[FRA:] Nationalism and Symbiotic Fantasy

[Orion Anderson]

LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE NEWSLETTER


NATIONALISM AS SYMBIOTIC FANTASY

 


Psychologists recently have debated whether or not there is such a thing as
a "symbiotic phase:" a time of development when the infant imagines that he
or she is fused with the mother. Perhaps they are looking for love in all
the wrong places. In the United States, we sing about America the beautiful
with its spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountains and fruited
plains. We sing about the land that we love with its mountains, prairies and
oceans white with foam.

Freud stated that originally the ego includes everything and only later
separates off an external world from itself. Perhaps when people identify
with their nations they have recovered the "all-embracing ego feeling." One
doesn't need to look to childhood to study symbiotic fantasy. It is present
in the world in which we live. This fantasy constitutes the ground of our
being.

When we bind with our nation and its national life, we plug into the
delusion of an omnipotent, symbiotic connection to the world. So powerful is
this fantasy-so deeply are we identified with it-that (like fish in an
ocean) we barely perceive that we are living within it. When CNN beams down
at us at the airline terminal, we don't conceive of what we see and hear as
something separate from ourselves. That is us beaming down.

In The Nation: A Study in Ideology and Fantasy, Richard Koenigsberg reflects
upon the meaning of the most powerful political ideology of our time. What
are the sources of this ideology? Why are we so certain that nations exist?
Why are we willing to kill and die for these entities? One doesn't need to
look to childhood: We may study ourselves by interrogating the meaning of
those fantasies that we have projected into the world.

 The Fantasy of Oneness <http://www.ideologiesofwar.com/gfx/tn_s.gif> NOW
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THE NATION:
A Study in Ideology and Fantasy

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Reviews of THE NATION: A Study in Ideology and Fantasy

"A truly bold and provocative treatise. The nation is seen as the symbolic
embodiment of a communal narcissistic ego, cleansed of the 'badness'
introduced by a particular class of persons within a nation's boundaries
whose 'removal' by whatever means is easily rationalized if goodness is to
be restored. The interpretations are intriguing and illuminating, the
scholarship creative and careful."
    -Political Psychology

"I wish to acknowledge the remarkable research of Koenigsberg."
    -Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel in the Int'l. Review of Psychoanalysis

 The Fantasy of Oneness <http://www.ideologiesofwar.com/gfx/fo_s.gif> NOW
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THE FANTASY OF ONENESS AND THE STRUGGLE TO SEPARATE: Towards a Psychology of
Culture

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ON ORDERING CLICK HERE

"A very thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the interplay of unconscious
phantasy and cultural phenomena."
    -Thomas Ogden, M.D., author, The Matrix of the Mind

"I was excited and very impressed by this fascinating book."
    -Frances Tustin, author, Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients

"I am very much intrigued by Koenigsberg's psychoanalytic theory of culture.
I find a strong element of truth in what he has expressed. I want to
emphasize the great pleasure I experienced in reading this book and finding
it so thought-provoking."
    -Bernard L. Pacella, M.D., former President, American Psychoanalytic
Association