Back to Politics:

There are two points to underline in the previous posting about the emergence of the Other and Narcissism. The emergence of the other, which is both inevitable and unavoidable, whatever the success or failure of that process, it creates the duality of the subject ,i.e., the narcissistic stance and conditions for ‘psychopathology’. Psychopathology emerges from the possibilities of establishing nonsensical cause\effect dualities of the I\Me. In other terms, the presence of the other creates the duality of I and Me which has many possibilities of I,s and of Me,s. Therefore, narcissism of I am Me relation could be affected by the other and his or her role in allowing or disallowing a comfortable I am is that me person.  The possibility of inexactitude of I am Me is the basis of the pathological psychological conditions.

The manifestations of those inexactitudes are always, always , accompanied by a need to have a similar person to lower the sense of estrangement and anxiety. This is the seat and the root of social narcissisms. In situation where narcissism is socially threatened (we are not what we thought we are, whether  positively and negatively). The society becomes less unified, and flare-ups of patriotism that looks back for times of prosperity dominate the suffering nation. The Arab world is still looking for an old glory to adopt after the fall of the Ottoman empire. Social Narcissism is  different from personal narcissism because it does not deal with I-m but with they-me. The situation in the Ukraine demonstrates well this point manifested in the yearning for a union with Europe .

It started with a wakeup call that they are not west Europeans like the rest who are members of the European Union and of NATO. This was a narcissistic blow not because the Ukrainians were feeling any different from the rest of the Europeans but because the Two Idiotic Politicians who caused all this mess presented it to the Ukrainians in a narcissistic formulation….You are not what you think you are, you are not a democracy, and do not have the European values that we cherish. The European mirror did not reflect to that unfortunate country the beautiful image of Western Europeans. On the contrary it reflected the image of the old members of the Soviet Union (Which does not exist anymore).

It is interesting or rather curios that the West Europeans knew well that this is not the case anymore. Yet, the USA is still in war with communism which does not exist anywhere and still believes that it is  defending the liberated European democracies that have-now- more elaborate democracies than the USA’s democracy and still functions politically as their patron. Therefore, we can say that the Ukrainian war was only justified to boost the narcissism of some warped politicians who stimulated the group narcissism of a sleeping nation. That nation or the Ukraine was looking for a boast to its narcissism due to narcissistic hurts caused by internal discomfort. protectiveness of the Ukraine is to the USA a reminder of its great work to stop the Russian expansion in Western Europe after the second world war.

 Forwards to Psychoanalysis:

Politics is the link between a person (politician) and a nation either undergoing a drastic identity change or looking for one. The politicians are misguiding leaders or misguided political ideologists. In both cases there is a gap between the society and its presumed thinkers. I must take you back three or four years to an event that explains things well.

In 2020 there was an event on the T.V. called the George Floyd case.  In the openness of the street and in day light a white police officer had his knee on the neck of a black man who was laying on the ground unable to move or to breath. People, black and whites, were standing there watching and taking pictures. No one in the spectators call an ambulance or the Police?!!!?The black man eventually died.

I, and many others, watched an old scene of two three hundred years ago being reenacted in 2020.  What came to my mind is the return of the repressed. In psychoanalysis we sometimes witness things that were repressed and got activated in its way to consciousness creating old scenes. A good example is getting severe physical and emotional anxiety being questioned by a senior authority. I published a post warning of the return of the repressed and sure enough what the USA is presently dealing with politically and even materially is return of the repressed past.

Could the Ukraine war be a return of the repressed! Yes, and very much so. The Ukraine war seems to be a direct result of misjudgment of two mediocre public employees of the European Union and        Those kind of mistakes are common everywhen but the ones that make the difference are the ones that reveal a historical moment that has ripened up and just needs to be activated. The need to unite Europe to resist its pending decline and dissipation. The first world war was triggered by the assassination of an insignificant prince but was justification to end a monarchy so Europe advances to a higher level of political structure: no Royalties but political parties. The second war was bring the USA (as part of the declining European Empire thus it brought all nations in one Universal war (Europe, China, Japan, etc.). Better to say: the second world war was so worldwide that made us not pay attention and realize not realize that that it had a salient objective be achieved: no Nationalistic, Racial, Territorial, Geographic separation but we are all in one world.

We are now in that state of affairs except in the USA and few other small countries in the middle east and Africa.

                                                  Wish and Desire:

 

                    The Psychological Birth of the Other.

 

                 The issue of the birth of the Other in our psychological life was rarely addressed by analysts, despite the impossibility of understanding Narcissism without dealing with that aspect in our psychological life. Th reason in my opinion- which came first to a very experienced colleague- is that the Oedipus myth was the Myth that shaped our understanding of repression, sexuality, and the unconscious, i.e., guilt and embarrassment, when we can see now that the central issue of psychoanalysis is the duality of the subject, consequently it is Narcissism. The literature on ‘the Other’, is very scarce. In the sixties of the last century Lacan and the Lacanians dealt with the issue of “desire’ which included aspects of “otherness” but the discussions went astray because there was truly little understanding of narcissism yet, and it stayed as Freud formulated, an issue of libidinal investment. There was not enough attention paid to a basic difference between Desire and Wish (Easy to sound critical now after fifty years of solid French psychoanalysis behind us), Wish is void of a subject to make it fulfilled while desire is almost totally dependent on the existence of an “other’.

              The false presence of ‘the other’ in narcissistic conditions relates to something to notice in the enfant’s relations with the other. The baby is not narcissistic as the Freudian definition makes him because there is not enough distinction between I and She (mother). Till the second part of the first year of life the enfant does not distinguish between wanting the mother’s smile (desire) and wishing her to smile. This shows in his inability to concentrate on her face unless she has a grimace on it. This is clear in the enfant’s response by smiling to the other, and his response when looking at a smiling other. The distinction between the enfant’s simile when mother similes to him (no otherness in that smiling) and smiling to her when he wants her to smile to him indicates the birth of ‘the other’ in the child’s psychological life. It also indicates the birth of narcissism and the distinction between desire (mother’s smile) and wish (to make her smile). In narcissism there is desire that establishes a relation with the other; it is a wishing relationship. Is the mother’s simile the cause of relating and recognizing the other? Or does recognizing the mother as an-other starts the smiling process and the notions of desire and wish behind it?

        Just as an interjection in a main discussion: Is this a psychoanalytic topic (analysis as therapy) or just an argument that does not belong to us? We will see.

The Other and the Onset of Differentiation in Psychical Life:

        Many years ago I asked myself this question and I was not able to answer it: Is language the cause of our psychological life or is it the product of psychological life. The intriguing things about that question is the ease by which both answers could easily be accepted and with no major difficulty in reversing cause and effect in that answer. However, when I started to thinks about that issue lately I was struck by two issues: we humans, without exception talk and even make 'things' talk to us. Thus, language is not the cause of anything in particular but the effect of something we need to identify.  The second things is that although we all speak we are not all at the same level of expressivity; we all breath the same way but we do not express our selves equally good or bad. Therefore, we have to acknowledge that we are different in our psychical life in spite of being all psychological creatures. 

        At this point we (psychoanalysts) have to address our psychological life differently from the old concept of the personal psychosexual line of development, not because it was wrong or deficient but because reversed the cause effect in development. It was the emergence of the other (mother!) and its changes witch created the different stages of development. It is the other in every stage that enriched the psychological life of the child. In other words we get to a point of total distinction from the rest of the animal world, a distinction that  in itself reveals another aspect of that distinction which was not  seriously studied by psychoanalysis, or other human sciences. 

 The Other and the Onset of Differentiation in Psychical Life:

        Many years ago I asked myself this question and I was not able to answer it: Is language the cause of our psychological life or is it the product of psychological life? The intriguing thing about that question is the ease by which both answers could be easily accepted and with no major difficulty in reversing cause and effect in that answer. However, when I started to think about that issue lately, I was struck by two issues: we humans, without exception talk and even make 'things' talk to us. Thus, language is not the cause of anything, but the effect of something we need to find out. The second thing is that although we all speak, we are all at the same level of expressivity; we all breathe the same, but we do not express ourselves equally good or bad. Therefore, we must acknowledge that we are different in our psychological life even though we are all being psychological creatures.

            At this point we (psychoanalysts) must address our differences in our psychological life. In other words, we get to a point of total distinction from the rest of the animal world, but a distinction that reveals   another aspect of that distinction which is not taken seriously by psychoanalysis, or other human scientists: Most evident is that we differ greatly in our psychological lives: we do not love or hate the same way, we seldom know exactly what we want, or even what to say. The issue at hand is that the birth of our psychological life depends a great deal on the other(s) around us when growing up (not in the psychoanalytic meaning of this sentence but the ontological meaning other-ness). The birth of the other is the birth of the I-Me and every stage of development has a different, a due of I-Me.  

    It will be a significant contribution if child psychoanalysts reviewed the old concepts of Child Devlopment in light of what have been seeing in practice in regard of the patients' sense of the Other\I, and how that affects transference in big way. It will also be significant because we do not have in psychoanalysis a place to study, learn, and deal and theorize about the place of the other in our personal narcissism.

 

                     2. From Psychoanalysis to Politics and Back

Wish, Desire, and Mass Narcissism

_______________________________

     

1. Politics.

            War in the Ukraine proved to have a core of stubborn psychological fixations. A year ago, I posted several posts in anticipation of the reactivation of old psychological fixations- the West has turned them into unquestionable facts- regarding the European Nations, Countries, Ethics, and a new novelty called Western Values. Those psychologically charged issues were going to confuse the new generations- that did not witness or experience what the media is reviving of the old but still active issues of the past. I listen today to the media attacking Russia as the case was at fifty years ago, and the cold war in the forties of the last century. They are the same to the letter. This ‘dishonest’ misleading of the new generation is mostly intentional acts of replacing reality with psychical reality which is easier to manipulate. Sometimes making those confusing issues so dangerously “actual” separates with barriers between wish and fact. Although all Wars start with that confusion between those two aspects of facts, they eventually and gradually lose the distinction and they merely be meaningless events of no link been them. In a nutshell, the Ukraine War is now a matter that gets its identity from the wars of the middle of the last century: pride, old conflicts between political system that do not exist any more like socialism and capitalism, democracies and dictatorships that are totally fictitious, and a fixed ideas that the West Europe is superior to East Europe, not only culturally but humanly too.

Those manipulations regarding what that war is about prove that we humans know very little about ourselves. We do not know that we either deceive ourselves for silly reasons or allow others do that to us.

It so loudly cried in the media that WE NEED SOMEONE OR THING TO PROJECT US From THE THEM of OUR OWN MISSIRIES and OUR OWN SHORTCOMMINGS. No one goes back to the onset of the war and underline its cause.

*Two Planted Mistakes:

I am saying that the Ukraine war was initiated by two simple but dangerous mistakes that surprised even the ardent west European bigot. The manager of the old military NATO military organize (Stoltenberg!?) knows that the condition of disbanding its ‘communist’ equivalent or the Warsaw pact prohibited the NATO existence on none-western member of that union. He even admitted that but said that Western values over rules that condition giving the Urania the freedom to break that rule. Few months before Ursula van der Leiden offered the Ukraine membership in the European Union without the full approval of its membership from the membership. This situation remained unprovoking to Russia until Western Europe decided that Russia is now what all the thing it was attributed to her fifty years ago, i.e. the war in the Ukraine was caused by a long cherished Western European self concept of the inferiority of the East part of its old empire and that Russia is a communist country that wanted to dominate the world.  The war in the Ukraine is founded on two mistakes that are the tail end of a dying empire called The Europe Culture (only its west part).

This solution is clearer to me because of a very old lesson I was taught by my Great uncle (mothers uncle). He was an active political activist and liked to teach me few of his tricks (1936- 19 42), when he died in exile. I was expressing my admiration of the West for their freedom of speech and believes and related that to democracy as their system of government (though Egypt was a British Colony at that time. He corrected me and advised to always look for the causes before judging effects.  Freedom of speech is not the cause of democracy, but it is the opposite: democracy creates freedom of speech. He immediately gave the example in a question: Why do you think a democratic country like Britain expels me from my own country because I am telling the people what they are doing with our revenues from our resources, and how our raw materials are manufactured in England and not her in Egypt. Since then, I learned and practiced the separation between causes and effects in any kind of learning.

At this point I want to underline a fact about psychoanalysis. There were always recognition of differences between causes and effect in the history of the human race, but it was only Freud who made that point his life’s work. Psychoanalysis was the discovery of the distorting and distorted dynamics of that link them both. Thus, my uncle’s advice to always investigate the distorted link between cause ant effect worked well for me because I chose psychoanalysis as ideology and profession.

Fortunately, later in life I came across psychoanalysis that is based on that same principle, and aims to analyse patients from the same point of view i.e., difficulties that are caused by similar confusions in the likes between causes and effects in experiencing their lives. Psychoanalysis is the psychotherapy that highlight the confusion between causes and effects psychological life. Thus, we can ask the same question regarding the cause-effect of the Uranian war. What is the cause of creating two or three big lies and initiate a war that was not only impossible to win but could create the disintegration of the present European Union.?

I think that the most obvious reason is the need to create a situation that looks from the outside a threat and an attack on the EU. It is the only thing available now that could keep the union in a state of worry and need to remain united: Create an enemy who threatens the Union. Brexit proved that the European Union is not that secure. Creating an external danger is an old trick to preserve internal unity. This is the mechanism we encounter in phobias and some obsessive-compulsive conditions. Because it started with two political mistakes made by two carelessly political ignoramus (employees of the European Union) it did not start as “a certain reaction’ to an historical issue, but started with the resurgence of an already established hate of Russia (ignoring the major changes that happened to it regarding economy, politics, affiliations, etc.) Add to that is another more subtle but powerful aspect which is the need to find someone to hate to be able to love oneself. In other words, although the circumstances that led to the Ukrainian war were a result of two silly and ignorant Western politicians making their own decisions to invite the Ukraine to join NATO and the European union. They did not think of the agreement between NATO and the Warsaw pacts-Russia as the main member and the strict rule of joining the European Union. Their ignorance of their own political limitations made them innovate a threat that requires changing the basic politics of the dying European Empire. The invasion of Russia to the parts they wanted to put in it the NATO forces is the less intelligent decision those two employees wanted to create to the danger of the old enemy of 'Tatata' Democracy.      

  

3.Wish and Desire: 

  

                    The Psychological Birth of the Other. 

 

The issue of the birth of the other in our psychological life was rarely addressed by analysts, despite the impossibility of understanding Narcissism without dealing with that aspect of our psychological life. Th reason in my opinion- which came first to a very experienced colleague- is that the Oedipus myth was the Myth that shaped our understanding or repression, sexuality, and the unconscious, i.e., guilt and embarrassment, when we can see now that the central issue of psychoanalysis is the duality of the subject, consequently it is Narcissism. The literature on ‘the Other’, is very scarce. In the sixties of the last century Lacan and the Lacanians dealt with the issue of “desire’ which included aspects of “otherness” but the discussions went astray because there was truly little understanding of narcissism yet, and it stayed as Freud formulated, an issue of libidinal investment. There was not enough attention paid to a basic difference between Desire and Wish (Easy to sound critical now after fifty years of solid French psychoanalysis behind us), Wish is void of a subject to make it fulfilled while desire is almost totally dependent on the existence of “other’. 

 

The false presence of ‘the other’ in narcissistic conditions relates to something to notice in the enfant’s relations with the other. The baby is not narcissistic as the Freudian definition makes him because there is not enough distinction between I and She (mother). Till the second part of the second year of life the enfant does not distinguish between wanting the mother’s smile (desire) and wishing her to smile. This shows in his inability to concentrate on her face unless she has a grimace on it. This is clear in the enfant’s response by smiling to the other, and his response when looking at a smiling other. The distinction between the enfant’s simile when mother similes to him (no otherness in that smiling) and smiling to her when he wants her to smile to him indicates the birth of ‘the other’ in the child’s psychological life. It also indicates the birth of narcissism and the distinction between desire (mother’s smile) and wish (to make her smile). In narcissism there is desire that establishes a relation with the other; it is a wishing relationship.  

Is the mother’s simile the cause of relating and recognizing the other? Or does recognizing the mother as an-other starts the smiling process and the notions of desire and wish?  

 

The Other and the Onset of Differentiation in Psychical Life: