Sunday, August 17, 2008
Some food for thought.
Nationalism as Symbiotic Fantasy
Library of Social Science Newsletter
Psychologists recently have debated whether or not there is such a thing as a “symbiotic phase:” a time of development when the infant imagines that he or she is fused with the mother. Perhaps they are looking for love in all the wrong places. In the United States, we sing about America the beautiful with its spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountains and fruited plains. We sing about the land that we love with its mountains, prairies and oceans white with foam.
Freud stated that originally the ego includes everything and only later separates off an external world from itself. Perhaps when people identify with their nations they have recovered the “all-embracing ego feeling.” One doesn't need to look to childhood to study symbiotic fantasy. It is present in the world in which we live. This fantasy constitutes the ground of our being.
When we bind with our nation and its national life, we plug into the delusion of an omnipotent, symbiotic connection to the world. So powerful is this fantasy—so deeply are we identified with it—that (like fish in an ocean) we barely perceive that we are living within it. When CNN beams down at us at the airline terminal, we don't conceive of what we see and hear as something separate from ourselves. That is us beaming down.
In The Nation: A Study in Ideology and Fantasy, Richard Koenigsberg reflects upon the meaning of the most powerful political ideology of our time. What are the sources of this ideology? Why are we so certain that nations exist? Why are we willing to kill and die for these entities? One doesn't need to look to childhood: We may study ourselves by interrogating the meaning of those fantasies that we have projected into the world.
|
|
Nationalism as Symbiotic Fantasy
Library of Social Science Newsletter
Psychologists recently have debated whether or not there is such a thing as a “symbiotic phase:” a time of development when the infant imagines that he or she is fused with the mother. Perhaps they are looking for love in all the wrong places. In the United States, we sing about America the beautiful with its spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountains and fruited plains. We sing about the land that we love with its mountains, prairies and oceans white with foam.
Freud stated that originally the ego includes everything and only later separates off an external world from itself. Perhaps when people identify with their nations they have recovered the “all-embracing ego feeling.” One doesn't need to look to childhood to study symbiotic fantasy. It is present in the world in which we live. This fantasy constitutes the ground of our being.
When we bind with our nation and its national life, we plug into the delusion of an omnipotent, symbiotic connection to the world. So powerful is this fantasy—so deeply are we identified with it—that (like fish in an ocean) we barely perceive that we are living within it. When CNN beams down at us at the airline terminal, we don't conceive of what we see and hear as something separate from ourselves. That is us beaming down.
In The Nation: A Study in Ideology and Fantasy, Richard Koenigsberg reflects upon the meaning of the most powerful political ideology of our time. What are the sources of this ideology? Why are we so certain that nations exist? Why are we willing to kill and die for these entities? One doesn't need to look to childhood: We may study ourselves by interrogating the meaning of those fantasies that we have projected into the world.
