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.

         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.   

 An Appendage to the main posting. 

An addition to the ongoing post

 

A year ago, (May 2022) I watched-on TV- with millions of Americans, a black man (J. Floyed) stretched on the ground with a white police officer putting his knee on the black man’s neck, while that man was moaning and groaning from time to time that he was unable to breath. This scene was in full daylight, in a crowded street while people were taking pictures and videos. No one called an ambulance, because the police officers in the scene were busy searching the man’s car. The man ended up dead.  

I thought that I was watching a scene from the seventeenth century, and the same mentality of slavery of the black. As an Egyptian who lived fifty years on the border of the USA and watching mostly USA media ….and a psychoanalyst too, I thought that I am watching a return of the repressed. It meant that something in childhood (or the childhood of a group) was repressed (forgotten completely). It returns as it was without any modifications or elaboration. Ther were some interesting discussions in the early sixties about the return of the repressed, which some very perceptive analysts even considered the third year of analysis the time when most of the current issues that instigated the need for Analysis are examined and the basic and foundational in the psychoneuroses are ready to be dealt with. This was a concept that some analyst named a return of the repressed. There were just very few papers on the subject for fear of turning psychoanalysis into a predictable process, thus the concept of the unconscious would be badly distorted. 

However, I believe that noticing the return of the repressed is an important psychoanalytic issue because just a quick review of psychoanalysis of the groups is more likely to reveal some commonality in the returning unconscious pains of nations. The return of the repressed is useful in explaining national and shared emotions in countries that did not deal with the repressed well enough to stop it from returning. The interesting part of the discussions regarding the return of the repressed in the third year of an analysis is the similarity with major social changes in a society as some historians underlined.  

The collops of the European Empire came after the second world war and the various small wars of southeast Asia and Africa. During those events many of the ‘repressed’ issues in this late empire returned in the form of a cal for democracy that was never was an issue before and even became one of “the social values” of the modern political scenes.  ing.

 The End of the Last Empire

The European Empire and its Psychology.

                                It is unusaual to be aware of a major major change in ourlives and and have the ability to notice, think, understand most of it and aloso have peers who would be going Thrrough the same events but with  different perspectives.

            This introduction is meant to underline the psychoanalytic way of thinking that could contribute to other fields of knowled like the social and the political fields. The present political scene in the world does not make sense, It has the features of social morbidity that resembles the morbidity of the psychoneurotic symptoms of individuals.  However, I need to clarify that I do not think of social cahoes as pervasive social psychopathology. I only mean that the componets of social chaos are structured as the componets of a psychoneurisis are structured in individuals.

         At the preseant time we are at a point where and when the last empire in the history of mankind has all the features of a dying civilizzation, represented in the so called the European Empire ,which  started six centuries ago and began its decay a couple of hundred years ago with endless internal conflicts, and two atomic bombs of which one was unnecessary to use (The Nagasaki bomb). There is also an active current of reversed immigration from the previously colonozed parts of the worldwas; although relatively smal is small in volum it says that 'the world is no longer divided into master\slave, white\black, poor\rich etc. One of the most perceptive books of late entitled: The World is Flate (By: Thomas Friedman) shows how tecnology has eliminated the geographic barrires that made Europe the home of the masters of the rest of humanty. 

        Flattening the world is not fully done yet, and the Ukraine War attests to a foolishly stubborn Europeans that still holds on to its old sense of superiority. It is still unable to accept old-despised Russia and China as equals (the mighty enfant who does not know that he is not the only one who owns his mother). That mass self-deception could only be achieved by mass projection, becaus as the enfant 'thinks' he owns his mother he does that within the projection of need and not of perception and conception, Projection to the chlid is perception to adults, and it is also so to the self-decieving person. The USA projects on Russian rulers all what it did to the natives the slaves and theVietnamese, for instance. USA  dumping all the bad of communism on leaders like Stalin and Putin. Few as years ago China was the savage barbarian uncivilized country that its leaders were dicatating its policy on the people of Hong- Kong. This was a distraction from the USA manipulation of 'free' elections in South America, to even assassinating the elected president of Chile and replacing him with a military general. Better though to say that we can use our psychoanalyitiec way of thinkin in analysing social phenomena but not assume that the oucome is the same if by force experience we could talk about the society as whoel as if it is one individual

What is the psychodynamics of projection in its social form?

             The European countries who ruled, exploited, and exhausted their potentials beyond the limits of existence(like the Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Inka, people) did before- are now showing all the signs of a dying empire. It started with the end of the second world war and the emancipation of Africa, South America, Southeast Asia some smaller change in the Caribian islands. But the most demonstrative of all those changes is the migrations of people of the old empire to the source countries of that empire. Even in its small margins the phenomena says that 'the world is no longer divided into master\slave, white\black, poor\rich etc. One of the most perceptive books of late is entitled: The World is Flate (By: Thomas Friedman). Flattening the world is not fully done yet, and the Ukraine War attests to a foolishly stubborn Europe that holds on its old fictitious sense of superiority. That has proven to "always" be achieved by choosing an old adversary who was inferiot and has become an equal to still treat as a failure in progressing and catching up with civility. In our case Russia is the barbarian, savage, backward, dictatorship, and Putin is the devil incarnate. Although, all evidence shows that Russia now adays is advances and civilised like the best westerner country  including the USA. 

        Psychoanaldysts have a great deal to say about some of those social phenomena because, although they are not psychopatholgies they contribute to mass self deceptions that create morbid psychlogical fantacies to the public. The notions and dishonest presenation of the political an military situation in the Ukraine created serious sitautions in the USA and the rest of Europ that seem unrelated but after a second thout one couls see or at least sens the raelationship ship of those events. d social facts. Why there is  now (since the war in the Ukraine) so many more mass  shooting in the USA, an unsetled  Monarchy in England, sudden anxieties about safty in Finland, Sweeden, and unrest in the the part of the European Union that is formed from the eastern European countries.n reagrsd to internal inequalitied,etc. Why suddenly the old suspitions about Communist Russia and the lack of 'our democracy'in it are now as high though it is not a communist country anymore and is not less democratic than countries like Turkia, Italy, and the Balkan countries! The basic foundation of all this is the lack of psychoanalytic analytic attention to the sociopolitical events and changes.

            At the onset of the Ukranian War I publishe few postings about how the old animosities between East Europe and its West will affect the attutdes of the media centers. I can brag and say that they must have read my blog: evrything good was West and everything East was bad. Even Russia did not disroy Kiev it was depeicted as military failure. Russians lost tens of thousandsant the Ukranian resisitance lost few wounded. I am familier with all that from th media's reporting about the Six-day war between Egypt an Isreal in June 1967. Make lies and let people worry about the truth.

             Ignoring the truth as means of distroying it. The issue is ignoring that social and group psychology are the subject and object of development and evolution too (getting better in goodness and badness too). The trick is what psychoanalytic principles could guide the thinker in understanding social evolution. As a psychoanalyst I will consider group-hate, projection, negation, denial, changes in fixed repressed ideas or believes, expressing suppressed unconscious thought as thoughts of common knowledge, all that are the new wrap of social development and evolution. I will treat the current events that are proclaimed as old suppressed realities as manifestations of upcoming major social and political changes that we should expect to happen.

            It is astonishing, amazing, and appealing to see the degree of political ignorance of American Politician in regard to what is happening now in the world. It is appalling that the USA (330 millions people with a couple of hundred top world Universities) does not have thinkers  to educate the literates let alone the public and update their believes (prejudices). Thinkers are the psychoanalysts of societies.In the fifty years of living next to the USA in Canada I can identify three or maybe four recent thinker\political politicians ( R. Kennedy, Clinton, Obama and         . The so called american politician is still warning the public of a communist plot when the last communist country in the world was China (Sorry we have to be careful because North Korea is still communist).

The basic undeniable  fact is that everything we deal with in life is in a sate of change and evolution, as our own minds also change with it. Thus, resistance to change and stopping things from evolving  are illusions that we better go back to understand the present, instaed of analysing the present to predict and prepare for the future. Someone like me that has lived long remembers what happened between the east and the west, the socialists and the capitalists, Russia and the West, (Stalin\Putin) and (Eisenhauer\Lesinski) can see the backwardness in even the vocabulary of propaganda and anti propaganda. The main point is what will be a test to acknowledging social evolution and change (the neurotic resistance to  social  changes and the fixation on the past as better and has all the wisom we neeed. So, from food gathering to food manufacturing and from the temporary family of males and females to Empires that kept evolving for centuries (Greek, Mongol, Assarian, Babylonian, Roman.,etc.. ), we reached the end of the last in our history , the European civilization and European empire. The main issue in this subject is how we could analyse-to understand- what the present time is preparing for the future. Just a reminder: we analyse to prepare the patient to his future. 

Spingler was of the onion that civilizations along with their political structure move from east to  west. Even though if there are important details that could undermine this brilliant idea It at least the merit of telling us a lot about the Ukranian War and the obsessive compulsion hat of the dying Empire to Russia and China.  

All European countries are  amalgams of provinces England, France  large countries like Russia, China, Indea even the USA could and should be derstoof differentl

Psychoanaldysts have a great deal to say about some social phenomena because they shae

 psychodynamics       wore few posts  about the psychodynamics of group hate, projection, self deception, and how they will be the fabric and background of the way the Ukraine Issue will be understood and managed. I imagined how what would happen if the politicians do not open their eyes to see the danger of  the ideas introduced and promoted by just two uneducated European politicians (Ursula van der !! and the general manager of NATO: Ostenberg) . I did that because it was obvious that that small peaceful country had been foolishly and maliciously tricked into believing what those two pompous idiotic politicians were advocating... join the EU and Nato.  According to the rules of the European Union and Nato itself the Ukraine could not become member of those two organizations without the approval FIRST of the (24!!) current members. As matter of principle Those two politicians were calling for something that would take three years to happen. Those two persons -who are pathetic in their political awareness- thought the matter is Simply an issue of -again- OUR VALUES.

This is not the issue of this post. The issue is ignoring that social and group psychology are subject and object of development and evolution (getting better in goodness or badness too). The trick is what psychoanalytic principles could guide the thinker in understanding social evolution. As a psychoanalyst I will consider group-hate, projection, negation, denial, changes in fixed repressed ideas or believes, expressing suppressed unconscious thought as thoughts of common knowledge, all that as the new wrap of social development and evolution. I will treat the current events that are proclaimed as old suppressed realities as manifestations of upcoming major social and political changes that we should expect to happen.

It is astonishing, amazing, and appealing to see the degree of political ignorance of American Politician in regard to what is happening now in the world after the DECLARATION OF INDEPENCE (of the USA few years ago!!!!). It is appalling that the USA (330 millions people with a couple of hundred top world Universities) does not have thinkers  to educate the literates let alone the public and update their believes (prejudices). In the fifty years of living next to the USA in Canada I can identify three or maybe four recent thinker\political politicians ( R. Kennedy, Clinton, Obama The American politician is still warning the public of a communist plot when the last communist country in the world was China (Sorry we have to be careful because North Korea is still communist).

The basic undeniable  fact is that everything we deal with in life is in a sate of change and evolution, as our own minds also change with it. Thus, resistance to change and stopping things from evolving  creates illusions that we can go back to understand the present and the future. Someone like me that has lived long remembers what happened between the east and the west, the socialists and the capitalists, Russia and the West, (Stalin\Putin) and (Eisenhauer\Lesinski) Can see the backwardness in even the vocabulary of propaganda and ant propaganda. Tha main point is what will be a test to acknowledging social evolution and change.  neurotic resistance of  social  changes and evolution in us. So, from food gathering to food manufacturing and from the temporary family of males and females to Empires that kept evolving for centuries (Greek, Mongol, Assarian, Babylonian, Roman.,etc.. ), we reached the end of the last in our history , the European civilization and European empire 

Spingler was of the onion that civilizations along with their political structure move from east to  west. Even though if there are important details that could undermine this brilliant idea It at least the merit of telling us a lot about the Ukranian War and the obsessive compulsion hat of the dying Empire to Russia and China.  

All European countries are  amalgams of provinces England, France  large countries like Russia, China, Indea even the USA could and should be derstoof differentl

 whether material or non-material. All living things die, and anything material decays. So, as the signs of life in animals or plants wither and die, the material evidence of civilizations and empires also decay and vanish too. At the present time we are at a point where and when the last empire in the history of mankind is dying: The European Empire.  It started six centuries ago and began its decay a few hundred years ago with endless internal conflicts, and two atomic bombs of which one was unnecessary to use (The Nagasaki bomb).

 The European countries who ruled, exploited, and exhausted their potentials beyond the limits of existence-like the Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Inka, before did before- are now showing all the signs of a dying empire. It started by the end of the second world war and the emancipation of African, South America, Southeast Asia some smaller change in the Karibian islands. But the most demonstrative of all these changes is the migrations of people of the old empire to the source countries of that empire. Even though this reverse migration is small margins it says that 'the world is no longer divided into master\slave, white\black, poor\rich etc. One of the most perceptive books of late is entitled: The World is Flate (By: Thomas Friedman). Flattening the world is not fully done yet, and the Ukraine War attests to a foolishly stubborn Europe to hold on to its old fictitious sense of superiority, unable to accept old-despised Russia and China as equals. That has proven to "always" be done by choosing an old inferior adversary who has become an equal to treat as a failure in progressing and catching up with civility. That mass self-deception could only be achieved by mass projection. In the case of Russia, the USA projects (get rid of) its barbarian history with the natives, slavery, Vietnam, by dumping all the bad on Putin because he is managing a war and not malleable politician. In the case of Hong Kong crisis, few months ago, China was the savage barbarian, uncivilized, Un European, undemocratic villain as distraction from the USA manipulation of 'free' elections in South America, to even assassinating the elected president of Chile and replacing him with a military general.

This introduction is meant to pave the way for psychoanalysis to contribute to a political scene that does not make sense like psychoneurotic symptoms and conditions.

Development and evolution are the inevitable conditions of all matters of existence, whether material or no material. Anything living dies and anything material decays. So, as the signs of life in animals or plants wither and die, material evidence of civilizations and empires also decay and vanish too. We are at a point where and when the last empire in the history of mankind is dying: The European Empire.  

 The European countries who ruled, exploited, and exhausted their potentials beyond the limits of existence-like the Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Inka, people did before- are now showing all the signs of a dying empire. It started by the end of the second world war and the emancipation of African, South America, Southeast Asia some smaller change in the Karibian islands. But the most demonstrative of all these changes is the migrations of people of the old empire to the source countries of that empire. Even in its small margins it says that 'the world is no longer divided into master\slave, white\black, poor\rich etc. One of the most perceptive books of late is entitled: The World is Flate (By: Thomas Friedman). Flattening the world is not fully done yet, and the Ukraine War attests to a foolishly stubborn Europe to hold on to its old fictitious sense of superiority. That has proven to "always" be achieved by choosing an old inferior adversary who has become an equal to treat as a failure in progressing and catching up with civility. In our case Russia is the barbarian, savage, backward, dictatorship, and Putin is the devil incarnate. In the case of Hong Kong crisis, few months ago, China was the savage barbarian, uncivilized, Un European, undemocratic villain.

Psychoanaldysts have a great deal to say about some social phenomena because they shae

 psychodynamics       wore few posts  about the psychodynamics of group hate, projection, self deception, and how they will be the fabric and background of the way the Ukraine Issue will be understood and managed. I imagined how what would happen if the politicians do not open their eyes to see the danger of  the ideas introduced and promoted by just two uneducated European politicians (Ursula van der !! and the general manager of NATO: Ostenberg) . I did that because it was obvious that that small peaceful country had been foolishly and maliciously tricked into believing what those two pompous idiotic politicians were advocating... join the EU and Nato.  According to the rules of the European Union and Nato itself the Ukraine could not become member of those two organizations without the approval FIRST of the (24!!) current members. As matter of principle Those two politicians were calling for something that would take three years to happen. Those two persons -who are pathetic in their political awareness- thought the matter is Simply an issue of -again- OUR VALUES.

This is not the issue of this post. The issue is ignoring that social and group psychology are the subject and object of development and evolution (getting better in goodness or badness too). The trick is what psychoanalytic principles could guide the thinker in understanding social evolution. As a psychoanalyst I will consider group-hate, projection, negation, denial, changes in fixed repressed ideas or believes, expressing suppressed unconscious thought as thoughts of common knowledge, all that as the new wrap of social development and evolution. I will treat the current events that are proclaimed as old suppressed realities as manifestations of upcoming major social and political changes that we should expect to happen.

It is astonishing, amazing, and appealing to see the degree of political ignorance of American Politician in regard to what is happening now in the world after the DECLARATION OF INDEPENCE (of the USA few years ago!!!!). It is appalling that the USA (330 millions people with a couple of hundred top world Universities) does not have thinkers  to educate the literates let alone the public and update their believes (prejudices). In the fifty years of living next to the USA in Canada I can identify three or maybe four recent thinker\political politicians ( R. Kennedy, Clinton, Obama The American politician is still warning the public of a communist plot when the last communist country in the world was China (Sorry we have to be careful because North Korea is still communist).

The basic undeniable  fact is that everything we deal with in life is in a sate of change and evolution, as our own minds also change with it. Thus, resistance to change and stopping things from evolving  creates illusions that we can go back to understand the present and the future. Someone like me that has lived long remembers what happened between the east and the west, the socialists and the capitalists, Russia and the West, (Stalin\Putin) and (Eisenhauer\Lesinski) Can see the backwardness in even the vocabulary of propaganda and ant propaganda. Tha main point is what will be a test to acknowledging social evolution and change.  neurotic resistance of  social  changes and evolution in us. So, from food gathering to food manufacturing and from the temporary family of males and females to Empires that kept evolving for centuries (Greek, Mongol, Assarian, Babylonian, Roman.,etc.. ), we reached the end of the last in our history , the European civilization and European empire 

Spingler was of the onion that civilizations along with their political structure move from east to  west. Even though if there are important details that could undermine this brilliant idea It at least the merit of telling us a lot about the Ukranian War and the obsessive compulsion hat of the dying Empire to Russia and China.  

All European countries are  amalgams of provinces England, France  large countries like Russia, China, Indea even the USA could and should be derstoof differentl

Psychoanaldysts have a great deal to say about some social phenomena because they shae

 psychodynamics       wore few posts  about the psychodynamics of group hate, projection, self deception, and how they will be the fabric and background of the way the Ukraine Issue will be understood and managed. I imagined how what would happen if the politicians do not open their eyes to see the danger of  the ideas introduced and promoted by just two uneducated European politicians (Ursula van der !! and the general manager of NATO: Ostenberg) . I did that because it was obvious that that small peaceful country had been foolishly and maliciously tricked into believing what those two pompous idiotic politicians were advocating... join the EU and Nato.  According to the rules of the European Union and Nato itself the Ukraine could not become member of those two organizations without the approval FIRST of the (24!!) current members. As matter of principle Those two politicians were calling for something that would take three years to happen. Those two persons -who are pathetic in their political awareness- thought the matter is Simply an issue of -again- OUR VALUES.

This is not the issue of this post. The issue is ignoring that social and group psychology are subject and object of development and evolution (getting better in goodness or badness too). The trick is what psychoanalytic principles could guide the thinker in understanding social evolution. As a psychoanalyst I will consider group-hate, projection, negation, denial, changes in fixed repressed ideas or believes, expressing suppressed unconscious thought as thoughts of common knowledge, all that as the new wrap of social development and evolution. I will treat the current events that are proclaimed as old suppressed realities as manifestations of upcoming major social and political changes that we should expect to happen.

It is astonishing, amazing, and appealing to see the degree of political ignorance of American Politician in regard to what is happening now in the world after the DECLARATION OF INDEPENCE (of the USA few years ago!!!!). It is appalling that the USA (330 millions people with a couple of hundred top world Universities) does not have thinkers  to educate the literates let alone the public and update their believes (prejudices). In the fifty years of living next to the USA in Canada I can identify three or maybe four recent thinker\political politicians ( R. Kennedy, Clinton, Obama The American politician is still warning the public of a communist plot when the last communist country in the world was China (Sorry we have to be careful because North Korea is still communist).

The basic undeniable  fact is that everything we deal with in life is in a sate of change and evolution, as our own minds also change with it. Thus, resistance to change and stopping things from evolving  creates illusions that we can go back to understand the present and the future. Someone like me that has lived long remembers what happened between the east and the west, the socialists and the capitalists, Russia and the West, (Stalin\Putin) and (Eisenhauer\Lesinski) Can see the backwardness in even the vocabulary of propaganda and ant propaganda. Tha main point is what will be a test to acknowledging social evolution and change.  neurotic resistance of  social  changes and evolution in us. So, from food gathering to food manufacturing and from the temporary family of males and females to Empires that kept evolving for centuries (Greek, Mongol, Assarian, Babylonian, Roman.,etc.. ), we reached the end of the last in our history , the European civilization and European empire 

Spingler was of the onion that civilizations along with their political structure move from east to  west. Even though if there are important details that could undermine this brilliant idea It at least the merit of telling us a lot about the Ukranian War and the obsessive compulsion hat of the dying Empire to Russia and China.  

All European countries are  amalgams of provinces England, France  large countries like Russia, China, Indea even the USA could and should be derstoof differentl