(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
We live in dark times. Right-wing populist movements are spreading, gaining power beyond and beyond Europe. These are shocking and scary days.
One of Donald Trump's top election promises was that he would raise a wall on the border with Mexico and make Mexico pay for it. Last autumn Hungary built a barbed-wire fence on the border with Serbia and Croatia. While airstrikes drowned in the Mediterranean last spring and the party voted to deny access for Syrian refugees, Frp politician Per Sandberg appeared in a t-shirt with a picture of an anchor and with the text "Good Journey – Sea Adventure".
What can psychoanalytic thinking contribute to understanding such phenomena? In what ways is it fruitful, and what are its limitations? Psychoanalytic thinking is invaluable when it comes to grasping what's at stake in such political movements, and it's a tragedy that these insights have been lost from mainstream social research – more than that; they are actively avoided. At the same time, I would warn against an uncritical application of some of psychoanalysis's individualistic premises in confrontation with social phenomena.
As we are witness the manifestations in our day of exclusion, humiliation, and ridicule of a "threatening" other – an imagined other seen from the standpoint of the subject as the practitioner, but with real consequences in the form of suffering and ultimately death for those made to target discs – what questions do we want to ask ourselves? What kinds of fears or fantasies are played out in the rhetoric of politicians promoting these agendas? That would be a highly relevant question to ask – and a question psychoanalysis is supremely equipped to investigate, but is often left out in today's debates.
Or: Why is it about one individual rather than another, a leader or supporter of a right-wing, nationalist movement – that is another question psychoanalysis can help elucidate. A further question, as to why this particular type of people is being made a target today, may be better answered by looking at prevailing social conditions, to power relations. This can be about the fantasies behind prejudice against "others", about social stigma and insult, or lie in ideas about what constitutes the characteristics of an "us" and a "them". Such is remarkably constant – though who is designated varies in time and space.
Rather than å understand the current political mood – increasing nationalism and ethnocentrism, with idealization of what the nation state has defined as within the boundaries of "we-one" and downgrading of those defined as "others" – as an example of pathology in contrast to a perceived normality, will I suggest that we see these tendencies as characteristics of the socially unconscious in the current society. The point here is not that characterizing certain extremists as crazy or sick in certain ways is completely wrong; it can often be appropriate. The point is rather that focusing attention here can distract from a more serious issue – the spread of attitudes that would previously be called extremist in the general population. When this happens, traits that were previously seen as "abnormal" become normal in the sense of ordinary, and general social acceptance causes these to be lost sight of. To paraphrase Adorno et al. – personality patterns that have been dismissed as pathological because they deviate from the manifest trends or prevailing ideas in a society, turn out to be merely exaggerated versions of what was almost universal beneath the surface. In this way, what is pathological today, with changes in social conditions, can become tomorrow's prevailing trend. Similarly, the fascist leader, as described in Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, from the followers in giving freer expression to the urgings which incite the flock members to follow him, in being less inhibited in giving voice to that which is latent in them, and thus granting them the vicarious satisfaction of going up in this passion.
The "others" are depicted in dehumanizing terms such as diseases, insects or pests.
Authoritarian populist movements portray immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, blacks, Roma and Muslims as enemies, threats to one's community and "way of life". The "others" are depicted in dehumanizing terms such as diseases, insects or pests that threaten to destroy the "body of society". In other words, forms of fundamental fear associated with the destruction of one's self or attacks on one's body are exploited for political purposes – to strengthen a nation-state as an imaginary closed entity that succeeds in expelling "foreign bodies", "pollution" or differences.
In one sense, psychoanalysis is in a unique position when it comes to understanding and interpreting such discourses, thanks to the unconscious meanings they draw on and exploit. But this is complicated when we reflect on the fact that these meanings are socially embedded in everyday practices, in social norms and standards for what and who counts, and who is not entitled to attention or reflection. Since psychoanalysts or psychoanalytically oriented theorists are part of the same society that incorporates these meanings, and where many of the same things are taken for granted and remain thematized, and since they take part in the same socially unconscious, they are not necessarily better off than others with a view to identifying dehumanizing practices of which they themselves are a part. I have described elsewhere how we can refer to condensation and displacement, and other characteristics of primary process logic, as something that unfolds in the public space when people are presented as masses and become pure objects for discourse, and when groups are presented as mutually homogeneous units that are sharply separated. For example: White middle-class people in this society habitually shift racism over to white working-class people, and see it as a trait that belongs "over there." This is allowed because it is a shared social structure, transfer that is supported and not questioned in social practices. Thus, knowledge of and experience with unconscious dynamics as such – albeit important – is in itself insufficient without genuine and equal encounters with social positions, environments and practices.
The new nationalisms response to a felt need for belonging, meaning and security is an imaginary unit that shows signs of being an "I" made into "we", where individual narcissism is replaced by group narcissism. Cohesion is allowed to the extent that the members of the group are imagined as identical – and the appearance of another that is clearly different evokes the rage that reveals the limitations of these ties. These ideologies transform the liberal individual, an isolated competitor seen as driven only by selfish motives, into a herd animal who stays close to his own, but who is equally ruthless towards one who is perceived as not belonging. "Our contempt for weakness" is common to both of them – this to show how traits that now appear on the political scene with extreme cruelty have already been nurtured in the society we share – competition, egocentrism, coldness towards oneself and others, and with contempt for many of the qualities that make us human.
For again å refer to Adorno's essay on fascist propaganda: He describes how fascism plays on unconscious forces in a way that perpetuates the follower's addiction. It exploits the unconscious for social control rather than striving to make the subjects consciously their unconscious. In contrast, a stance against instrumentalism is inherent in psychoanalytic practice. In these times where one worships efficiency and utility, and where few stop to ask: utility for what purposes ?, the psychoanalytic standpoint of promoting reflection, wherever it may lead, represents a much-needed alternative, when even the education system moves in direction of more efficiency and less thinking. This point of view is worth defending, and it is worth asking how it can be expanded to produce more reliable spaces where thinking can take place.
The text is taken from Auestad's book Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Inquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination (2015), and has previously been published in English in the magazine New Associations, published by the British Psychoanalytical Council.
Auestad is a Norwegian philosopher and author. 2lene.auestad@gmail.com
