extent that they allow us to externalize, work through and come to terms with our deepest desires, fears, conflicts and fantasies. Cultural ideas and institutions are not separate from the psychic functions they perform. Indeed, we may theorize, ideologies and institutions exist and are perpetuated precisely by virtue of their capacity to perform psychological work.”

“Beneath the sound, fury, and grandiosity of warfare lies a profound psychopathology: this willingness to kill, die and maim in the name of nations. Historical accounts deny psychopathology by depicting war as if a normal, even natural human activity. The case study presented here illuminates the pathological quality of warfare. Nations of the world continued to send men to die, day after day, month after month, year after year, producing a quantity of casualties so mind-boggling—that even now people are attempting to comprehend and come to terms with what occurred.”

The Psychological Interpretation of Culture

A psychological approach to the study of society seeks to identify the sources and meanings of its cultural formations. For any ideology or institution, I pose the question: “Why does it exist?” To understand an element of culture requires uncovering the psychic function that it provides or performs. An ideology or institution comes into being—is embraced and perpetuated—insofar as it does something (psychologically) for individuals within that society.

Cultures are social constructions, but constructed for what purpose? A psychological approach to the study of society poses questions revolving around the creation and perpetuation of specific cultural forms. For any belief-system or institution within a society one may pose the question: What psychological work does this element of culture perform for members of society?

The fundamental flaw of recent cultural theory is the assumption that there is a reality “out there” (constituted by language, discourse, etc.) that exists and can be studied separately from the minds of those human beings who create, embrace and perpetuate it. Human beings are born into symbolic systems that already exist. Still, the question remains: Why does a particular symbolic system exist in the first place?

Based on our experience of symbolic systems as overwhelming in their impact, we imagine that they constitute “objective realities” separate from human beings. We experience society as an entity “out there,” above us. We forget the human source of our cultural world. Why do some elements of culture become stable and persist, while others fade and disappear? One “explains” the existence of a cultural form by interrogating the psychological gratifications it provides and psychic functions it performs.

Freud's analysis of dreams, slips of the tongue, and psychosomatic symptoms was guided by the principle of psychic determinism, asserting that there are no accidents in the life of the mind. Our unconscious mental life is the source of the images we dream at night, the mistakes and blunders of our everyday life and the pains in our bodies. A psychological approach to the study of culture extends the principle of psychic determinism. We examine belief systems, institutions and historical events assuming that these cultural creations have not come into being by chance.

Why do people pretend that ideologies and institutions have a “life of their own,” as if they keep on keeping on independently of the people who create and embrace them? Why do we imagine that culture or society descends upon us from above, as if emanating from another domain of existence? Why do people believe that cultural ideas and institutions are separate from human beings?

I theorize that society is created by human beings, and serves a human purpose. Cultural forms exist to the extent that they allow us to externalize, work through and come to terms with our deepest desires, fears, conflicts and fantasies. Cultural ideas and institutions are not separate from the psychic functions they perform. Indeed, we may theorize, ideologies and institutions exist and are perpetuated precisely by virtue of their capacity to perform psychological work.

Norman O. Brown (1959) stated that “culture exists in order to project the infantile fantasies into external reality where they may be seen and mastered.” According to this view, culture constitutes a vehicle for externalizing and working through unconscious fantasies. Brown views culture as a “transference screen”—a vast canvas or tableau onto which the psyche projects and dramatizes fundamental conflicts and existential dilemmas.

Brown spoke of the “human neurosis,” viewing history as a form of collective psychopathology. Indeed, the extraordinary record of slaughter in the twentieth century (an estimated 200 million deaths caused by political actions undertaken by societal groups) suggests that Brown's diagnosis was kind. Yet in spite of the grotesque historical record, people rarely conceptualize historical events from the perspective of psychopathology. We continue to idealize societies: avoiding focusing on the ugliness and sickness that emanate from within the very fabric of civilization.

The Psychopathology of War

Beneath the sound, fury and grandiosity of warfare lies a profound psychopathology: the willingness to kill, die and maim in the name of nations. Historical accounts deny this psychopathology by depicting war as a normal, even natural human activity. The case study presented here illuminates the pathological quality of warfare. Nations of the world continued to send men to die, day after day, month after month, year after year— producing a quantity of casualties so mind-boggling that even now people are attempting to comprehend and come to terms with what occurred.

Perpetuation of warfare requires a denial of what happens to the body of the soldier. Delusions of honor and glory can be sustained only by turning away from the results of battle. Haig's son reported that the British Commander-in-Chief felt that it was his duty to “refrain from visiting the casualty stations because these visits made him physically ill” (in Gilbert, 1994).

The French Commander Joffre—after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier—said to his staff: “I mustn't be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.” War is about the mutilation of the body of the soldier in the name of the sacred ideal. We want the “beautiful” ideals, but don't want to look at the body of the soldier.

The idea of omnipotent bodies politic is a dream that people experience while they are awake. Nations constitute a shared fantasy of immortality. This may seem at times to be a benign, beautiful dream—a fantasy of oneness with a beloved country. However, this dream transmogrifies into a nightmare the moment people begin to doubt the omnipotence of their nation.

Wars occur in order to demonstrate—to test the proposition—that one's nation is all-powerful. Nations bring forth or manifest power by virtue of their capacity to kill and to cause death, that is, as a result of their willingness to sacrifice the lives of human beings. As long as there are people who “die for the country,” we are persuaded that nations are real.