Psychoanalysis and Social Paranoia:

            B. Paranoia and Society:

    There are several issues in psychoanalysis that hinder it from being automatically applicable to social phenomena or events. The most obvious is that in the analysis of the individual the unconscious, implicitly, changes both the content and the formation of consciousness, in different ways. In social phenomena, the unconscious becomes an instrument for creating an implicit commonality between diverse groups of individuals; it does that by explicit means and not by implicit means. In most successful social conflicts the conflict is totally clear but consciousness is expressed in innuendos. Those innuendoes could be false interpretations, applying old innuendos to the new events turning them less specidic and banal but acceptable to the public. I chose this example from so many like it because it is closer to what this post relates to. The Soviet Union, when Russia was once before, was known for blatant illegal handling of the opposition to its regime. The Western countries- for their own interest in defaming Russia's unlawful and criminal means- to resist its resistances were using those features 'not as proof of the badness of Russia' but as evidence of their better social conditions. Thus communism is bad and capitalism is good. When Russia turned around and became a capitalist country as it is now the same old hate     Russia continued. Thus, the Western World. Social hate continues. This is the nature of social phenomena that we interpret in terms of knowledge of individual phenomena, they are 'mistakenly' analytically or psychiatrically interpreted. 

                                A Russian Plane fell in the desert and one of the passengers was identified as the senior to Prigozhn. PrigosZhn, who was claimed by the best military expert and intelligence as someone who intended to invade Mosco to topple Putin with his twenty-five thousand mercenaries. Before even reaching the sight of the fallen plane all the commentators were talking about the plot against Putin,and Putin's knwn vendictive criminality. There was no mentioning that the sight of the fallen plane was not reached yet, thus every thing said was not taken as a supusitions, not even as a possibility; but were take as FACTS.

            In individual paranoia what is not evident is a morbid thought or opinion that looks for confirmation. Paranoia makes that possible despite the flimsy justifications declared. A paranoid wife would find in her husband's changing of ties evidence that he unknowingly gives of having an affair with a woman and even a specific woman the wife hates. Individual paranoia is meticulous in the way a subtle jump from an issue to a far fetched but realted assumption.

    In social paranoia, the political organization works on social masses to make them individually ready, even eager to fill the gap in the logic of the conclusions of the "pre-formulated" conclusion.d that were not only already made but paranoid. Nothing is more clear than spreading a rumor to create  mass paranoia (In one event in the sixties a rumor was spread in the Middle East- that a specific country is using gas to render women infertile so certain people would disappear and be repalce in Mass to occupy that vacacncy.) The issue is that mass paranoia does not depend on creating a convincing case, but on activating hostility based on a true wish to practically reject any thing contrary. Individual paranoia is a strange but a healing remidy to a painful suspition, while social or group paranoia is a wound peircing act to keep an almost healed narcissitic wound falre up again.

        This means that an analyst must carefully mind the temptation of using an interpretation of individual paranoia in explaining a  paranoiac social attitude. The causion here is not just to do a good job. It is to be ready for a better job after the one awaiting clarification. the paranoid woman need therapy, the paranoid scociety is hanging on falsitied thus is subject to continue that falsity falsity with other falsity and paranoia becomes fact and reality.

 Psychoanalysis and Social Paranoia:

            A. Common Observations:

    There are several issues in psychoanalysis that hinder it from being automatically applicable to social phenomena or events. The most obvious is that in the analysis of the individual the unconscious, implicitly, changes both the content and the formation of consciousness, in different ways. In social phenomena, the unconscious becomes an instrument for creating an implicit commonality between diverse groups of individuals; it does that by explicit means and not by implicit means. In most successful social conflicts the conflict is totally clear but consciousness is expressed in innuendos. Those innuendoes could be false interpretations, applying old innuendos to the new events turning them less specidic and banal but acceptable to the public. I chose this example from so many like it because it is closer to what this post relates to. The Soviet Union, when Russia was once before, was known for blatant illegal handling of the opposition to its regime. The Western countries- for their own interest in defaming Russia's unlawful and criminal means- to resist its resistances were using those features 'not as proof of the badness of Russia' but as evidence of their better social conditions. Thus communism is bad and capitalism is good. When Russia turned around and became a capitalist country as it is now the same old hate     Russia continued. Thus, the Western World. Social hate continues. This is the nature of social phenomena that we interpret in terms of knowledge of individual phenomena, they are 'mistakenly' analytically or psychiatrically interpreted. 

                                A Russian Plane fell in the desert and one of the passengers was identified as the senior to Prigozhn. PrigosZhn, who was claimed by the best military expert and intelligence as someone who intended to invade Mosco to topple Putin with his twenty-five thousand mercenaries. Before even reaching the sight of the fallen plane all the commentators were talking about the plot against Putin,and Putin's knwn vendictive criminality. There was no mentioning that the sight of the fallen plane was not reached yet, thus every thing said was not taken as a supusitions, not even as a possibility; but were take as FACTS.

            In individual paranoia what is not evident is a morbid thought or opinion that looks for confirmation. Paranoia makes that possible despite the flimsy justifications declared. A paranoid wife would find in her husband's changing of ties evidence that he unknowingly gives of having an affair with a woman and even a specific woman the wife hates. Individual paranoia is meticulous in the way a subtle jump from an issue to a far fetched but realted assumption.

    In social paranoia, the political organization works on social masses to make them individually ready, even eager to fill the gap in the logic of the conclusions of the "pre-formulated" conclusion.d that were not only already made but paranoid. Nothing is more clear than spreading a rumor to create  mass paranoia (In one event in the sixties a rumor was spread in the Middle East- that a specific country is using gas to render women infertile so certain people would disappear and be repalce in Mass to occupy that vacacncy.) The issue is that mass paranoia does not depend on creating a convincing case, but on activating hostility based on a true wish to practically reject any thing contrary. Individual paranoia is a strange but a healing remidy to a painful suspition, while social or group paranoia is a wound peircing act to keep an almost healed narcissitic wound falre up again.

        This means that an analyst must carefully mind the temptation of using an interpretation of individual paranoia in explaining a social attitude. The causion here is not just to do a good job. It is to be ready for a better job after the one awaiting clarification. the paranoid woman need therapy, the paranoid scociety is hanging on falsitied thus is subject to continue that falsity falsity with other falsity and paranoia becomes fact and reality.

                                            _____________________________

I call the reaction to the falling Russian Plane (which is supposed to be sabotaged by Putin (to kill , his presumed enemy???), mass paranoia. A plane was carrying some shady Russian military person who died instantaneously. Before his body was extracted from the scene of the crash there were a few "Certain" accusations and interpretations about Putin planning the whole thing to get rid of that person. The issue is that neither the scene of the crash was reached, nor the unseen sight of the crash could insinuate a causative link between the accident and the people in the crash. However, just becoming a Westerner for a few moments  is not enough to make the the drop of a plane from the sky a plot. The illogic or the arguement makes it a paranoid issue.

I paranoia-as clincal practitioners in the field of mental functions-we know paranoia from the delusion that serves the interpretaion ("he looked at her and coughed because he was nervous about seeing standing next to his wife). So the place she was became to core of a delusion of conspiracy). 

B.

 

The New Frontier of Psychoanalysis:

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Current Politics:

            This post is not interesting to clinically oriented psychoanalysts, but -I believe- it is interesting to the analysts who appreciate its method of deductive and inductive thinking in eliciting out matters implicit in other issues. This way of thinking is the way we psychoanalysts lead to revealing the unconscious to our patients. This too is what a good political leader does for his followers. But knowing from personal experience that such an attitude takes years and years of maturation in both the analyst and the political followers; whether the analysts are politically inclined (like several left-wing analysts in France in the fifties and sixties), or some politicians who were analytically trained. The idea- as I noticed it in myself was subtle and neither my leftist leanings guided my practice, nor my practice made me understand social matters differently. Only years after I stopped my clinical work did I realize that the link was there in me but in disguise. As I politically refused the standard political explications of the links between causes and effects with disguised implicit moral explanations, I rejected the standardized ‘explanations’ of psychopathology based on ‘sensible’ understandings of repression and resistance. The link between dialectics in history and politics like Hegel’s dialectics supported by Marx- Engels explained the rule of social evolving and advancing, Freud's principle of interpretation\ construction\reconstruction was the way the patient gets rid of his psychoneuroses.

        What added to my conviction of the link between psychoanalysis and Marxism is subtle, but also the glaring misunderstanding of the regular ‘leftists’ that imperialism (the end of the European empire) is no longer a reality but only fiction of a degenerating old narcissism. Communists did not realize that while capitalism was dying communism was also dying with it. The only classical communist country surviving till now is North Korea, and the only glorifying capitalism, as the way it was till the end of the wars in Asia, is the disintegrating USA as both an idea and a country. .On the other side of the equation, analysts remained fixated on some old analytic concepts like Unconscious, Repression, and the Libidinal explanation of narcissism. What is unconscious in psychical life is mechanisms, not some things, and what is repressed is not an urge but a meaning, and narcissism (as in the myth itself) is a confusion of the duality of the subject's I/Me. Very little has been said about the death of psychoanalysis because most (if not all) psychoanalysts considered psychoanalysis to be a profession of psychotherapy and did not realize that Freud -himself- was a product of a European leap into learning about the human subject as a sperate existence from his old conventionalities.

       From the Psychoanalytic to the Political:

         The end of something is the birth of something usually better than the one demised. I am saying that because around the time a chose psychoanalysis as a career, the world was adjusting to no more World Wars, especially with the European empire already collapsing. As such, a great deal of historical data as facts showed within the psychological makeup of humans, including the previously revered leaders. Thus, seeing psychoanalysis in a none clinical context made me realize the power of that theory in opening a very wide vista in regard to almost everything humanly related. Some years ago I read a book on Einstein's Wars and the European scientific societies of great thinkers that were there just before the burst of the wars, thinkers (if not greater) who were around him at that time. It actually made me wonder if there is an unobvious link between wars-local or international- and social leaps: to answer this question we have to acknowledge that there are unobvious connections (unconscious!/)  between major changes in the different fields of knowledge and bursts of destructiveness in the human race. Within what I knew of previous empires a question forced itself on me: is aggression a precondition of advancement?  The answer I have is that aggression is instrumental in getting rid of the present to facilitate the emergence of the new and better. The examples of that are many and easy to identify. So, those scientists that came along with Einstein have actually made his aggressive assault on 'gravity and space' change us to the extent of making aggression an old sense of false distinction. In better words: we can look at history as a dynamic entity that deals with the same individual psychology but on a larger scale of time, space, and elements of the dynamic setup. The problem is to make a distinction between psychoanalysis emerging from the discoveries of individuals and emerging from the 'not individual in the individual (social morality is different in its purpose from individual morality).

An example is quite needed now. 

A study done by a French psychologist in the mid-fifties of last century showed that the sample of prostitutes she interviewed were less educated than the general population of Paris females. They had typical lower middle-class standards of morality and they considered prostitution "just a profession"  that has a social function. They were slightly less educated than French society in general, but not in other aspects related to basic morality or social ethics.  The main difference was in the degree of social responsibility to their groups: they were more dedicated to their comradery than two smaller but valid groups of the main French society. The interesting thing in that study is the higher social devotion of the prostitutes to each other, than women who were not part of an identified social group. The morality of the distinctive group was higher than the same morality of individuals. This study showed that psychical issues in the individual take an additional value when that same person is in a group of the same background. 

            Therefore, psychoanalysis remains the same for groups and individuals with the possibility of a difference to serve an additional psychological demand imposed by the group. Therefore, psychoanalysis as the theory of the subject is valid in dealing with an individual or a group of individuals who get some of their narcissism from their group. As such, the psychoanalyst could-just could- apply the theory of the subject on the subject in any group formation. Politics creates different social formations. As marxism could apply to different socioeconomic formations. The best proof of that is what constitutes social change and if it has any resemblance to psychotherapy?  

 

Interpretation and the loss of Reality.

        I had in mind that I should, by now, end my participation in the ongoing discussions regarding psychoanalysis and psychopolitics too. However, people and events keep going on and around, making it easy to go back on my decision. This time it was a neighbor who watches with me the news of the world (four-sometimes five TV Channels). We disagree categorically on the war in Ukraine. Because of his personal experiences, it is almost natural for him to hate Russia and not because of his love for Ukraine. This is my reason to go back on the decision to stop my blog. I point out to my neighbor and still do, that Western Program Commentators- announce and present wish fulfillment meanings to what they announce and deliver. The most blatant example is Russia's kidnapping of Ukrainian kids, separating them from their families, and maybe indoctrinating them too. He was never able to give me a reason why Russia will smear her reputation (in this war in particular) by doing something stupid like that. He could not admit that Russia took advantage of having kids separated from their kin because of the war, protected, fed, and dressed up the kids well, and made a show of giving them back to their families. Russia could have denied completely having any children to return, or just made them victims of hateful treatment.

        This is the reason I come back and deal with something that could look very unrelated to my neighbor’s NEED to create a negative opinion of Russia. How could a person Interpret something to believe in after, as if it came to his mind only later and became part of the real world? How beg a person, erases the distinction between perception and opinion? Once again, how do we use interpretation as information that deserves to be considered real issues, and has the power of evidence?

…………………………………………………………..

        I was watching an old movie entitled “The Nuremberg Trials”. The issue was how people make beliefs first and then get convinced of their own creation as if their interpretations stem from reality. and their conviction is not a belief but an idea. In those cases, I think the problem is in how we reach interpretations that are turned into facts, reality, truth, and convictions. The issue in that movie is exactly this: are the Germans guilty of crimes committed against the Jews for convictions that originally stemmed from interpretations and not from facts? Or how political leaders prepare the field of political opinion to become a field of interpretative products. The easy way out of this dilemma is not to start from the beginning but from the second point after the beginning. Start from the success of Jews and their strong adherence to certain undeclared rules, in addition to hard work and effective mentality. If the first point is not properly identified, then the Jews’ success becomes material for interpretation. Some of those interpretations were enough to create hate and doubts of the Jews which ended up with something that cannot be understood even if the interpretations prove to be right.

Interpretation in Psychoanalysis:

        I will get to the second point without groundwork because it is common knowledge, at least to psychoanalysts. The first conceptual notion in psychoanalysis is that any human manifestation (like dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue, even war) is not just what they are, but what they carry within their structure of additional meaning. Freud’s first book was “The Interpretation of Dreams”. He recognized that the dream says something, thus, it permits interpretation. A dream is a scene in which everyday life is presented in a way that says something more that is integrated into its details and is expressed metaphorically (He is a rock…strong like a rock), or within a metonymy (Like Gibraltar). Interpreting with metonymy and metaphor in mind. They are the basis of psychological life in general, therefore, we can only understand matters if we interpret them. As a psychoanalyst, I listened to the patient trying to understand by interpreting what he experiences and failing in making sense of “nonsense” (she was unable to reach sexual climax because of such and such …etc., when it was not sexual satisfaction but pleasing a hateful mate…. because of other nonsexual traits). Psychological life is a state of mind, body, and life that is expressed in metonymic or metaphoric moods.    

        The question to formulate and try to answer in this regard is why we are susceptible to coming up with the wrong interpretations at the most significant points in our psychological life. The answer is the fact that the wrong answer is inaccuracy metaphors and metonymies. Psychosomatic inability to swallow could be of the wrong treatment or certain foods, but also to swallow ideas demands. A good psychoanalyst is one who detects that the patient is misconstruing his consciousness by adopting the wrong metaphor to express it.  

        We can just cut it short by emphasizing that psychological life is a jumble of metonymies and metaphors, i.e., interpretations. In other words, if it was not for the gift of language we would not have had psychoneuroses or psychoses, but would not have had music and songs, love and hate (I mean Ukraine and Russia).

        Going back to psychoanalysis, interpretation is the replacement of perception because it has the advantage of being wrong but with no obvious correct substitute for things. What would a dying empire-the European-do with its narcissism (its image)?

        It creates hateful countries, leaders, issues, and as the president and manager of NATO said bombastically (our)Values that the OTHER only has their opposite: we cannot be alike, or we will lose our minds. The same thing was created by Germans to explain (justify) the war. The Germans had a reason to want war (the Versailles treaty). They must have an enemy to wage war. They INTERPRETED their hurt as caused by an internal enemy, and convinced the public that they are an envied great people, and the Jews are the obstacle in the way to glory. The interpretation made the Jew the one who should be humiliated to save the Germans from an old humiliation represented by being the superior race that was humiliated by the inferior race (Jews).

        I think that misconceptions create hate, and hate creates the required interpretations.

 

        Psychoanalysis: A Different Viewpoint

 

The position I suggest taking from psychoanalysis is that it is not a discovery of something about human nature but a discovery of human nature itself. It is not wrong to say that despite centuries of philosophical endeavors which resulted in very remarkable understandings of our minds and many aspects of ourselves, we still did not work out how we become who we are and who “you became”. This is not a silly aggrandized remark by a devoted young analyst. As my work and readings extended beyond psychoanalysis as a clinical endeavor, it became clearer to me that if it was not for the contribution psychoanalysis has made to the humanities and the human sciences, we would not have passed the stage of noticing, describing to be able to enter the phase of interpreting and explaining the human subject, in us.  What I mean is that psychoanalysis came at a point in time [the Nineteen Century] when all the efforts of the thinkers and philosophers before had led to novel points of view regarding human nature, but they only led to the widening of the ‘vista’ of the world of humanness. Psychoanalysis came about at a slightly later time but got the attention of most thinkers and philosophers for reasons that took a full century to gather.

The philosopher of modern times suggests that certainty is relative and just a temporary detail that requires a second look. despite that ‘uncertainty’ has become a cornerstone in philosophy it never even occurred to anyone before Hegel and Marks that we humans are always engaged in a silent process of dialectical thinking that we are unaware of. Uncertainty begot dialectics which proved to be the subject of thinking because dialectics is ‘thinking itself’.  Without a natural dialectical response to the world, we would have lived in a world of dogma, which sometimes we find ourselves struggling with.

Having reached the stage of post-psychoanalysis as an effective psychotherapy we psychoanalysts need to minimize its property of psychotherapy because psychological ‘facts’ have undergone basic changes since the birth of psychoanalysis as therapy. After abandoning hypnotism, the issue of recovering the past to correct it has been adopted from psychoanalysis without any questions asked. What I mean is that we -psychoanalyst-should by now- minimize the property of psychotherapy in psychoanalysis, because psychological ‘facts’ have undergone basic changes after the birth of psychoanalysis. This change is in the best interest of the ‘psychoanalysts’ because hence they can make all the necessary and demanding changes in the field of psychotherapy, and free it from the old and redundant ritualistic notions of a profession. Psychoanalysis is not a profession, though it started as such, and continued as so, and now it needs a serious and more significant revision.  Psychoanalysis is an issue of epistemology (Knowing)more than an item in some mental health specializations.

                        ……………….

It is normal and natural to be what we ‘know’ of who we are, and what we are not. Even when some thinkers recognized that we are not what we think of ourselves, or what others think of us, we still define ourselves as entities that we are familiar with, or not fully as needed. In better words, we are more than one entity, because we are comprised of entities, nevertheless. Therefore, if we exhibited the possibility of being the vessel of contradictions, those contradictions remain within the conflict between opposites within the one entity that is ‘I am’. This argument in such an issue is: how come we are always a duality giving birth to dualities and we are never a final entity? We are always the outcome of a dialectical duality (sometimes an excellent duality and in other times not of so good duality).

Hegel’s dialectics looked at human nature as a duality, and not composed of dualities. It is in our human nature that we deal with dualities and seldom that we accept non-equivocal issues. The issue of dialectics as the ‘honest’ state of being got a major push from what the existentialists of the twentieth century unraveled. The most intriguing issue in this regard was an insignificant revelation by an almost charlatan (Mesmer). He discovered an aspect of ‘the subject’ that took the world of psychopathology by storm: Hypnotism. The duality of consciousness opened a window on psychiatry that Freud made use of and expanded to become fundamental to any exploration of new or renewed problems of the sort. The duality of conscious\unconscious was not regarding psychopathology alone but regarding the human subject in all his states.

Psychoanalysis was the most important proper start to studying and learning about the human subject with openness to the prospect of his duality. It started with the basic condition that makes the human different from all other living entities. Man can only be in one of the two fundamental components of his being: conscious or unconscious. The degrees in-between those two poles do not change their specificity. The in-between states still relate to that polarity of knowing (conscious) or not knowing (unconscious) because consciousness is the seat of knowledge despite the possibility of knowing things badly. The main issue to care about in this argument is what knowing or unknowing does to consciousness as a state of being. Knowing and unknowing give birth to the knower, i.e., the subject. Thus, we are doomed to be, but it is up to the subject in us to choose to deal with what he should be like. All those issues pertained to philosophy and some of its derivatives (aesthetics, ethics, etc.).

Freud turned all the tables upside down. We are not made to be what we are because, by the time we could ask questions about who and what we are, we would have been already made of what we are by others. He underlined the significance of the impact of the ‘other’ in shaping our self-image since our childhood when we relied on the adult other to become conscious of who we are. Thus, we are “an alienation” by need and by force and the existentialists were correct in bringing to attention alienation and our ‘false’ identities.

At this point, we should appreciate Freud and psychoanalysis not as a profession of psychotherapy, but as uncovering psychopathology as an extreme condition of human alienation (human is neither what he wanted to be nor what we have become; false entities). If you go to Freud’s ordinary clinical work, you see that his patients were not what they were but were unsuccessful in being something else. The Rat Man was a sadist who failed to become ‘his self”. My patient Mark was over strict with his daughter not because he always said ‘it is good for her future but because his own feelings regarding women’s sexuality were affected by a few childhood experiences that scare him from His-Self. The main discovery of psychoanalysis is this unvisited dilemma: We got to be ourselves (but that would not agree with another self-imposed self. I am not arguing the moral issue in that regard; I am arguing just the structural dilemmas between what and why in our-selves. Is psychological sickness (psychoneurosis) a pathology or a separate condition of self-deception?

Hegel with his dialectics revealed-not only that the mind is not only a duality- but its function is to create its antithesis to properly deal with thought. Husserl was the pioneer of Freudianism even before Freudianism was coined.  Early existentialists regarded the falsity of existence as a state of being that demands demystification. Freud did that but without declaring his secret intention. Freud the clinician was a big disappointment. His clinical work is trivial in comparison to his work on the psychodynamics of the subject. Not only in the volume of publication but in the essence of teaching us how to do psychoanalysis. His first books were Dreams, Slips of the Tongue, Jokes, Sexuality, and other topics that relate to general psychological issues (Civilisation, Moses, etc.). The works on clinical issues (papers on technique) are great guides in what we should avoid doing, which in the hands of good clinicians are a treasure trough. Freud is better called the first person who knew what not to do in psychoanalysis: not to look for the cause of the psychological condition with the patient, but to find out how it happened. Doing that would reveal the dialectics of psychoneurosis, symptoms as alienation of real causes, and the relationship between causes and effects in psychoneuroses is distorted. Freud has a book that is least recognized “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” in which he tackles the causation of anxiety in the way I am describing here. It did not meet the acceptance of psychoanalysts for the same reason I am underlining.          To end this note that got too long I would conclude by saying that psychoanalysis has affected both our concept of the human subject indirectly and in the core. It also showed that understanding the human subject happens when we understand how and what we approach that understanding.

The change that psychoanalysis introduced to humanity is that the subject has the keys to all the vaults of being, and being is not something to take for granted but is the issue that has in its nature the answers we need.

 

 

The position I suggest taking from psychoanalysis is that it is not a discovery of something about human nature but a discovery of human nature itself. It is not wrong to say that despite centuries of philosophical endeavors, which resulted in very remarkable understandings of our minds and how it works and many aspects of ourselves, but remained an entity that could not explain its ‘self’, which proved to be a complex issue to tackle without analysis. I can say with reasonable confidence that the first breakthrough happened in 1900 when Freud came up with his work on dreams. The reason is that there was no one before him who thought of understanding a human phenomenon that could teach us something about ourselves as the cloud teaches us something about rain.  This is not a silly aggrandized remark by a devoted young analyst. It is a special moment in the history of mankind: we can use what we are to understand who we are.

As my work and readings expanded beyond psychoanalysis as a clinical endeavor, it became clearer to me that if it was not for the contribution of psychoanalysis- which Freud realized and actualized- we would not have passed the stage of noticing, describing, and speculating and eventually became able to enter the phase of interpreting and explaining the human subject, that is us.  What I mean is that psychoanalysis came at a point in time [the Nineteen Century] when all the efforts of the thinkers and philosophers before him had led to novel points of view regarding human nature, but they only led to the widening of the ‘vista’ of the world of humanness. Psychoanalysis came about at a slightly later time but got the attention of most thinkers and philosophers with a genuinely new perspective. The human subject hid himself from himself, therefore we could not understand what we are for reasons that took a full century to gather. The discoverer was the hiding agent; thus, a very ingenious way had to be found.

Strangely enough, almost a charlatan (Mesmer) found out that people can lose control over their mental faculties (hypnotized) and reveal things that pertain to them which would not allow them to slip from their mental control. Hypnotism revealed the gap from which a man like Feud could use it in a different and useful way. The rest of the story is known but its implications were not properly understood till Freud tried and removed the mystic about it. When he did it became clear to him that what is involved in the mystic of psychoneuroses is evident but needs reinterpretation to be dealt with. Thus, Freud conceived and developed free association to as means to go through resistance to admit something of negative content. If we accept this quasi-characterization, we could say that Freud was the first to notice that the repressed needed a suitable unrepressed material to link with it, thus it could be approached. Thus, psychoanalysis was about to be initiated: a suitable psychical element that could accommodate the repressed psychological phenomenon and is conscious enough to be managed. Freud started his endeavor by exploring psychical phenomena that could accommodate the “unconscious” and allow dealing with it. Let us see what this man worked on first: Dreams (1900), Parapraxes (1901), Jokes1905, Infantile Sexuality (1905).

Freud’s clinical work throughout his whole his life was insignificant and shows a lack of interest and little concern about the outcome. However, his remarks on his work outline the proper practice of analysis and somehow touched upon most of the main concerns that we, practitioners, faced and still face both as therapists and supervisors. He was the prophet who sinned most. This way-if do what said and not what he did we will still be psychoanalysts. The point is that psychoanalysis has shown and proved that psychical matters are always attached to other things: a dream has a meaning, a slip of the tong has double meanings, a symptom tells a story, consciousness contains unconscious issues, psychical life is in continuous dynamic changes and could be very good in telling us about other things. In psychoanalytic terms, in any human product, there is something about that human tells about the human subject who initiated it.

After abandoning hypnotism and its usefulness in dealing with some primitive hysterical disorders, the issue of recovering the past to correct it has been adopted by psychoanalysis without any questions asked. What I mean is that we -psychoanalyst-should by now- minimize the property of psychotherapy in psychoanalysis, because psychological ‘facts’ have undergone basic changes that we should not stop at recovering and reorganizing the past in those patients’ lives. This understanding of the work of psychoanalysis is necessary and is in the best interest of ‘psychoanalysts. We must go beyond the discoveries of hypnotism- which we still hang on to indirectly (recover the repressed). If we accept that the secret formula of psychoanalysis is sold now in comic books we can make all the necessary and demanding changes in the field of psychotherapy, free it from the old and redundant ritualistic notions of the early profession, and do what ‘reconstruction’ in psychotherapy requires. Psychoanalysis is not a profession, though it started as such, and continued as so, but it needs a serious and more significant revision.  Psychoanalysis is an issue of epistemology (Knowing)more and better than an item in some mental health specializations.

                        ……………….

It is true and expected from us as humans to be what we ‘know’ of who we are, and what we are not so be authentic. Even when some thinkers recognized that we are not what we think of ourselves, or what others think of us, we still define ourselves as entities that we are familiar with, even if not fully as needed. In better words, we are more than one entity, because we are comprised of entities that pertain to the situation (fathers, sons, good, accomplished, etc.). Therefore, even when we show that we are entities of contradictions we remain within the conflict between opposites within the one entity that is ‘I am’.

This argument in such an issue is: how come we are always a duality giving birth to dualities and we are never a final entity? We are always the outcome of dialectical dualities (sometimes an excellent duality and in other times not of so good duality).

Hegel’s dialectics considered human nature a duality, and not composed of dualities. He outlined our human nature as a duality looking for a settlement. We create or found them out and we seldom accept non-equivocal issues. The issue of dialectics as the ‘honest’ state of being got a major push from what the existentialists of the twentieth century unraveled. We are always in search of a solution to our dialectical existence. We are never one but one who searches his an alter one…I am good because I am not bad.  The most intriguing issue in this regard was an insignificant revelation by an almost charlatan (Mesmer). He discovered an aspect of ‘the subject’ that took the world of psychopathology by storm: Hypnotism. The duality of consciousness opened a window on psychiatry that Freud made use of and expanded to become fundamental of any exploration of new or renewed problems of the sort. The duality of conscious\unconscious was not regarding psychopathology alone but regarding the human subject in all his states.

Psychoanalysis was the most important proper start to studying and learning about the human subject with openness to the prospect of his duality. It started with the basic condition that makes the human different from all other living entities. Man can only be in one of the two fundamental components of his being: conscious or unconscious. The degrees in-between those two poles do not change their specificity. The in-between states still relate to that polarity of knowing (conscious) or not knowing (unconscious) because consciousness is the seat of knowledge despite the possibility of knowing things badly. The main issue to care about in this argument is what knowing or unknowing does to consciousness as a state of being. Knowing and unknowing give birth to the knower, i.e., the subject. Thus, we are doomed to be, but it is up to the subject in us to choose to deal with what he should be like. All those issues pertained to philosophy and some of its derivatives (aesthetics, ethics, etc.).

Freud turned all the tables upside down. We are not made to be what we are because, by the time we could ask questions about who and what we are, we would have been already made of what we are by others. He underlined the significance of the impact of the ‘other’ in shaping our self-image since our childhood when we relied on the adult other to become conscious of who we are. Thus, we are “an alienation” by need and by force and the existentialists were correct in bringing to attention alienation and our ‘false’ identities.

At this point, we should appreciate Freud and psychoanalysis not as a profession of psychotherapy, but as uncovering psychopathology as an extreme condition of human alienation (human is neither what he wanted to be nor what we have become; false entities). If you go to Freud’s ordinary clinical work, you see that his patients were not what they were but were unsuccessful in being something else. The Rat Man was a sadist who failed to become ‘his self”. My patient Mark was over strict with his daughter not because he always said ‘it is good for her future but because his own feelings regarding women’s sexuality were affected by a few childhood experiences that scare him from His-Self. The main discovery of psychoanalysis is this unvisited dilemma: We got to be ourselves (but that would not agree with another self-imposed self. I am not arguing the moral issue in that regard; I am arguing just the structural dilemmas between what and why in our-selves. Is psychological sickness (psychoneurosis) a pathology or a separate condition of self-deception?

Hegel with his dialectics revealed-not only that the mind is not only a duality- but its function is to create its antithesis to properly deal with thought. Husserl was the pioneer of Freudianism even before Freudianism was coined.  Early existentialists regarded the falsity of existence as a state of being that demands demystification. Freud did that but without declaring his secret intention. Freud the clinician was a big disappointment. His clinical work is trivial in comparison to his work on the psychodynamics of the subject. Not only in the volume of publication but in the essence of teaching us how to do psychoanalysis. His first books were Dreams, Slips of the Tongue, Jokes, Sexuality, and other topics that relate to general psychological issues (Civilisation, Moses, etc.). The works on clinical issues (papers on technique) are great guides in what we should avoid doing, which in the hands of good clinicians are a treasure trough. Freud is better called the first person who knew what not to do in psychoanalysis: not to look for the cause of the psychological condition with the patient, but to find out how it happened. Doing that would reveal the dialectics of psychoneurosis, symptoms as alienation of real causes, and the relationship between causes and effects in psychoneuroses is distorted. Freud has a book that is least recognized “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” in which he tackles the causation of anxiety in the way I am describing here. It did not meet the acceptance of psychoanalysts for the same reason I am underlining.  To end this note that got too long I would conclude by saying that psychoanalysis has affected both our concept of the human subject indirectly and in the core. It also showed that understanding the human subject happens but understanding the subject changes by understanding and requires more work. This is what good analysis does to the patient (the subject), to continue understanding because that is psychical helth as the understanding of humanity is not a job to be done, it is a job to continue. What is obvious in the American conception of themselves they are what they are and that is already achieved. 

The change that psychoanalysis introduced to humanity is that the subject has the keys to all the vaults of being, and being is not something to take for granted but is the issue that has in its nature the answers we need. As in individual psychoanalysis, the process of analytic work ends when the subject realizes that he can and should continue what he went through with his analyst. Psychoanalysis is the gift that we have and came from realizing that knowing engenders the facility for further knowledge because knowing changes the subject and the process continues.  Psychoanalysis introduced us to what is dormant in us and the need to not stop at a fixed definition of ourselves. 

 The Fascinating Process of Projection:

            I was listining to the news ( The Europen Chanel) when I heard the announcer saying something about the war in the  Eukrain. He came to an unimportant issue and said, "So let Mr. Putin feel good about that". This kind of comment does not fit in almost any official TV station in all the countries of Europe. The NEWS is something and the comments on the news are something else.  However, at that moment my struggle with the concept of projection came back to me with a wish to revisit it. The reason is that I always had difficulty using a concept of an individual connotation to explain a social phenomenon. A Ukranian who has difficulty with his boss and projects his qualities to justify hating him should not project his personal hate on Russia or Russians. For a simple reason, his psychological nature is not the psychological nature of a whole nation. I can say that I and my friends are such and such, but to say that all Canadians must be like me or us is annulling the personal quality of psychical issues. In a nutshell, social dynamics are not the same as psychodynamics. In every projection that an individual initiates there is a great part of him in it. Thus, every projection is a personal psychological event.

            The TV announcer assumed and maybe rightly so that all people hate Putin, but he could not say that they hate him for the same reasons. He projected his hate for him but did not pay attention that Putin is "a signifier in his mind and not a signified",i.e., Putin signifies different things and different degrees of hateful things or te same way. However, when Lacan made an issue of the distinction between signifier\signifide he actually gave the hint of the distinction between thing and its connotation, subject and issue that pertain to the suject, and most of all perception and projection. To get to the point directly: is Putin a subject or a connotation? Is Ukraine a coronation or a subject? In psychoanalysis proper, the subject is perception (like the Pope of Rome) and a connotation (like piety and holines).  Therefore, Putin started as a 'perceived' object and eventually became a coonotation and the target of projection (s). 

               What is fascinating about Projection is its inevitability, always "always" originating from the subject and not from the object. Our psychological life is stemming from projections (some are better than others), and will be in the degree of deviation from the object thta is formulating its connotation. Lately, I was reading something very detailed about WWII. I compared my image of Hitler then (Age 8-9) and after reading and knowing about the Versailles Treaty. Two totally different projections. I conclude this paragraph with psychoanalytic ( Lacanian) notions: the notion of the other is never simple perception, because perception without projection is void of connotation.

               I will venture and mention something that I cannot substantiate. Love is never pure love but a mixture of object \ and projection. Love is also a tricky process of projection. It is tricky because there is more of the subject in it than what the object contributed to the feeling. In Arabic literature, there is the expression "love from first sight". The wise- man said the cure for that mistake is a second look. Therefore, we are in a better place if we could differentiate between the object and its subject, between perception and projection, and between the object and its connotaion. So, that TVannouncer should have come up with his own perception of the news he is reading instead of projecting firstly on the other.

                How much we ignore or just trivialize what we come to assess our psychicical life. and how how much prijection is ther in that reagrd. We do not do that intentionally but we use prejudgment as an excuse for our prejudes.  I am saying that in relation to succoming to the medias impact on our judgement.

     Narcissm in Politics

I received two very pertinent responses to my last posting: the first was a question about a possible similarity between a human and a major social phenomenon like an Empire. The issue was: since we individuals have a curve of life could empires also have a life curve that brings it to aging that ends with its death? The second was regarding possible deteriorations and restorations within the life span of one cycle of an empire. My point of view is that empires could exhibit such similarities to the individual, but when we look for the causes in both we find out a basic difference: in the case of the individual, the causes of death are understandable (dysfunction of organs, or the disturbance of certain interconnected physical functions resulting in the failure of what sustains life in the person.

In social phenomena, such as empires, a dysfunctional system of government affects another system of government almost like what happens in individuals’ death. Yet, the collapse of the empire is usually and clearly the people and not the systems that bring an empire down. The dysfunction of the empirical tools affects the psychology of its people; thus, the collapse of controlling the Suisse Canal in Egypt hit the narcissism of the Brits as a whole, and their individual sense of greatness was shaken by the military’s defeat in Port Said in 1956. However, there is a link between the individual and society just in the sphere of narcissism. Changes in the narcissistic structure of the I John (the person) and ME the known physician could be taken to correspond to I Great Britain and the Undefeated Army.

The gradual widening of the gap between the subjective identity (I) and the objective identity ((M) was instrumental in making both people in Great Britain and in India ready for to demise of the British Empire. More so, the collapse of Great Britain itself was a result of the liberation or semi-liberation of its own people with the birth of the Labor Party. The problems with the surface of internal conflicts within the ethnicities in Great Britain exposed some cracks in its social identity. The difference in that regard looks as if it pertains to issues related mainly to narcissism. I did not mean that social phenomena are the result of the psychological problems (narcissism) of its populations. What I meant is that what causes a person’s psychological death is something internal like failing to gain recognition. What causes an empire to fall is something external as defeat or failure to support itself. This is proven in some clear cases. The Chinese empire almost died two or three times during its span of life, but was revived by its own people (not foreigners) to continue uninterrupted. The same with the Early Egyptian empires that went through three episodes known as the First Empire, the Second, and the Third. Therefore, the answer is that Early Empires were not comparable or compatible with anything similar, so there was that silent state of narcissism that guided their progress and death. But there was a history of empires that the issue of narcissism became a new factor.

Narcissism is the cardinal condition of psychological death. After years of Narcissus just knowing that he is “I” Narcissus, he saw that the I has an image (Like the child who realizes that he has an image of “the Me” that his mother has given him. As Narcissus discovered that he has an image he was mesmerized and drowned to die… the I Am gave way to this is me  (psychological death of the subject happens when the me takes over the I). In Empires, Narcissism is based on “This is us”, the strongest, the most intelligent, the most demographic, etc., we are the American of the USA (for instance). I am American becomes confusing because it was formulated as so in the time when ME of that time has passed. The notion is that group and social narcissism are based -in most cases- on the idea that we are not anything else, but we are our am’s. (ego). The ‘me’ in group narcissism is born dead. Therefore, narcissism in individuals is the opposite of narcissism in empires: death is the cause of one and the result or outcome of the other.

The Distinction and Difference:

The distinction between the individual’s narcissism that makes him psychologically dead, and group or mass narcissism that makes an empire ready to collapse is totally the making of  historical moment(s)in the life of each. There are several events in the recent history of the European Empire that show its predicted collapse and end. In India, Algeria, Congo, South Africa, Sudan, Kenia, etc., there were uprises and massacres that were declared the end of colonization. In South America, countries were liberating themselves “Without Permission” from the Colonists. Asia had to go to war because imperialism was infiltrating the public leaders in many countries. If not because European imperialism was evident and its narcissism reached its peak in southeast Asia in a clear, the colonized countries lost their fascination with narcissistic leaders who were paid agents of the colonists.    

Therefore, we can talk about the collapse of the European Empire in clear terms considering those changes. Without citing reasons and causes it is obvious that there are no more parts of the world where imperialism could exist or be disguised to keep going. Moreover, there are no new ways of disguising imperialism to give it a chance to survive. Moreover, there are no countries that could be depicted as backward and others as advanced (lately Albania had an uprise that we could not see its parallel in Sweden). The world is now ONE human entity but still has pockets of racial and cultural backwardness.

Although I am not politically naïve, I believe that in the next thirty-fifty years we will lose the news analyst and news experts that make their work an arena of ridiculous political so-called analysis.  Enlightened and educated persons will help to restructure a world in which knowledge will force separate silly politics from new politics that will overpass political narcissism. There will be a will to globalize the minds and not just politics. As a psychoanalyst and not a politician I expect very fundamental changes in political narcissism. We will be able to look through personal and national narcissism.