2. From Psychoanalysis to Politics and Back

Wish, Desire, and Mass Narcissism

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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: