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.

         I am sure I sound like a broken disk by now, as I keep going on and on the same subject....the lessons we could learn from the contemporary political situation, especially from the war in Ukraine. The reason is that that subject is of importance to me and some psychoanalysts because of the variant impacts it has on "the psychological" factors behind each distinct opinion ( 'I agree but not for the same reason you base your opinion').  This phenomenon reveals something of very significant value to us, psychoanalysts (but because this is not the place to expound on this point, I will just underline its source. Our opinions and most of our judgments stem from and support our personal narcissism, whatever the mental contribution to that issue). The specifics of all this are interesting because the obvious and declared opinions about the war negative or positive as they might be do not have the same sense of source. I am saying this because I have a sense of something more than politics and psychoanalysis has to be addressed. It is the nature of the link between individual narcissism and national and group narcissism, I am working on it still. 

        This twist in my thinking came about and is still coming, from reading a book that I came to discover lately (honestly by chance). The author Samir Uri is a historian and a brilliant analyst of historical facts and has the gift of an analyst who makes the best choices to connect different events (The name of the book is Shadows of An Empire). It is a book on the birth and collapse of the British Empire. He also states in brief that there will not be national or racial empires again and we are now out of the Shadows of Imperialism. We are in the universality of all the past and present. So, we can recognize and realize that the sequence and evolution of empires were reflections of stages in the evolution of the human subject.  The war in Ukraine is one of the last steps toward the decline of ethnic, racial or national narcissism. It is becoming ridiculous for a nation, a race, or a population to claim superiority. The obvious reason is that the basis of superiority is now available to every grouping in any part of the world. Still, there are some corners of the world that hang on to "their" superiority, but they seem to be left to their illusions (Mainly in North America).

        Believing in what I just mentioned I can also make you see how losing the basis of narcissism generates distortions in the perception of reality. In the Ukraine war, the disparity between Russia's capabilities and the Ukraian capabilities creates a gap that distorts reality and reaches a point when the distinction between wishful thinking and strait perception is lost. The president of Ukraine who is only important to the West as an element of annoyance in the cold conflict with Russia sees himself and the people around him as an active factor in the ongoings of matters in that conflict. he used by the West as an occasion that permits accusing Russia of inhumanity, war mongering, and war crimes. Even if we leave the past dormant and do not recall what the West did in the colonies, we still can see till now how projection distorts perception. Going back to the war between Iran and Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan, and North Sudan, Afghanistan, we cannot miss the active participation in those massacres and the claims that the West is not involved in them. The West is unable to live in a world that is not divided into good and bad and that is always on the side of the good. The reasons given are that the West is the Civilized, Free, and Democratic. The fallacy in this 'perception' is evident in the West relying on military power keeping NATO while there is no military threat in the world to justify creating military alliances.

        Thus, after all the wars and the impossibility of a new World War, the West remains captive of its NARCISSISM that requires the despise of the enemy even if there is no enemy to fear. Russia, China, North-Korea, are still the hateful enemies: A question: Isn't this mentality enough to make the West the world's enemy by now.