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?