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Group think; American paranoid collapse

Thread ID: 14520 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-07-13

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TexasAnarch [OP]

2004-07-13 04:52 | User Profile

Group-think in the paranoid collapse stage of America’s historical group fantasy.

Group-think is the psychological process that results when individual members of a group who use a word the way English-speakers use (the first person plural pronoun) “we”, fall under the self-enforced habit of deferring their “I” to what the “we” communicates – that is to say, when the sense of personal identity is voluntarily submerged in the sense of group identity.  Everyone using “we” for themselves, with each other, will generate a feel for the shared understanding of the group by so-doing. Since, in children, this will invariably be mediated by bigger, stronger, more knowledgeable and complete adults, it will eventuate that speaking  “we”, “our”, “us”, “ours” will always thereafter be accompanied by the intuition of the merged feelings of those who have shared the same experiences, the more closely connected to the family the greater the empathy intuited.

 Note:   This way of explaining group-think goes with  Jung’s theory of the four functions of consciousness:  the earlier, more generic functions of feeling and intuition compensate the later developing but more differentiated functions of perception and thought in adults.  The earliest development of consciousness is in the womb already. It has only been recently recognized that nerve cells are sufficiently mylenized after 12 weeks or so in utero  to sustain later “remembered” states, of course without any sense of “I” as distinct from the processes undergone.  Recall of that condition would be a re-cathexis (Freud’s terms for what Jung called “psychic energy”) of what Jung called “participation mystique”:  being “in” the group’s “good graces”, or “under the disapproving eye” of its factotum are evocations of the sense of comfortably sharing,  or being punished in a all-containing fantasized womb-surround.  After birth, this period of our – everyone’s – life becomes the split-off, unconscious basis of the participation mystique – mystical participation.  The universal template of this unconscious bond of human identify in experience is the ritual acting-out of the fantasy of achieving

The Group’s birth (or re-birth).

   This applies also to war – it is a quasi- religious ritual to gain rebirth.  This is “understood” according to the imprinted process each one goes through to get here --  struggling, in the last stages of birth, for breath (acute oxygen deprivation); freedom (encircling, strangling, life-threatening poisonous placenta retained in memory as “First Object”); release; deliverance (from the torture/pain) ; Victory!  Re-accomplishing the heroic act of being born (enduring the most severe of life’s natural traumata).

   It was through spotting the recurrence of tokens of these earliest formative experiences in the language of those involved in actual war “countdown” that led Lloyd deMause to this intellectually revolutionary insight.  Here is his account:

[B]DISCOVERY OF WAR = BIRTH group-fantasy[/B] [url]http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/p84x104.htm[/url] In January of this year (1978* - my add.) I was reading Business Week and noticed the interview with Henry Kissinger in which he explained that he had learned that "it is easier to get into a war than to get out of it" and that the only case in which the U.S. would go to war again was "where there is some actual strangulation" occurring. This imagery struck me as familiar. It particularly reminded me of something Kaiser Wilhelm and those around him kept saying in 1914, that "the Monarchy has been seized by the throat and forced to choose between letting itself be strangled and making a last ditch effort to defend itself against attack and that a "net has been suddenly thrown over our head, and - . . . we squirm isolated in the net."(13) I remembered that when I initially read them I was struck by how inappropriate these feelings were, since Germany was in no way strangling and since England, who was accused of throwing the net over her head, was at that time quite friendly toward Germany. Since I was familiar with the many "encirclement" theories with which nations justified their going to war, I was once again tempted to pass off the imagery as rationalization when I stopped myself and said "No! Both Henry and Wilhelm seem quite sincere here. They are reporting to me that it felt as if they were being strangled and that consequently they had to go to war, and for once I ought to trust their feelings and see where they take me." I once again pulled out my pile of notes, and soon found that this had indeed been the controlling fantasy I had overlooked for so long - - images of being "strangled" and "choked" leaped up from every page I had before me. What was more, the strangulation of war seemed to be caused by a fantasy of being in the birth canal, "unable to draw a breath of relief," "unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel," but nevertheless "against one's will" beginning "the inexorable slide towards war," starting with the inevitable "rupture of diplomatic relations," moving with "naked force" into "the descent into the abyss" and finally "breaking out" into the "war that is the price of one's freedom."

Needless to say, I was still extremely reluctant to accept the reality of such an unlikely, even bizarre group-fantasy as "war as birth." Yet even a provisional emotional acceptance of the basic birth thesis made all the difference in the world to how I proceeded with my research. For one thing, only now could I begin to use my knowledge of the psychoanalytic literature on common birth images in dreams, in which suffocation and claustrophobia always represent being trapped in the birth canal, facts which completely eluded me during the prior year while trying to make sense of the historical material. I had noticed, ...

[B]applied ti C.I.A. conduct[/B]

“Powell’s ‘Solid Intelligence’ From C.I.A. on Iraq Weapons Was Soft, Senate Panel Says.” By David Johnston.
“One day before Secretary of State Colin L Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council,” Johnson writes, referring to the speech in February 2003 presenting claims it had mobile biological weapons laboratories, “a Defense Department analyst warned the agency against relying on some of the most significant informants, such as an Iraqi defector, code named Curveball, whom Mr. Powell planned to cit.
“”I went through the speech,” an unidentified military intelligence office, an expert in biological warfare, later told the Senate Intelligence Committee, which had quoted him in its report, “and I thought, my gosh, we have got – I have got to go on record and make my concerns known.” “But the deputy chief or the agency’s Iraqi Task Force told him “Let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say and that the Powers that Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about,” – in an e-mail message to obtained by the committee.”

[B]GROUP-THINK IN PARANOID COLLAPSE LEADING TO WAR TRANCE[/B]

The boys at Langley are certainly not the only ones in group war-trance state. All America has sunk into the rabbit hole of re-birth craze. his is the final, “upheaval” stage of the American historical group fantasy:

[url]http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/p172x200.htm[/url] [B]Summary[/B]

(H)istorical group-fantasies are defined as those shared fantasies which are [1] massive displacements onto the public stage of feelings connected with the individual's search for love, [2] allowing people to use groups to relieve shared private feelings and [3] to act out and defend against re-pressed desires, rages and prohibitions which have their origins in childhoods common to the group, [4] using the same ego mechanisms of splitting, condensation, reaction formation, etc. as in personal fantasy formation, only [5] forged in public discussion [6] out of materials provided by recent historical events, [7] distributing group roles by psychoclass, and [8] producing group dynamics which can lead to a breakdown of group-fantasy, a period of paranoid collapse, and an attempted restitution through the formation of a group-delusion, [9] which result in a group-trance state which may require discharge in violent historical action. ….

[B]LAST TWO SECTIONS [/B]

..” [8] "producing group dynamics which can lead to a breakdown of group fantasy, a period of paranoid collapse, and an attempted restitution through the formation of a group-delusion": Since group-fantasies require that the fantasy-leader be under continuous attack for his possession of the group, and since the leader's attempts to counter these attacks through magical and heroic efforts to prop up his image are doomed to fail, every group-fantasy eventually reaches a "collapse" stage where the leader is experienced as being extremely weak, unable to nurture the country, and in-creasingly powerless to contain the growing rage and anxiety within, the group. This collapse of ego defenses releases previously bound material at all psychosexual levels, a condition within group development which parallels that which occurs in preparanoid individuals just prior to the formation of their paranoid delusion.(10) In preparanoid individuals it often happens that some new life situation removes an important authoritarian "leader" figure from the person's emotional life, someone who previously had served to direct, organize and give meaning to his or her life. This lack of direction and containment produces a collapse of structure in the individual - a collapse from which the new paranoid delusion itself is in effect an attempt at restitution.(11) This collapse of structure can be looked at productively from any one of a number of theroretical positions: as a collapse of ego functions (Freud's disintegration anxiety), a collapse of self structure (Kohut's dread of self-dissolution), collapse of alpha-function (Bion's dispersal of contact-barrier), or collapse of womb-surround (Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix stage 2). With historical groups, this "paranoid collapse" of an important group-fantasy produces an historical moment of extreme anxiety, narcissistic rage and confusion. Since one function of historical group-fantasies is to redistribute anxieties through historical role-taking, the collapse of the effective fantasy threatens both to release id and superego elements which it had previously bound and to produce a threat of total disintegration of the self. Objectless paranoid fears, often with religious apocalyptic overtones, sweep through the group. During this "paranoid collapse" period, fears of sexual license and of political anarchy appear most prominently; oral, anal and oedipal conflicts long hidden erupt into the public consciousness and language of public discourse; and rebirth and millennial fantasies proliferate. These periods of "paranoid collapse" - during which group-fantasies of anarchy, sexual license and rebirth emerge in full bloom - are perhaps most clearly expressed in Reformation and early modern times. For instance, during the English Reformation, the collapse of Catholic mythology led to widespread fears that changes in ritual would produce widespread bouts of wild "beast-like carnal liberty" by anabaptists, anarchic violence by sacramentarians (many of whom were in fact pacifists) and so on.(12) Similarly, the English Civil War was prefaced by fears of the outbreak of adultery and incest, including millenarian rebirth fantasies among Fifth Monarchists and others,(13) the French Revolution was preceded by a paranoid "Great Fear,"(14) the American Revolution was prefaced by groundless conspiratorial fantasies on both sides, and so on. As I shall describe later in detail, every violent group-delusion in history is preceded by a "paranoid collapse" period, whether it is called a Popish Plot, a Gallic Peril, a Yellow Peril, Alien and Sedition Acts or a Communist purge. All perform the function of concretizing the objectless rages and anxieties of the group after the collapse of the group-fantasy During this collapse period, groups often split into opposing camps even more hostile to each other than usual. Each sub-group claims the other is the real threat to order, hierarchy and authority, projects all id material onto the other group and itself identifies with the moralistic superego. At other times, minority millennial groups, often overtly bizarre ….

Like the formation of an individual delusion, the formation of a group-delusion is always restitutional. Often, it is formed during one dramatic incident, one which might be termed a "moment of group-psychotic insight,"(16) when specific concrete enemies are suddenly perceived as the cause for one's present painful condition. The psychoanalyst O. A. Will has described this moment in the formation of the individual's paranoid delusion in these terms: 187 As communication fails, isolation increases, and the sufferer finds himself caught in a nightmare, driven by a feeling of urgency to make sense of the incomprehensible with which he is involved. He seeks a simple formula to make all clear, and if he is unfortunate he may elaborate the paranoid solution with its grandiosity, apportioning of blame, and chronic reformulation of the past and present to defend and protect a "system" that will reduce anxiety.(17) This "moment of group-psychotic insight" can occur over a long period of time with each of the delusional elements being worked out by different delegate groups(18) which have split off to develop the group-delusion. Alternately, the delusion can be formed rather quickly, particularly when the group has long been in search of a delusional solution to its condition of collapse. Assassinations, for instance, are favorite organizers of group-delusions. Whether they lead to war, like "the shot at Sarajevo," or to internal persecution, like the assassination of Vom Rath which produced Kristallnacht and intensified the persecution of Jews, assassinations occurring after an extended period of paranoid collapse produce the precise feeling of "Aha! I knew the enemy was real and not just in my head" which is necessary to justify the respective group-delusions of "Germany really is being strangled by enemies" and "Jews really are blood poisoners." Although the dramatic external event appears to trigger the delusional solution-as, for instance, when the burning of the Reichstag was fantasized to be a conspiracy and was used to unify Germany under Hitler-the actual formation of the group- 188 delusion precedes the moment of psychotic insight. These group dynamics explain the hitherto unexplained fact that when the political psychologists Holsti and North(20) constructed a "paranoia index" and conducted a content analysis of German communications before World War I, they found that the paranoid content reached its apex at the very moment when the decision to go to war was made - that is, at the moment of psychotic in-sight when the group-delusion was formed The anxiety on their graph then declined sharply, for the world "made sense" again once the external enemy was identified and the decision was made to fight, even though the actual war had yet to break out. However disastrous the next four years of carnage were to prove, they were less threatening than the terrible feelings of internal collapse and objectless rage which preceded them.

[9] "which result in a group-trance state which may require discharge in violent historical action." The more I have studied historical group-delusions in the past decade and tried to empathize with the individuals I followed through my documents, the more I have realized that something very strange was going on inside myself during this study. As I worked with primary documents, my head began to feel stuffed with cotton, my memory seemed to dull, and I began to realize that I felt exceptionally passive in the face of problems I was trying to solve - as though there were something in the study of group-delusions, particularly war, which would forever elude me, and which put this subject in a class by itself among all the problems I had ever encountered. I began to feel as though I were in a trance, a state I was somehow sharing with those I was studying. I began to suspect that people in the midst of group-delusions are themselves in a group-trance, in which normal rules of logic are suspended.

Saul Bellow once captured this group-trance feeling rather well. When trying to think about the problem of war, Bellow observed, he seemed to become very drowsy.. wakefulness, for some mysterious reason, comes and goes... Sometimes I suspect that I am myself under a frightful hypnotic influence - I do and do not know the evils of our times. I experience or suffer this alternate glowing and fading in my own person, and I see that others, too, are subject to it. I am familiar with the history of World War I and of the Russian Revolution. I know Auschwitz and the Gulag, Biafra and Bangladesh, Buenos Aires and Beirut, but when I come back to facts anew I find myself losing focus. Then I begin against reason to suspect the influence of a diffusing power - a demonic will that opposes our understanding. I am forced to consider... whether we do not go about lightly chloroformed.(21) The group-trance contains all the primary process attributes of individual delusional thinking, using many of the mechanisms of what the Kleinian school calls the paranoid-schizoid position, but with the illogical thinking confirmed even further by group consensus. This is why group craziness is so much more powerful - and less studied - than individual craziness. Just a few of the more common rules of group-trance thinking include:

(a) Opposites never contradict: Jews can be simultaneously despised weaklings and all-powerful poisoners without the one image affecting the other; Russia can be crumbling and ineffective but at the same time at the peak of its power and expansionist desires; one can believe, as we all believe today, that war occurs regularly throughout history and that another war is bound to reoccur soon, while, at the same time, planning our lives around the axiom that war in our lifetimes is impossible. Opposites which, in normal conscious thinking, would modify each other, in trance thinking merely exist side by side.

(b) "Mistakes" proliferate: When, for instance, Truman permitted MacArthur to continue north in Korea despite Chinese warnings that they would respond militarily, it was called a "mistake," despite voluminous evidence that "mistakes" of this kind are motivated. Munich is a "mistake," Pearl Harbor is a ''mistake,'' the Bay of Pigs is a "mistake," Vietnam is a "mistake" -none are desires.

(c) Two plus two equals zero: The larger the risk, the less it is consciously felt in the group-trance. As Eichmann put it, "One hundred dead is a catastrophe. Five million dead is a statistic." When President Kennedy told us all over TV that he was turning down Khrushchev's offer to exchange Cuban missiles for our obsolete Turkish missiles, and im-plied he would soon be forced to invade Cuba even though a hundred million Americans might be killed by Russian missiles, we all nodded our approval from the depths of our group trance, certain that this figure was too large to be personally meaningful.

(d) Personal embarrassments become substitutes for policy: President Kennedy's way of summing up the American relationship to Russia at the beginning of his presidency was: "If Krushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it's all over.'' In return, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Krushchev admitted Russia indulged in the same kind of crazy "personalized" thinking: When I asked the military advisers if they could assure me that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor.. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians would accuse us of appeasement or weakness. So l said to myself: "To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles." That is what happened. And so now I am being reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians. They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?(22) The "personalized" reactions of the group-trance state all assume that the world outside the group is suddenly full of others who for some strange reason are out to humiliate the nation, and especially its leader. In fact, foreign policy during group-trance periods is so concerned with humiliation that the search for the group-psychotic insight is usually conducted as a search for a humiliating other." This is a result of two group processes during the collapse stage. In the first, the leader feels his group's growing rage toward himself, including continuous attacks on his self-esteem, but denies that it comes from his own group and displaces it instead to the outside world: "The American people are not trying to humiliate me - the Russians are." A careful analysis of the accusations which leaders imagine outside groups are making of them usually reveals how little disguised many of them are from those current-ly being made by members of his own group. In the second process, paralleling the first, both the group and its fantasy leader, facing a breakdown of defensive structure, a disintegration of the self, experience extreme narcissistic rage, and become humiliation-prone. The "humiliating outsider" is simply the critical, accusing, persecutory super-ego's response, projected onto others: "American values are falling apart and we are nothing but a mass of selfish desires-the Russians see how low we have fallen and are trying to humiliate us."

(e) Nothing is real, everything is fantasy: So powerful is the derealization process of a group-trance that I have never been able to find any nation anywhere in history going to war which bothered to estimate the number of dead and injured expected to result from their actions. The dead are quite unreal to the planners, who are operating out of their delusional trance. During the Vietnam War, for instance, the Pentagon never once tried to make an accurate estimate of total civilian casualties, even of the civilians we were supposed to be protecting. When in 1966 a Harvard student asked Secretary of Defense McNamara, who was famous as a "real numbers whiz," how many civilians had been killed in Vietnam, he admitted he simply had no idea.

The function of dead people in the group-trance state is to confirm the internal violence of the group-delusion. If, for some reason, not enough people are dying to match the internal fantasy, something seems amiss. As Nixon put it when the number of American casualties had dropped sharply toward the end of the Vietnamese War: "American casualty figures in Vietnam had been reaching new lows. I knew that these reductions might be a ploy on the part of the Communists to make escalating the fighting that much more difficult for me."

(f) Historical amnesia is the rule: In a century in which 100 million people have been killed by wars, and on a planet where there is currently destructive power equal to 10,000 tons of TNT for every man, woman and child, the mere suggestion that there may be more destruction on the horizon is regularly met by blank stares and suspicions of mental imbalance. Historical amnesia is one of the first symptoms of a group-trance. If wars and revolutions always come as a surprise, that fact may have less to do with the difficulty of predicting human violence than it does with the fact that there are presently more studies on the library shelf on jewelry than on wa r- so pervasive is our need to deny even the very existence of our group-delusions.

(g) Goals disappear, action becomes irresistible: One of the most bizarre results of group-trance thinking is that no war, revolution or other group-delusion is ever begun with a goal of what is expected to be accomplished by the action One's logical assumption that any war leader actually has a plan for what to do when the war is over and won is quite mistaken. Even though wars and revolutions are often supposed to have economic causes, no group has ever drawn up a document setting out the economic consequences of their intended action. If it had, it would never have proceeded, since group-delusions are highly uneconomical ways of getting what you really want. The action itself is in fact the goal, not the consequences of the action. When the Japanese ignored their intelligence reports, which unanimously concluded that the U.S. would win in any conflict with Japan; when the Germans ignored their intelligence reports, which said that fighting Russia as well as England would result in German defeat; when President Johnson ignored CIA reports saying that his massive bombing of North Vietnam would not bring victory, they were not just "being optimistic." Their goal was the violence and emotional release of action itself, not its possible consequences in terms of any tangible goals which could have been considered rational by even the most ardent apologist. In a group-trance, action becomes irresistible in order to carry out delusional motives. Literally crazy thinking-which allows such notions as "preventative wars" or "better dead than Red"-becomes the rule.

(h) Violence is imperative: Because the enemy, internal or external, serves as the repository of projections during the group-delusional stage, the impulse to action implies the need to wipe out the carriers of these projected feelings. All the objectless rage of the paranoid collapse phase is now at the service of the organized group-delusion, and the enemy is now seen as worth less than vermin, existing only to be killed. The official enemy, of course, is not the only victim-the group also indirectly kills off many of its own id-representatives, its youth, who represent itself in the life-phase when it was most sexual and most aggressive. Oddly enough, the group-delusion is so powerful that the successful outcome of the group's violence, an outcome which obviously depends on power factors alone, is always seen by the group as confirming the success of the moral values of the group-fantasy itself. Thus, American success or failure in "wars against Communism," like Korea and Vietnam, is thought to indicate the success or failure of American liberal values; the various victories of ancient Athens or Sparta somehow are supposed to prove the worth of their differing political systems; the defeat of the Spanish Armada indicates the greatness of Elizabethan values; the defeat of the American South by the North indicates the moral superiority of abolitionism; and so on. All military triumphs are rationalized by reference to the courage and superiority of the "winning" group-fantasy systems, but in fact all come down to accept-ing that might makes right and to denying the premise that all violent actions in fact represent the failure rather than the triumph of real human values. In summary, the concept of historical group-fantasies includes a theory of history as consisting of evolving cycles of attempts by individuals to form large groups organized around shared fantasy systems, based on displacements of personal psychosexual conflicts from successively higher psychoclasses, each cycle culminating in a paranoid collapse of the group-fantasy and the acting out of a group-delusion to relieve shared feelings of inner chaos and rage. These cycles take place because of the group's psychohistorical dynamics, in a sphere of the psyche independent from that of individual neurosis, but drawing upon its content. The independence of historical group-fantasy stages from those of individual neurosis produces the strange feeling of discontinuity between the public and private sphere that is reflected in such discussions as "Were the Germans really sick in following Hitler?" or "Did America go crazy during the Vietnam war?" The same population of individuals - with the same levels of maturity, personal psychic distress, and rates of psychosis-at one point in a group-fantasy cycle can manage successfully to bind their anxieties under a "strong" fantasy-leader, and several years later, without their individual psychodynamics or "personal health" changing at all, they can march off to war. We "go crazy together" in group-fantasy cycles of from a few to a few dozen years in length, in accordance with psychohistorical group dynamics, quite independent of cycles of personal distress, of changes in childrearing patterns, or of any other criteria. Unlike the "natural therapy" which I believe goes on within historical families, as successive generations of parents attempt to do a better job than their own parents had done in raising their children, I do not believe that going through successive group-fantasy cycles is therapeutic. No one ever seems to learn anything from wars and revolutions, and acting out group-delusional projects seems to leave the personality structure as immature as before. In fact, group-delusional violence is actually traumatic to the individual, to the family, and to the parents' ability to pass on a more mature psychic structure to the next generation. History can therefore be viewed as a race between the therapy of family evolution and the traumas of group-delusional violence. The empirical evidence for my theory that historical groups repeatedly lurch from stable group-fantasy to paranoid collapse to group-delusion under the group dynamics which I have described will be the task of the remaining sections of this paper. First, however, I will introduce a new technique which I believe can be useful in the task of revealing the specific historical group-fantasies hidden in the mass of empirical material available to the psychohistorian: Fantasy Analysis.