The End of the Last Empire

The European Empire and its Psychology.

( "Well, this is the end of Western Civilization: F. roosvelt 1933")

                                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 chaoes 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 political thnkers who are very different in speicficty and comprehensiveness ( Shomsky, R. Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, with shompsky being in a calss of his own). 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. 

 Back to Politics:

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

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

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

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

 Forwards to Psychoanalysis:

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

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

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

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

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

                                                  Wish and Desire:

 

                    The Psychological Birth of the Other.

 

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

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

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

The Other and the Onset of Differentiation in Psychical Life:

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

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

 The Other and the Onset of Differentiation in Psychical Life:

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

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

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

 

                     2. From Psychoanalysis to Politics and Back

Wish, Desire, and Mass Narcissism

_______________________________

     

1. Politics.

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

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

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

*Two Planted Mistakes:

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

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

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

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

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

  

3.Wish and Desire: 

  

                    The Psychological Birth of the Other. 

 

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

 

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

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

 

The Other and the Onset of Differentiation in Psychical Life: 

 

                                                                

Psychoanalysis:   The Difficult Link Between Theory and Practice.

This is not the regular argument regarding causes and effects, or the link between learning and applying what is learned. It is more a discussion  of something unique about the psychoanalytic theory and its practice.

                                            ...............................................................

         Psychoanalysis-in one way-is similar to all other professions that are conceived as a practice of a theory, or the application of an stablished knowledge. Yet, there is something particular about psychoanalysis which requires a different kind of scrutiny. After Messmer's introduced Hypnotism (magnetism) to the Europeans- of which some were physicians- the notion of a rich world of psychic life just opened the minds of the medical professionals. They accept the notion of experimenting with that phenomenon. The Salpetraire  Hospital in Paris proved that some patients seem to have a different layer of consciousness behind their sick one, parallel but different. Bernheim in Salzburg too ventured to deal with the consciousness that is revealed by hypnotism.  So, in the late eighteen hundreds, and in France more than any other part of Europ, the psychical was given birth  in the form of its coexistence in awareness and unawareness together. It started and argument: witch consciousness instigates the other, and how that due evolves and coexists in all humans and not only patients. We can imagine now what kind of chaotic atmosphere there was at the time. Freud, who was trying psychiatry at the time for a profession went to France (maybe three times) to learn more about the UNCOSNCIOUS.

What I want to emphasize is that Freude's discovery of psychoanalysis was unintentional, but was also still unique. He realized that hypnosis removes-and just removes- a barrier between two psychical entities. This was the basic realization that Freud faced and what remained the core of psychoanalysis whether as a profession or a theory of the subject. In better terms Freud identified the core of the human subject and was not distracted by the details of either consciousness or the unconscious. He, in a stroke of genius, honed in his intellect on the force that separates the two coexisting consciousness. Let us not forget Freude's early great publications like The Interpretation of Dreams, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Book on Jokes, and crowning all that by The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. All those works were about the barrier that creates the psychological phenomena in many aspects of our human life and are also developmental, i.e., we are born with them but they evolve and mature over the childhood years. 

        The early beginnings of psychoanalysis are mainly unspecific and could be confusing for the historian. But- as an example-Freud did not trey to interpret dreams but wanted to know what structures dreams, therefore dreams could be interpreted, i.e be referred to the dreamer. Better to say: Freud had his hand on the door knob that opened the door to the notion of psychoanalyzing; the knob was the human SUBJECT. His sense that the psyche is the way to understand the subject was the breakthrough which is a compound of two separate psychical entities: consciousness and whatever is unconscious. This is what evolved into psychoanalysis: listening to the patient's speech (symptoms, dreams acting out, etc.) and finding out what was not said but gave the clue to its unconsciousness presence in the person's consciousness.

                Now we can go back to the question: Is analysis a practice of a theory or a theory that promised a practice.

            The answer, which needs further elaboration is: psychoanalysis is neither of the two because any attempt at separating the two constituents results in two distinctly different understanding of psychoanalysis. Interpreting a dream separately from the dreamer (Alexander's Dream for instance) says something about the dream, but interpreting a dream in the process of therapy would tell us  something about the dreamer. In psychoanalysis we encounter the two distinct entities of the object (the work of art, the human act separate from subject, slips of the tong, etc.,etc..) and the subject, the patient ,the politician, Better: analyzing the subject's product or his the art during his therapeutic process is different from the same thing happening outside therapy! Interpreting the subject's associations in attempt to bring his psyche into focus is not the same as interpreting  psychical product to get to his psyche. We can analyze the patient and his art work and get two different results. We can understand the human subject when being a patient and understand his psychological in his relations with peers. But, up till now we -psychoanalysts- believe that we are should be using the same psychoanalysis. Therefore, we think or should think, that we are applying the same theory in both cases. In clearer words we believe that we have a theory that could be applied in any field of human endeavors. we should go back to the main Freudian dis discovery.  Messmer revealed the existence of a hidden or disguised aspect of the subject. the French psychiatrists formulated that discovery as a duality with the  human mind. Working on the link within that duality Freud discovered that that duality is not just in psychopathology but duality is the nature of everything related to the human subject, and in all his endeavors. He also managed to formulate  a theory of  the link (s)  between those dualities. THUS, the dual nature of the psyche was made a duality between theory and practice, when the psychotherapy was the only field of applying the notion of duality. 

            In the early sixties of the last century I was assigned- as anew graduate of the first department of psychology in the middle east- to the position of assistant researchers in anew research institute. I was to work on the problem of prostitution as a step toward legalizing it in conservative religious society,      Egypt. At that time  lady in Paris called Maries Choies -published a book on the psychoanalysis of prostitution. I was struck by her attempt to squeeze psychoanalysis in a socio-economic phenomenon. I even tried myself to do something similar with (Blood Feud in Upper Egypt) and reached the same conclusion: psychosocial phenomena have their own meaning, and psychoanalysis is viable in individual cases only. It became more obvious that the theory of psychoanalysis is about the nature of the subject who in a way unique because it shows what the sociologist misses, and generalizing from studying him is unacceptable unless we try to reverse the sequence of action: from the general to the individual (which will also prove futile). Thus, psychoanalysis is not a theory that has a practice but a theory of the human condition and could suggest approaches toward therapy. I felt satisfied that I can  understand psychopathology in the way that would make treating it fits the Freudian notions of the unconscious (see Freuds paper on the Unconscious (

            We, or just some of us, take notice of those duality(ties) of the subject. What we should-the least-do is to seriously consider an academic approach to studying the dualities in the human psyche. The study of both the brain functions that are behind the role of language in making the psyche be expressed linguistically is an issue that belongs to several academic fields. We need to rid ourselves from the notion of improving psychoanalysis and venture in speculating about what is feasibly new. It cannot be improved but it could and should give birth to serious academic works on language and the dualities of the subject. It is not theory or practice; it is language and the duality of the subject. 

This aspiration is stemming from the lake of a link between the subject and the human phenomena. Therefore, psychoanalysis is not a theory that could become a practce, or a theory that we could derive from it a practice. It is a branch of epistemology that is ready to tacle the subject of the dual existence of the human subject.   

Projection and Denial 

    This post is a response to three reactions to my last posting regarding projection as an essential step in relating to another. My point is that we do not have another means to relate to another except by projecting our entity (identity) onto him to start communicating, then depending on the narcissism involved in the situation we would withdraw back some of our projection but never all of it. The objections to my formulation reminded me of a paper by Freud [Negation, 1925, S.E, XIX]. I reread the paper -after more than fifty years of the first reading- to find in it something quite central in projection. According to Freu's paper negating an idea is denying or negating projection: "if you think that I am saying this to prove your interpretation is wrong you are wrong". However, and as Freud says in his paper, negating takes different modes of expression to confirm itself, like admitting to something to deny another. 

    The point I want to make is that in projection (unconscious) there is an implicit negation of something (unconscious) related to what is said, in negation (conscious) there is an unconscious projection involved. As an example: a newly married man was making well known that he loves his father-in-law like a real father and negated that joking about him in public is expressing something different. What I want to clarify is that analytically speaking there is no psychological phenomenon that is not a duality but not a duality of Cs.\Uns. The duality is between two psychological entities of the same nature. So, a projective sentence would be both Cs and Ucs, as its implicit negation would also be of the same nature. Underlining this point makes the analysts look at projection as an entity of duality which would then require to be looked at as an antithesis of its negation. 

    In clinical practice we should examine the bipolarity of each conflict but by also revealing the bipolarity within that main bipolarity. This is the best way to bypass the structural polarity of Cs\Ucs. and get to the psychodynamic of psychological life or at least the therapeutic process. It also shows that a psychical entity has within it a denial of something not openly mentioned. In other words, projection, or the basic link we have with the other, is fundamentally negation of soemthing that either start a relationship or drop it before iy begins, unless the Other can bypass the negation in it.

    Projection and negation are the two sides of the coin of relating. Just think of transference to put this sentence in perspective,

   

 A second and closer look at Projection:

        The most difficult aspect in training in psychoanalysis is to get the candidate to translate his findings in the patient's association into therapeutic insights. Freud's clinical cases demonstrate this point well. He did not offer any therapeutic gestures derived from his great discoveries in the psychodynamics of his patients. Possibly because he did not know then how to do that. Therefore, it is imperative Freud's most important findings was projection. It is rather impossible to initiate a dialogue with the other (interpersonal relation) without at least a period of projection. To understand the other, you have to do some projection as a start, and only as start, and then it is an open field of possibilities of understanding or misunderstanding. 

                                             -----------------------------

        I have good reason to get back to the concept of Projection to present some aspects that were dismissed because the concepts of defense mechanisms are no longer in focus. They were -in the sixties of the last century- and were great psychoanalytic theoretical advancements that took us forward to the notion of the "schools". It was the main and first concept that analysts used to explain paranoia.... leading to identifying psychical conditions by the dominant defense mechanism in it (obsession: splitting etc.). In other words: psychoanalysis, fifty years ago, was dealing with conditions that had characteristics and symptoms, revealing some psychical manifestations related to 'defenses' against the unconscious. Presently, it deals with disorders not disease entities. Psychopathologies that we presently encounter clinically make the old concept of 'defense mechanisms' redundant. Yet, we should look closer at what we are abandoning, because there is more to them than what meets the present eye. 

        Projection was the mechanism of paranoia 'par excellence' that gave a good perspective to the difference between denying an unconscious wish by projecting it on the other (he wants to seduce my wife denying his wish for his wife to be seduced) and to detect the subject's own intention. Projection and paranoia have not disappeared, but "projection" has lost its psychoanalytic meaning and function and is rarely detected. The literature that leads to neglecting the concept of projection ignored two central issues in projection: the narcissistic nature of the projective relationship, and the projective nature of a narcissistic relationships.  The paranoid person is narcissistic, and the narcissist (the average person) relates paranoically to his narcissistic objects (the 'projected' part of his-self in the encounter).  This is a reason to go back to the mechanism of projection since we know now that there is no interpersonal relationship that does not have some paranoid projection in it. We should also differentiate between projection as just an initiation of a relationship and as a personal way of relating..period. Since we all do some projecting in our daily life and the literature is well supplied with works on the subject I will try to move to the social aspect of projection because in many cases it is used consciously to deal with group narcissism. 

        Projection: The Social Phenomenon: 

 I am reading a book by T. Dicks entitled Churchill and Orwell about their views during the Second World War in regard to the war. The detailed account of the mental set and psychological reactions of those two insightful persons to the events reveal that it is impossible for a social phenomenon (groups or masses) to take hold of a group or a nation without projection because it encompasses all other different psychological reaction that come individually. The masses do project first and then react in their own individual ways. What attracted my attention to this rarely considered phenomenon is our reaction to change in projection. I was discussing the situation in the Kraimian  war with a well-informed lady whom I agreed with regarding Putin's position and management of the war. Suddenly she said how much of what was said about Hitler could be wrong as the Western media is doing with Putin now. My first reaction was: no way... Hitler was mentally disturbed. But after a short while I thought of Churchill and how we thought of him as genius when in fact the man was not that giant. I remember as a kid that this is what my father said about him: a British Giant. 

        The issue is that in projecting our own wishes onto others we get in return the narcissism that we lose by choosing as our substitute. Thus, projection becomes the psychical mechanism that preserves narcissism when the person is not in a predicable situation, or relationship.  In the case of individual relationships projection is managiable. The analyst has a choice (based on the kind of patient he treats) to replace projection with reality or let the fading away of projection allow reality to do the job. In group situations it is not possible to replace fantasy with reality because reality loses its personal quality and fantasy becomes the will of the masses. The leader keeps the sense of narcissism active because