PSYCHODYNAMIC PRACTICE 10.4 NOVEMBER 2004

The perils of conviction: addiction, terror and leadership ELISHA DAVAR ABSTRACT The subject of this paper is the use made of destructive idealization in both the self and in society. Using Freudian and Kleinian ideas about the ‘death instinct’ as a starting point, the author returns to the notion of ‘destructive reconstruction’, an idea developed by Spielrein in 1912. Making use of her theory, a case example of a drug addict is cited where an idealization of destructiveness is used to achieve the annihilation of self and object. The idea of an idealized destructive union is then examined with reference to suicidal terrorism as well as the unconscious dynamics underlying the Bush – Blair alliance in the Iraq war. Finally the role of leadership and potential for destructive decision making within a parliamentary democracy is explored using Britain’s role in the war against Iraq as an example. Targeting, demonization and myth-making are explored as aspects of an unconscious systemic process that was to become part of a self-idealization that was severely misplaced. KEYWORDS Death instinct, libidinal narcissism, idealization, hysteria, spiritual sexuality, fundamentalism, suicidal terrorism This Life’s dim window of the Soul Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole And leads you to believe a Lie When you see with, not thro the Eye. (The Everlasting Gospel: William Blake) Psychodynamic Practice ISSN 1475-3634 print/ISSN 1475-3626 online # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14753630412331313686

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INTRODUCTION The ‘death instinct’ has always been a contentious issue for psychoanalysis because the unconscious is supposed to have no conception of death, only that of disappearance. What then is it and how would we recognize its workings? The answer remains unclear, riddled with theoretical problems such as those of definition: a drive or an instinct? An anti-life force or an active destructive deathly force? And these in addition to all the issues entailed in establishing and proving its existence. Nonetheless Freud began with a biological conception of the death instinct as an event that sought the dissolution of living matter and a return to inorganic matter. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he set about formulating a conception of the death instinct: ‘It seems then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or to put it another way, the expression of inertia inherent in organic life’. (p. 36).

After the wanton destruction Freud witnessed during the First World War, he recast his formulations concerning the death instinct, giving the forces of destructiveness a more prominent role. He had witnessed men behaving in ways which confirmed that they were not only willing to fight for, but equally willing to die for their country, and not only in fantasy. His thinking about the death instinct changed. From a force seeking biological inertia, it became an active destructive drive attacking sexuality. Freud meant the death instinct to be seen as older stratum of instinct pushing for dissolution, set in opposition to the life instincts pushing forward with their ego instinctual and reproductive drives. Usually the life instinct has precedence over the death instinct, which remains an undercurrent somewhere in the background. However, were the death instinct to get the upper hand, Freud’s (1920) formulation that the aim of all life is death (p. 38) would in all likelihood be realized. In Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud had given the death instinct a larger role as an unchangeable destructive agency, though he believed it operated as a displaced instinct. He understood the sadistic instincts as stemming from the death instinct under the influence of narcissistic libido. He thought of the death instinct as an 440

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entity that was ‘clinically silent’ and could not be proven. This ‘clinical silence’ was difficult for the analytic community to accept. Here was a tenet they could neither prove or disprove. What were they to do with it and how were they to investigate it? Klein (1933) in contrast took the life and death instincts as a cornerstone of her theory and felt that both were active drives from the beginning of extra-uterine life. Post-Kleinian thinkers, notably Bion, Rosenfeld and Segal who worked with psychotic patients, demonstrated two things: that psychotic patients were analysable and that the death instinct was clinically active, albeit in hidden ways. They challenged Freud’s view about the silence of the death instinct and took his theories much further. They saw it as a force that was inferable and that worked in hidden ways. Psychotic parts of the personality were shown to profoundly influence personality functioning in concealed ways so that the death instinct might even appear to mimic the life instincts, but steering life towards a different conclusion. Post-Kleinian thinking about the death instinct has resulted in the conceptualization of a ‘pathological organization’. Analyses of borderline and psychotic patients have shown that in these patients, the healthy parts of the personality are besieged by a skilfully coordinated unconscious system which has a tenacious and stagnating grip on the rest of the personality. Steiner’s (1993) work shows how dangerous liaisons develop between good and bad parts of the self, which hold the personality to ransom. Brenman’s (1985) work shows how a cruel superego dominates the personality whose aim is ‘the worship of omnipotence which is felt to be superior to human love and forgiveness, the clinging to omnipotence as a defence against depression, and the sanctification of grievance and revenge’ (1985, p. 280). Rosenfeld’s (1987) work on destructive narcissism shows how a particular type of patient with a borderline or psychotic core makes use of a defensive system. It operates just as the mafia does, organizing a series of protection rackets for ransom money under the leadership of a ruthless boss. The thrust of his work illustrates how these destructive forces are actually turned to libidinally, as though they would be allies and saviours on the side of life. Thus in essence both Kleinian and post-Kleinian thinking view the death instinct as a force that attacks object relations, thereby attacking sexuality and libidinal relationships. The result of their research has led to highly original and innovative thinking about the working of destructive processes, both within individuals and also between 441

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groups. It is the appearance of being on the side of life aspect while really being destructive which is central to the theme of my paper. A CASE EXAMPLE: THE ULTIMATE THRILL OF SELFSACRIFICE ‘I want to be high all the time; to not have to think; to not have to get depressed! said D, a young man aged twenty-six who was a patient at a psychotherapy day centre. D was a victim in the true sense of the word of a difficult past. He had been on the receiving end of awful emotional abuse as a baby and young child. He was the son of a psychotic mother with a progressive delusional sickness who screamed abuses at voices shouting at her daily for hours on end. He spent his first four years in the care of this woman. His father was in prison while his sister who was four years older was in a boarding school with the nuns. The only relief from this mother were the monthly weekend visits of his sister who tried in her way to look after him. When D was four the two children were put in state care and adopted by a couple who could not have children. D’s adoptive father was very strict and sadistic using corporal and psychological forms of punishment to humiliate him, while his adoptive mother was protective but ineffectual. D was a handful and soon got into trouble at junior school, mixing with the wrong type of boys, meaning anti-social characters who always made trouble. In adolescence he was lured into a criminal teenage prostitution racket which got him hooked on drugs so as to make him compliant. They sent him to rich male clients, rewarding him with money and heroin. With his family’s support, he got away from the criminal network and stopped taking drugs, but soon relapsed. He tried on several occasions to kick off drugs but kept falling back on his old habit. As an adult he could not manage to give up his love object, his addiction, though he knew it was bad for him. He used to say with a shrug, ‘I can’t help it – I love it’. Getting stoned, high or drunk was the magical experience which gave D relief from a painful state of mind. Not thinking meant not being depressed. It acted like a protective shield, blocking out depression and anxiety. When he was not high or drunk, D was frequently anxious, suffering from severe panic attacks. I want to select two vignettes which illustrate of the way D’s internal protective system worked, which are central to my argument about the working of the anti-life force. 442

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D once sent me a streaming video clip of a cartoon like character, which he had found on the internet. The action of the cartoon character focused on a man’s arm which moved up and down mechanically. The video clip portrayed a tough tattooed guy lifting a mug of beer to his mouth and drinking it down in one gulp. The arm of the cartoon figure would then move down so that whilst urinating the man could catch his urine in a beer mug. The arm then went up to his mouth again so that he was then drinking his urine. This sequence was then repeated. The theme of the cartoon was thus of a static recycling system which regulated self- provision. Whilst D found it very funny, I saw a more earnest communication behind his humour; that of being hooked and caught in an awful dependent situation he could not get away from. Was this recycling system a re-enactment of a baby having to find solace in himself against a tirading psychotic mother, I asked myself? The second vignette illustrates D’s typical style of thinking. Simply put, D always knew better. Though he might ask for help or advice, he would rarely take it. He would almost always follow his own line of thinking, as though his ideas were the best. In conversations invariably he would eclipse what others thought or said with his own opinion. For instance, if he spoke about his group therapy sessions, he would explain what he had communicated in the session and would usually finish by saying that the group leader had agreed with him. He said of himself, ‘I must always win’, which made twoway discussions almost impossible, especially if he was the subject of discussion. If he made mistakes, he would turn it round to look as though he was right and in no way responsible for his mistakes. So I think the measure of his omnipotent style of defence becomes apparent to the reader. To an outsider looking upon him one would be struck by D’s reliance on the authority of his own inventions. It was as though D was saying ‘I have my own superior breast milk/beer/love which will take care of me. I am self-creating and self sustaining. I do not need yours’. Given that the true feeding experience was located inside him, he had no need of it from another. When this precarious delusion was under threat and D would realise how much he needed help, he would drink or drug himself to somehow steal back an illusory potency. It would thus seem to restore an omnipotent frame of mind where he could trick himself into believing that he was self sufficient and highly potent. He also seemed to enjoy courting danger, as though he were playing a game of Russian roulette to test his nerve 443

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and power. One night after getting very drunk, he miscalculated, overdosed on heroin and died. The death instinct had won. Ironically with the part of his mind that was deluded, I think D thought that he was invincible to death. He had seen friends overdose and die and swore that it would and could never happen to him. Chasseguet-Smirgel (2001) makes an astute observation. She points out that although drug addicts or anorectics have very dependent personality structures, both groups attempt to find an independence from needing to rely on people through reliance on a magical inner object, such as a substance or a set of convictions. She cites the example of an anorectic woman patient who dreamt that she ate her own faeces, thus relying on her own resources for selfprovision. By exclusive reliance on this self-encapsulating system, the dependence on the real mother is denied as a source of nurturance, as indeed are all forms of dependent relationships. Since sufficiently good containment is not found through external objects, such people turn away from the external world and attempt to find containment through internal, if flawed objects. The denial of the need of a real mother involves a psychic trickery whereby hallucinatory gratification is esteemed and elevated above the real mother. Thus an omnipotent, self-encapsulating shell of self reliance is built up, which is felt to be a trustworthy bulwark against depending on people who are menacing and unpredictable. Her point about the use of omnipotent mechanisms as a means of achieving a state of illusory independence and containment strikes me as important and I want to enlarge upon it. While a strenuous attempt to be independent of others is made with the aid of the magical talisman, unconsciously the opposite holds true though it is denied. D was a captive in a state of profound dependence on an object which is unlike a normal kind of dependence on an object. This type of object dependence is enslavement, namely an extremely cruel type of dependence. Harmony only comes about through an exclusive worship of the object of veneration and subservience to it. Symbiosis with this powerful inner object defends against experiencing abandonment anxiety and much later, castration anxiety. The anxiety about loss of omnipotence, subjectively experienced as abandonment and dying, necessitates fusion of the self with the object. The ego (the self in Klein’s terminology) and ego ideal (idealized self in Kleinian terms) fuse to become indistinguishable. A way to think about these fusions organized by the narcissistic core is to imagine a system in which the idealized, primitive part object 444

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makes an unconscious deal with the omnipotent infant part self. These two parts pair in an unconscious alliance. The deal is to make an invincible pair who will look after each other and defy the laws of nature. As deficit has been done away with, it would be equivalent to having paradise on earth, something that is strictly speaking the province of the Gods. I came across a description of Brecht’s epitome for heaven. It was ‘we can eat and be eaten’ – total mutual gratification of course, while that of hell was ‘to eat or be eaten’. Note that it is half of a whole and can quickly become nothing. For anyone who is familiar with Kleinian ideas about the origins of infantile anxiety, these two states capture a particular state of mind. The fantasy of the unlimited abundance of heaven, a supply line that never ends, a state of profound bliss. Its antithesis is the line of supply which eats you, perhaps an evocation that one’s own mother, the source of unlimited abundance, who will be deplete and cannibalize you in some act of revenge for the greed of swallowing up her resources (Klein 1975). A high psychic price has to be paid to sustain the quality of such an illusion of omnipotence. It does not come for free. The role of the eventual symbolic father with all its resonances remains an undeveloped area. The processes which become impaired include most obviously the establishment of object relations. Thus the concept of the other, the distinction between an inside and an outside are confused. So is the role of mourning which is essential to the development of linear time; in this way the marking of the difference between the generations, and an acknowledgment of one’s dependence on them and oedipal issues concerning succession are sidelined. Based on D’s case example I want to highlight the following points: The idealization of a protective parental object is part of the normal developmental processes of an infant’s evolution. Trauma, deprivation or over-stimulation by a parenting figure, may result in normal idealization processes being hijacked. Ordinary dependency needs will become so erotically invested that enslavement to the needed object comes to be regarded as a ‘normal’ relationship. The lie about the goodness and strength of the object is exploited for a particular purpose, namely to merge with the idealized object’s qualities. This lie requires further lies to bolster a false initial premise. It results in the development of a complicated system based on false premises, which becomes increasingly pathological and grandiose. The danger of this type of idealization is that it takes the form of a pairing or marrying with an object of promise that helps to sustain an 445

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illusory belief long beyond the point at which it is necessary or even useful. As the more omnipotent delusional facets of this pairing become manifest, the self-destructive and destructive of other aspects come to the fore. It engenders the illusion of a sense of timelessness and eternal continuity, as it exists in the unconscious. In the real world, I imagine it would be like someone who at some level is convinced of their own immortality. Finally I want to emphasize a theoretical distinction. The idea of merging with the object to seek obliteration of self and object was first conceptualized by Spielrein (1912) in her paper ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being’, which was based on her work with hysterics and schizophrenics. The concept she developed was that of merging for once and for all in death, so as to end all separations, and reemerging united and transformed into another. It is an oedipal completion of erotic desire by recourse to a pre-oedipal system. It emphasizes going back to the source of nurturance as a form of erotic reconstruction by means of self-destruction. There is a different emphasis from the Freudian or Kleinian conception of the death instinct, which is based on a dualistic theory of opposing impulses and is a description of a destructive force antagonistic to the force of sexuality. SUICIDAL MARTYRDOM. AN EXAMPLE OF THE DEATH INSTINCT OR NOT? At the time of writing this paper, a report on terrorist attacks (NRC Handelsblad, 18 April, 2004) collected from AP, APF and Reuters press reports lists that since the bombing of the twin towers there have been 383 terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists which have together killed more than 7000 people and wounding upwards of 10 000. (This data excludes attacks on American military in Iraq which are classed as guerrilla tactics). The attacks have taken place mainly in Iraq, Pakistan, India, Algeria and Israel and the highest number of casualties has been among the Moslem population. A significant proportion of these attacks – just over 100, so more than a quarter have been carried out by means of suicide bombings; and more are certain to follow. Do suicidal terrorists harbour an excessive amount of the death instinct? Or are they helpless people who see no other way out? There is of course no easy answer to such a question. It would be foolish to simply pathologize them and be done with it. No doubt many of them come from the ranks of the disaffected and live in appalling social 446

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circumstances but to see them as just helpless would not do justice to the fact that they also become killers targeting unsuspecting others. The rise in suicidal terrorism challenges those of us grappling with psychoanalytic understanding to come up with some sort of in-depth, comparative, understanding or explanation of this phenomenon. But I want to begin with a sociological understanding, as some interesting conclusions emerge which complement a psychoanalytic perspective. A French sociologist, Khosrokhavar (2003) explains the recent glorification of suicidal terrorism in certain sectors of Islamic society in the following manner. He starts his argument by pointing out that suicidal martyrdom does not really form part of the Islamic tradition. There is no reference to it in the Koran. The only recorded martyr is the founder of the Shiites, Imam Hussein who died in 680 in Karbala with his followers on the battlefield. And although his death is commemorated each year, even the Shiite minority did not follow Imam Hussein’s example. So why is the phenomenon now so much more widespread? His thesis is that suicidal terrorism now fulfils an intermediate role between the hero and the saint in Islamic society, thus functioning as a kind of meta-symbol. In other words suicide bombers become heroic figures to be eulogized because of a society’s need to invent heroes, idolize them and invest them with projections of great potency. Khosrokhavar uses the example of the Iran–Iraq war to show how this idealized projection works. In the 80s during the Iran–Iraq war, suicidal martyrdom took on a new meaning. He suggests that there is a relationship between the hopelessness Iranians felt during the war against Iraq which proved unconquerable, and the rise and glorification of suicidal terrorism, which was proportional. As time went by, it became clear to the Iranians that they could not win a war against an Iraq supported by Western military might. At that point martyrdom took on a heroic role and was glorified. The dynamic of the proportional relationship is important here, because had the Iranians been winning one can assume that the need to find metasymbols and turn them into heroes would have been less. It is the link between the hopelessness of the situation and the invention of heroes that is a crucial factor. The martyrs wanted to die to demonstrate that they rejected an unjust world. Dying in battle by actively seeking death turned into both a significant religious and political act. Offering up one’s life as part of the holy struggle came to be viewed by religious clerics as an assurance of entry into paradise as the reward. As one suicide bomber 447

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put it, quoting the words of a famous Muslim martyr ‘truly there is only one death, so let it be on the path of God’ (Juergensmeyer 2001: 73). So it took on a new meaning as an exalted form of love. And it spread. With this elevation of suicidal martyrdom came the idea of taking as many of the enemy as one could as part of the sacred duty. Suicidal terrorism had thus become institutionalized through religion. Khosrokhavar uses a surprising term to describe it – ‘the democratization of martyrdom’ – really a description of a perversion of democracy as the shared right to die but not to vote or live. Martyrdom thus now was not something that was only for the elites, but came within the reach of anyone who chose for it. He points out that here Islam differs from most other religions where martyrdom occurs. It is currently the only religion currently besides the Sikh faith which exalts taking the enemy with one, so giving Islamic ‘extremism’ its punitive quality. To me it looks as though an idealization of destructiveness was again being used as the ultimate form of defence against helplessness which leads me back to the psychoanalytic. When Spielrein was developing her line of thinking that destruction could be seen as creating some kind of new entity she had hit on an idea that was new for psychoanalytic thinking of that time. That said, it was not an entirely novel idea. Love and death in league with each other, is to be found in Nietzsche’s and Wagner’s works. But Spielrein observed that in dreams, myths and stories, sexual wishes were often associated with images of death. So she located the reproductive drive within the destructive drive. Her thesis was that self-destruction led to a reconstruction, though she seemed to be aware that there was a fine line between disappearing into the parent figure in the service of the ego or retreating there as an act that was destructive to the self. To quote Spielrein ‘I am dead means I have attained the desired regression to the parent and am disappearing there’ (1994: 173). What the self is doing in this search is seeking ‘the parental resemblance . . . . that one may seek to experience in reality the destiny of the ancestors, specifically the parents’ (Moll 2001: 164). And she ends up speaking evocatively about its power. It ‘is in the end capable . . . of sacrificing the whole individual to its ends . . . . that is how young people, completely transformed by their desires, strike magnificent poses, torches in hand, pathetic speeches on their lips, and leap to their death’ (Moll 2001: 164)’. In our day we could see it as similar to the passion which fuels the suicide bombers. The fantasy of self-sacrifice is that of death uniting the self with the loved one, originally the parent figure, and forming a new identity, is 448

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as it were an idea of completion. The longing to match up with one’s semblance is that of unconsciously going back to the source of nurturance where one belongs. Spielrein believed the strength of this compelling force, which she referred to as a ‘complex’, was so powerful that in spite of the individual’s personal wishes for survival, it seemed to have a will all of its own. She understood this will of its own as a primal urge which she connected with the idea of the survival of the species at the expence of the individual’s personal will. Her explanation of the drive to self-destruction was that the strong fixation of libido onto the parents makes a transference onto objects in the external world impossible, since no objects sufficiently resemble the parents. So the ‘real’ world cannot save one in one’s search. But even if the real world is deficient, that still leaves room for a projection on to an idealized image of the parents. Britton (2003: 42) suggests that this transference projection could be represented by the image of God rather than the image of something human. He suggests that the fulfilment of oedipal wishes can thus occur in death in a way it never could in life, as death of the self here means union with God/the parent while life means separation. Spielrein was examining self-destructiveness as a form of erotic completion, a dynamic particularly pertinent to hysterics. But I think one could draw the circle wider so as to understand the uses which self-destructiveness is put to as a social phenomenon. Might one therefore draw on the knowledge of the dynamics of hysteria and apply it to suicidal martyrdom to better understand its compelling quality? The desire to join the primal scene by becoming one of the partners to it in fantasy – a wish to be special, is the primary dynamic driving hysteria. As early as 1895 Freud notes ‘The child takes both of its parents, and more particularly one of them, as the object of its erotic wishes’. In hysteria this object longing leads to fantasies of sacrifice and self obliteration and then to fantasies of a new idealized union. The hysterical solution to the sexual knowledge which the genitalia bring is to ‘disavow’ them and seek a higher form of love. Bollas (2000) comments that ‘the most prominent paradox of the hysteric, however, is the exchange of carnal sexuality – specifically, the genital drive – for spiritual sexuality’ (p. 25). Sacrificial love then becomes an elevated form of passion as genital love is displaced upwards. This displacement results in a spiritual body such as a God or an Allah which is taken to be the real and ultimate love object. It strikes me that Islamic fundamentalism, in fact all forms of fundamentalism, are fed by these kinds of idealization where spiritual 449

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sexuality replaces the sexuality of the flesh. Suicidal martyrs demonstrate this devotion to spiritual sexuality by their willingness to die. Their leaders refer to it as permission not an obligation to die, though the followers feel it as a required demonstration of a spiritual commitment. The pull of such convictions, with the sense of a special duty, seems to me not unlike the erotized emotions that guide hysterics in their search for an elusive but powerful object that ensnares them. With hysterics there is no room for triangulation, or other objects of desire. Only one special object is endowed with a transformative desire, with which one’s fate and destiny are to be worked out. Likewise it seems to me that the singular belief or passion which suicidal martyrs hold, has the same erotized quality. Of course one should be careful to apply but not to equate the reasons for suicidal martyrdom with the dynamics of hysteria. Understanding them emerges out of differing disciplines, cultural and theoretical contexts. And the suicide bombers’ use of a destructive union occurs as part of an allegiance to a political/religious group with particular aims. LEADERSHIP, THE GROUP AND DESTRUCTIVE IDEALIZATION Bion contrasted the task group working purposively towards an aim with its unconscious life where much more magical solutions to problems operate. The basic assumptions (fight–flight, pairing and dependency) describe unconscious group processes which will influence the way the group goes about its problem solving. The task group working at its primary task is usually foreground, while the pull of these more primitive modes of thought, the basic assumptions, stays more in the background. Nevertheless the basic assumptions can exert a profound influence over the way a group works at its task. Within this parameter of destructive idealization, the fusion created between group and leader probably goes even a stage further than in the basic assumptions model Bion describes. Here the forces of primary narcissism infuse both leader and group in an increasing spiral of self- destruction. Each side can drive the other more insane by means of projective processes, infusing both with an insanity that ultimately and inevitably leads them to nihilism. An extreme but nevertheless clear example which Rosenfeld (1984) cites is that of Nazi Germany. It became much like a collective paranoid psychosis with a whole nation following their leader to death and self-destruction. At some point as the psychosis progressed, the hidden primary task being 450

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worked towards became one of self-destruction though Hitler or the German nation would not necessarily have known it. Bion (1961) took thinking about groups a stage further than Freud who remained patriarchal and in some sense protected the law of the father. In Bion’s later (1992) work he proposed a radical and interesting proposition. He suggested that the emergent leader of the group (as opposed to the real leader) is its ‘sickest’ member. In his later thinking about groups, he puts forward the notion that the leader has been given the unconscious task of responding to and shaping the group’s projective identifications. Groups can project into their leaders their disquiet and hopes, sensing the leader will respond. And if the leader requires it, the group will mobilize a social regression without the constraints of a superego which legitimizes any action that the group undertakes on its own behalf. Hence the most ruthless kind of acts to ensure the group’s future existence can be undertaken without any sense of guilt, including those that lead ultimately to its own self-sacrifice. A current example of such a system might be Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden has assembled an inner core group of people with like-minded ideals, who then recruit their followers from the disenfranchised by playing on the promise of divine justice and retribution in pursuit of an expansive, trans-national, global Islamic state. He has become an increasingly heroic symbol for the oppressed over time as a figure resisting Western hegemony. That is how the pull of a system of destructive idealization begins to work in its early stages. However one might also argue that Bush or Blair too, leaders drawn from parliamentary democratic traditions, may begin to look like ‘sick’ leaders in the way Bion meant; namely as emergent leaders taking up an increasingly ‘sick’ role as they use all their skills disingenuously to convey hope of moral triumph to their electorates in times of high anxiety and great uncertainty. To understand the connection between ‘sick’ or deluded leadership and the death instinct I would pose the following question. What is the most basic unconscious fantasy there is – because such a system turns on unconscious dynamics? Is it the dyad of infant with the mother or is it the parental couple that together create either an included and therefore benign infant or an excluded and therefore envious infant? I tend to think of the basic fantasy as that of the infant with the early mother rather than the primal scene fantasy, which has specific implications. Let me elaborate: The fantasy of the parental couple producing a child is a fantasy that deals in differences. The recognition of diversity requires 451

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identification with plurality. One cannot retreat into a fusion with one parent because of the recognition of a relationship to the other parent. This model lends itself to the recognition of different groups or belief systems because it is ultimately inclusive of differences. When, for instance, representative democracy is reasonably adequately defending the interests of a majority of its electorate, it is by definition a political system which is attempting to incorporate a number of different viewpoints to create a certain consensus. Policy development and decision-making take account of different interests and divergence of view. This open-ended model is close to the life instincts, because one and one can add up to three, not one, though one needs to recognize that democracies are also ideologically driven and risk becoming the relatively unaccountable exercise of power by an elite. In contrast, when thinking about the mother–infant dyad, the main dynamic is one of dependence. Issues of maternal power and infantile dependence come to the fore. This could apply to one party systems, to fundamentalist theocracies or to political systems where an elite dominates and rules a group or groups of people, benevolently or otherwise. All are patterned along the lines of this unconscious fantasy. A protective mother/father/leader will take care of the child/group. This fantasy can generate idealization of the parent and if exploited by parent or child becomes a closed system, which is infantilizing and does not allow for de-identification. Any infant need to de-identify with the mother and the mother also needs to de-identify with the infant to create twoness. Otherwise one plus one makes one as states of mind are manufactured that become fusional instead of illusional. When thinking about the Blair – Bush alliance in the Iraq war it is important to ask whether it was a creative pairing or a narcissistic pairing of this second kind, carrying all the dangers of becoming a selfidealizing, destructive pairing. I mean it in the sense of a mischievous, self-serving pair who become enslaved and hooked on their own sense of power and tap into the supply line of oil as if it were a scarce resource which they must exclusively have possession of, like a greedy baby addictively plugged into an oily breast. If this kind of unconscious systemic pairing between the two nations was operating around the task of diminishing terror it would be difficult to move out of that state of mind as it operates largely at a primitive projective level. Armstrong (1995), when commenting about the influence of systemic aspects of organizational life, suggests that organizational roles are in-acted meaning they are in but not of the role holder. They derive from the form of relatedness and emotional reality of that 452

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organizational system. What he is getting at is that leaders, apart from their own particular pathologies and mind sets, become infected by the emotional reality of organizations they work in, which then sits inside them and strongly influences the way they take up their roles. Blair for instance acts as the personification of a leader offering great certainty. But where does that certainty actually derive from? Cook, the former Labour Foreign Secretary believes that the Blair–Bush alliance is actually symptomatic of a wider problem caused by New Labour’s lack of ideological foundation. By itself, this is inadequate as an explanation of the motivations for going to war against Iraq but its implications are interesting. Suggesting that insufficient grounding of New Labour in a clear policy becomes compensated for in the leader’s style of leadership and results in the search for another ally as a parent type figure is in its way a challenging hypothesis about systemic influences. Furthermore one can view Blair’s increasing reliance on theological conviction in matters of war and joining Bush, a religious neo-conservative leader who basically stole an election victory as having all the ingredients for making a somewhat psychopathic, destructive alliance dressed up to look as though it has an ethical and moral dimension. To my mind it certainly has the makings of a destructive idealization at the unconscious level. PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY AND MORAL LEADERSHIP Libidinal fusion of a group with charismatic, ideological leaders like Bin Laden or narcissistic leaders like Saddam Hussein are obvious examples of monolithic, dictatorial, religious or political systems. But forms of dictatorship certainly do not end in that part of the world because our systems in the West are so-called parliamentary democracies. Fundamentalism calls forth and meets with its mirror image in the form of counter-fundamentalism. One might think of a Republican leader like Bush forcing his hand with his rhetoric ‘you’re either with us or against us’ or ‘this crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a little while’ as exemplifying the kind of convinced rightness which drives fanaticism. In Britain too, in spite of a leader from the Labour Party, a blinkered vision is also discernable. One can argue that over time Blair’s attitude has become too certain and convinced as he has taken an increasingly strident, moralistic approach against supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and then terrorism. The case of Blair’s leadership in the UK during the last year raises very specific questions about leadership within a representative 453

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democracy, the impact of anxiety and the potential for destructive decision-making. In Blair’s eyes, certain knowledge of WMD necessitated Britain’s active involvement in the occupation of Iraq. He argued that in spite of the dissent of a sizeable proportion of the UK community, tough decisions were needed for the security of Britain and the world community which resulted in the occupation of Iraq. Some people would argue that Blair was exercising potent leadership in taking Britain to war with Iraq. Others would argue that he was getting confused between his role as a prime minister responding to a difficult situation and acting upon some personal vision of how to eradicate evil. The role of destructive decision-making based on nonrational thinking becomes crucial if one moves into the murky area where facts are not black or white anymore. How does a government or leader manage the grey area of uncertain facts? All governments work on hypotheses but it is precisely in that area where the unconscious aspects of policy making may come to light. There one may get a sense of other principles at work of a more mythic or even demonizing kind which influences policy decisions. It is legitimate to ask whether Blair, supported by his close advisors, was reaching out towards a frame of external reality and facts or was becoming filled up with convictions without sufficient evidence for undertaking a war. Intelligence sources are often inconclusive, not totally reliable and open to interpretation. Though the evidence was imperfect, Blair seemed convinced of there being WMD and he led the country to war. This kind of thinking could be regarded as bordering on the megalomaniacal if a leader is acting only on the basis of strong personal convictions, which reach so far beyond the credibility of what the facts actually suggest. Anyone in a directorship position within a democracy needs to hold at least two representations in mind, the task and the accountability. If the leader’s convictions become too certain, he/she begins to operate from the ego ideal, rather than from the basis of the ego. In the end the judgement was Blair’s to make, and he decided to invade Iraq thus relieving the uncertainty of the situation by action. But big men can also make big mistakes. A prime minister is always treading a fine line, but particularly so at times of high anxiety. The risk of confusing one’s own unconscious processes and the role accountability are many as any prime minister also relies, in part, on parental identifications, which give a sense of legitimacy and authority in addition to that of constitutional authority. I want to allude to the Narcissus myth as I think it helps in understanding what I think of as ‘the big mistake’. The myth goes 454

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that Narcissus drowned while pursuing his own beautiful reflection in the lake. But Narcissus thought he was pursuing a beautiful youth with whom he had fallen in love. The essence of the story hinges on Narcissus’s confusion. Narcissus thought it was someone else he was pursuing when it was actually himself. Narcissism is about the perverse state of mind in which an individual serves his own pleasure while mistaking it for the general good. I think the narcissistic defences for want of a better term, perhaps they are best described as narcissistic opportunistic defences work in a way that confuse a particular agenda under the rhetoric of pursuit of the collective good. A large proportion of the electorate may then discover to their dismay and they did in this instance, that their leader is working to another ethical agenda – primal conviction with accountability to God rather than the electorate – and they can do little about it. Kampfner (2004) analyses Blair’s leadership style in the context of the world political stage. He points to his being a strategic thinker committed to the Anglo-American alliance. In that way he hopes Britain exerts strong influence as second player in world community issues. Using this line of thinking, Blair has led Britain five times into war in the last six years – in supposed times of peace. Desert Fox was undertaken in Clinton’s time to keep Saddam within his boundaries, thereafter Kosovo, then Sierra Leone, then Afghanistan and recently Iraq. Kampfner suggests that the conviction of taking ‘the right path’ grew stronger with each military intervention. As Blair’s interest in foreign policy developed with each new war, he wrestled with his own theological thinking. He came out on the side of pursuing the interests of the community as a whole as a means of improvement which justifies both warfare and a new style of warfare. The new style is one of a war of alliances against an enemy. Iraq’s behaviour supposedly necessitated a justifiable war to disarm Iraq for the greater good of the peace loving nations, guided by a sense of justice with the intention of implanting Western style democracy in various vantage points in the Middle East. Whilst there are differences of course, Blair’s convinced and convincing style of impassioned leadership ends up looking not too dissimilar to the unquestionable rightness which fuels Islamic or Christian fundamentalists. But to pursue the line of similarity, doing the right thing becomes almost inseparable from doing God’s will. It means getting closer to a sense of timelessness, continuity and indestructibility. It is precisely those potent illusions of indestructibility that are defences against mortality, which become part of a complex of heroism, moralism and 455

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arrogance that are themselves the triad of qualities that are essential aspects of the death drive. The death drive discounts the reality principle and use of objective evidence for the illusion of peace in our time on earth. To me it seems like an idealization at work, rather than a working with ideals. When does fighting for or defending ideals change into an idealization with a more destructive and self-destructive connotation? Again by referring to the exalted spiritual love of the hysteric as a disavowal and withdrawal from genital sexuality, one can begin to develop a theory of ocular occlusion in the political arena. Knowledge of possible WMD became a blindly driven certainty which justified an invasion and both exported and imported a great deal of hatred. I think – and here my conviction becomes apparent – that that state is guided primarily by spiritual conviction without accountability. When leadership, accountability and conviction are not held in close connection to each other, it becomes easy to slip into omnipotence and to use power without accountability. Staying the course of holding onto uncertainty without falling upon primal figures who will offer a delusional certainty is as much a political management of uncertainty as it is a psychic one. Rosenfeld (1987) distinguishes between libidinal and destructive narcissism as two distinct forms of destructiveness, each with their own characteristics. The former is a defence against object relationships while the latter is an attack on the object relationship through envy. Segal (1997) suggests they are really two sides of the same coin, since both destroy the connection to a living object relationship. In this paper I have put the emphasis on libidinal destructiveness, the love of a conviction that has gone completely mad, but of course it also ends up destroying the seeing eye. The fear of another major terrorist attack has mobilized a political climate in the West, marked by extreme anxiety. In such a climate idealizations of symbols of protection provides hope and allays anxiety. Then that so called ‘clinically silent’ organization in the shadows, the ‘death instinct’ solidifies into a utopian and moralistic ideal that can be directed against a demonized enemy to which all manner of projections can be attributed. One might ask in this regard does factional terrorism elicit state terrorism, or does state terrorism engender factional terrorism? The two are intimately connected even if only by the projections each has of the other which keep that superiority inferiority game going. Bion (1962) wrote about a treacherous state of mind filled with ‘the envious assertion of moral 456

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responsibility without any morals’. He meant it in the sense of unconsidered thought, thoughts still waiting for a thinker, which he believed was a ubiquitous, anti-growth principle that is part of social life and embodied in all groups and institutions. The moralizing quality interferes with the growth of the mind and keeps that empty superiority going. Psychoanalytic insights in the social arena can reveal how this moralizing quality gets used to vilify the enemy who then becomes a carrier of the killer instinct in one’s own group. To conclude this paper I want to revisit the theme of passion and conviction which is after all what led me to write about the intangible forces that pulse in the heart. In the first part of the paper I explored an individual dynamic where D was driven and nurtured by a sick and destructive form of love that lead to his death. In the second part, I suggested that a sick love in a group or a society can be thought about in a similar vein. They are like two parts of the same kind of story, one occurring in the individual psyche, the other occurring in the societal psyche. I want to conclude with the thought that living and being alive, the province of the life instincts, could be regarded as a form of unrequited love. The outcome is unpredictable, uncertain, hazardous and possibly just a matter of luck. We go on searching for the objects we need to give a voice to our stories and to shape our destinies for as long as we live. Holding onto this ambiguous situation without getting sidelined requires a resoluteness and type of objectivity that does not rapidly leap into blame. The same variables are at play in the political arena. Our psychic apparatus tends to simplify things for the sake of peace of mind. We then know who to love and who to side with and by implication who to hate and who to aggress. The death drive could be regarded as a form of requited love. The picture is completed though the resolution is premature.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The stimulus for writing this paper was partly D’s doing. His struggles with his inner demons provided the source material for thinking about the death drive in an individual & within groups and society. Elisha Davar, Bloemgracht 185Bel, 1016 KP Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] 457

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REFERENCES Armstrong, D. (1995) ‘The Analytic Object in Organisational Work’, ISPSO Symposium, London. Bion, W. (1961) Experiences in Groups, London: Tavistock. Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience, London: Heinemann. Bion, W.R. (1992) Cogitations, London: Karnac. Bollas, C. (2000) Hysteria, London: Routledge. Brenman, E. (1985) ‘Cruelty and narrow-mindedness’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 66: 273 – 81. Britten, R. (2003) Sex Death and the Superego. Experiences In Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac. Chassegeuet-Smirgel, J. (2001) Unpublished paper given at the Psychoanalytic congress, Nice. Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E. 18. London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents S.E. 21. London: Hogarth. Juergensmeyer, M. (2001) Terror in the Mind of God. The Global Rise of Religious Violence, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kampfner, J. (2004) Blair’s Wars, London: Free Press. Khosrokhavar, F. (2003) Le nouveaux martyrs d’Allah, Paris: Flammarion. Klein, M. (1933) ‘The early development of conscience in the child’, in S. Lorand (ed.) Psycho-analysis Today, New York: Covici-Friede, pp. 149 – 62. Klein, M. (1975) Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, New York: Delacorte. Moll, J. (2001) ‘Unedited extracts from a diary’, Journal of Analytical Psychology 46(1): 155 – 73. NRC Handelsblad 17 April 2004. Wat wil de wereldterrorist? (pp. 37 – 8). Rosenfeld, H. (1984) ‘Narzismus und agression’, in Die Psychoanalytische Haltung. Munich/Vienna: Internationale Psychoanalyse, p. 375. Rosenfeld, H. (1987) Impasse and Interpretation, London: Routledge. Segal, H. (1997) ‘Clinical implications of Melanie Klein’s work: emergence from narcissism’, in J. Steiner (ed.) Psychoanalysis, Literature and War, London: Routledge. Segal, H. (2002) Not Learning From Experience: Psychotic Process in Large Groups. Unpublished paper given at conference. States of Anxiety. Living with Insecurity in a Global Society. The Centre for Psychosocial Studies. University of West England. Spielrein, S. (1912) ‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’, Journal of Analytical Psychology 39: 1994: 155 – 86. Steiner, J. (1982) ‘Perverse relationships between parts of the self in clinical illustration’, International Journal of Psychanalysis 63: 241 – 52. Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats. Pathological Organizations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients, London: Routledge.

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