Ever since the fall of Baghdad, when looters went rampaging through the city, there has been a barely spoken, but centuries-old, assumption about ‘the people’ running beneath the ghastly aftermath of the war. And that is that the ‘people’, meaning ‘people en masse’, are incapable of restraining themselves. In this case, two further assumptions are at play. People freed from the yoke of oppressive dictatorship are most at risk – the excesses of the Iraqi populace are laid at the door of Saddam Hussein at the very moment when he loses his power to control them, and not, for example, seen as the responsibility of the occupying armies. Second, the Iraqi people are especially prone to such behaviour because they fall outside the civilising processes of the West. Thus underneath Donald Rumsfeld’s magnificently evasive ‘Stuff happens’ – the formula allows us to think for a second that such things might happen to anyone, including presumably us, or even him – we glimpse a much harsher, discriminatory, form of judgement. Between dictatorship and barbarity, Iraq stands condemned; one reason no doubt why democracy, if that were ever the motive of the war, has to be imported and cannot be entrusted to the Iraqis themselves. Even while the images that poured out of Abu Ghraib prison suggest that there is no foundation whatsoever in reality for such fine, self-serving, discriminations between them and us.
Perhaps one of the most shocking things Freud did in Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in 1921 was to cut from an image of the ‘masses’, not far from that of an uncontrollable mob, to the church and the army in which the most passionate, not to say sacred, group identifications are formed. As I discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, Freud’s word is ‘die Massen’ which, until the latest translation by Kafka translator Jim Underwood as ‘masses’, has always been rendered as ‘group’. Certainly ‘die Massen’ is ambiguous – a translation more faithful to its spirit might be ‘collectivity’, since Freud’s question, throughout the texts which from 1914 onwards deal with this issue, is what moves individuals together, leads them to bind themselves into entities of more than one. But ‘collectivity’ sidesteps the problem, since it avoids the awkward but politically productive blurring of boundaries between masses and groups. Or, say, between looters and the army. Or, between Iraqis running wild in the street, and American and British soldiers in Baghdad jails obeying with unchecked enthusiasm vicious orders from their superiors.
‘We don’t feel like we were doing things we weren’t supposed to do, because we were told to do them’, says Lynndie England. The fact that such orders can be traced back through the highest chain of command, from Abu Ghraib to CIA manuals, and on to Guantanamo, as well as back to British training in Oman and Northern Ireland, did not stop efforts to make her a scapegoat in the United States and England alike. The process is not of course exclusively attached to crimes of war. Outrage at events that are genuinely appalling seems to contain its own sting. ‘I have no doubt’, stated Judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss as she granted lifelong protection to Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, convicted of the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993, ‘they were in serious danger of being killed or at least severely beaten.’ Sadism will be met with sadism. One letter sent to Maxine Carr, ex-girlfriend of Soham murderer Ian Huntley, on her release from prison, told her she would be dead in six days. It is hard to keep moralism on a leash. In the case of Iraq, the stakes are even higher because the violations are not those of one or two individuals whom it is easy to hate, but of a group – a group moreover that is meant to embody our national pride: ‘it’s hard to believe that this actually is taking place in a military facility’, stated Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Guardian in May.
At moments it felt as if exposing this reality, rather than the reality itself, were the worst offence. This is presumably why Geoff Hoon, and not only Geoff Hoon, seemed to think the most important issue was that some of the photographs were faked (as if discrediting the image would make the problem go away). Lynndie England and her partners in crime were despised, less one suspects for the appalling things they have done than for shattering the complacency of Western values, for letting the world see. By the end of this sorry tale, what would be left standing? Not our belief in our government as the guarantor of human rights. Nor in the ethical credibility of the army. Nor even the idea that, in a democracy, the people are restrained by the rule of law – if that were true Huntley, Venables and Thompson, to which we can add Mary Bell, as well as Maxine Carr, would not have to be effectively ‘disappeared’ for the sake of their own protection. Not one of these pillars of Western self-imagining can remain intact. In fact the net should be cast even wider. The lone criminal can be distanced, but not the policies of state. After all, these are the institutions of a government that, democratically elected, represent each and every one of us. We cannot palm our atrocities off on a dictator.
The people can be cruel; our institutions vicious. Knowing this, however, may not in the longer term make any difference. It might even make matters worse. According to Freud, it is when people’s self-love is threatened that they resort to extremes. Far from being humbled, they are far more likely to lash out in narcissistic self-defence. We are in a vicious circle if it is true that there are no limits to what people will do to hold on to their belief in themselves.
It is not a coincidence that Freud’s first extensive analysis of people en masse came after his study of narcissism, which had obliged him to transform completely his model of the mind. It was impossible for him to hold on to his early distinction between love and hunger, the move towards the other and towards the self, once he discovered that people can be their own preferred object, that our most passionate commitment might be to maintaining our best image of ourselves. A group is nothing if not the struggle to preserve its own ideal. This is not, however, an ‘ideal’ as in the sense of the ideal of democracy invoked so often in justification of an illegal war, the sort of ideal that is set in front of us as something to which we, and the world, can aspire. After Freud, things are ethically more complicated, in that such an apparently unobjectionable ideal can be seen as cover for something far less disinterested. What if, in struggling, say, to impose democracy (an oxymoron if ever there was one), we are in fact servicing an ideal, superior, version of ourselves?
It is surely no coincidence that Freud was led to this analysis of narcissism at the outbreak of the First World War. The war was a collective disillusionment – ‘The Disillusionment of the War’ was the title of Freud’s first essay in Thoughts for the Time on War and Death of 1915. What was being shattered by the war, along with the lives of the people over which it trampled, was the self-idealisation of the West. Then, the greatest shock was that war could break out between the civilised nations of Europe. Freud was not talking about the pre-emptive warfare of America’s New Century against the countries of the East, but his idea of what war should be like – a belief falling to pieces as he wrote – bears repeating. ‘We saw [such a war]’, Freud writes, ‘as an opportunity for demonstrating the progress of comity among men since the era when the Greek Amphictyonic Council proclaimed that no city of the league might be destroyed, nor its olive groves cut down, nor its water supply stopped.’ ‘There would of course’, he continues, ‘be the utmost consideration for the non-combatant classes of the population […] And again, all the international undertakings and institutions in which the common civilisation of peace-time had been embodied would be maintained.’ Such a war would have produced ‘horror and suffering’ enough, he recognises, ‘but it would not have interrupted the development of ethical relations between the collective individuals of mankind – the peoples and states’.
In a strange way, warfare becomes the deadly repository of our most tenacious and precarious self-idealisation. Because it is so ugly, it must be good: civilised in its conduct and civilised in its aims. In psychoanalytic terms, you might say that narcissists are so frantic and demanding because of the extent of the internal damage they are battling to repair. Paradoxically, it is because war is so awful that we invest with such ferocity in the belief that it can be the bearer of civilisation to all peoples. Either way, it seems significant that Freud elaborates his theory of narcissism in mourning (‘Mourning and Melancholia’ is also written in 1915) when the self-love of Europe seems lost.
Freud’s bruising catalogue of the reality of the war in which such hope had been so naively invested is worth quoting at length:
Then the war in which we had refused to believe broke out, and it brought – disillusionment […] It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law, which in peace-time the states had bound themselves to observe; it ignores the prerogative of the wounded and the medical service, the distinction between the civil and military sections of the population […] It tramples on all that comes its way as if there were to be no future […] It cuts all the common bonds between the contending peoples and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come.
Even more crucial perhaps is what this conduct of the war does to the relationship between the citizen and the state. It is precisely because the state is the representative of the people, precisely because we are a democracy, that the disillusionment is so intense. What is falling apart is the belief in the virtue of representative institutions. It is starting to cross the minds of the citizens that states might embody the very evils they use to justify the wars against other – totalitarian or what today are called ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ – states. ‘Peoples’, Freud continues, ‘are more or less represented by the states which they form, and these states by the governments which rule them.’ But today the citizen is faced with the dawning recognition – the ‘horror’ to use Freud’s term – that ‘the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrongdoing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolise it, like salt and tobacco’. (Freud uses the same word, ‘der Schrecken’, horror or terror, to categorise both war and the people’s loss of faith.) A belligerent state not only breaks the law in relation to the enemy; it violates the principles which should hold between itself and its citizens: ‘A belligerent state’, Freud writes, ‘permits itself every such misdeed, every act of violence as would disgrace the individual.’ No surprise then that, faced with the disclosure of such misdeeds as those at Abu Ghraib, the state will rush to return them to the citizen precisely as ‘individual disgrace’. Furthermore, the state uses secrecy and censorship to rob its citizens of the critical defences with which they might be able to deal with the reality of war. Truth, we have so often been told, is the first casualty of war. We tend to understand this as referring simply to the censorship of information, but Freud is making another point. Numbing its own citizens’ capacity for judgement is one of the chief war aims of the modern state.
This is I think one of Freud’s most radical moments. Of course we can read these essays at least in part as his response to his own disillusionment in finding his own nation on the wrong side of the First World War: ‘We live in hopes that the pages of an impartial history will prove that that nation, in whose language we write and for whose victory our dear ones are fighting, has been precisely the one which has least transgressed the laws of civilisation.’ ‘But at such a time,’ he continues, ‘who dares to set himself up as judge in his own cause?’ But inside this personal lament is one of his fiercest defences of the people against the democratic state’s monopoly and abuse of violence. For it is not just that the state demands of its citizens a form of virtue from which it so blatantly abstains itself; or that it suppresses the critical faculties of the people at a time when they are more in need of the freedom to exert them than ever; or that it has broken a bond of trust between itself and its citizens at a time when, in the name of patriotism, it is demanding ever more sacrifices. All this is bad enough. Worse however, like an insane parent – passing over for the moment that all parents are a little bit insane – who insists it is being cruel to be kind, the state insists that its worst belligerence is a virtue.
The greatest sacrifice the people are being asked to make on behalf of the state is to give up their right not to believe in it. If there is one thing worse than disillusionment it is not being allowed to recognise that disillusioned is what you are. (As psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once said, it doesn’t matter what children feel provided they are allowed to feel it.) There is a lie at the heart of democracy if the state will sacrifice its citizens’ freedom to take dissent to the limit, and indeed its relationship to them, for the sake of its own violently enacted and no less violently preserved self-regard. Tony Blair’s increasingly desperate statements of conviction would then simply be an inflated example of the trend. ‘I believe in myself’ is the last great performative of an idealist on the rocks. It also exposes the lie since, believing in himself and himself alone, he clearly neither believes in, nor belongs to, the people. ‘It is crucial’, Winnicott argued in his paper ‘Discussion of War Aims’ of 1940 that ‘we should win a military and not a moral victory’: ‘If we fight to exist we do not claim to be better than our enemies.’ How many times have we been told, as though it should make us feel better, that the soldiers’ activities in Abu Ghraib ‘do not compare with Saddam Hussein’s systematic tortures and executions’? As Ahdaf Soueif put it in the Guardian article of May from which I take that quote: ‘This torture started from the very top.’ ‘Hussein is now the moral compass of the West.’
Humiliation is a central component of torture. In Abu Ghraib, as many commentators have pointed out, this humiliation is targeted deliberately at Muslim sensibilities of sexual decorum and pride – a sure sign that these instructions come from the educated corridors of power and not from the blacks and ‘poor white trash’ being sent to do the dirty work of the war. Behind the humiliation there also lies a very carefully thought-out policy of psychic abuse. ‘The purpose of all coercive techniques’, states the Human Resource Exploitation Manual produced by the CIA for Honduras in 1983, ‘is to induce psychological regression […] Regression is basically a loss of autonomy.’ The manual is an updated version of the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual of 1963, according to which such regression has to be traumatically induced: ‘There is an interval […] of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. At this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply.’
This is psychologically very precise. It is almost exactly the scenario laid out by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in his 1995 article on ‘The Structure of Evil’ which describes the ‘psychic death’ or ‘radical infantilisation’ that the serial killer imposes on his victim: ‘With the total collapse of trust and the madness expressed by sudden dementia of the real, the victim experiences an annihilation of adult personality structures and is time-warped into a certain kind of infantile position, possibly depending now for existence itself on the whim of incarcerated madness.’ Incarcerated madness will do nicely for Abu Ghraib. Crucial in both cases is that the subject is made to regress to a state of childlike dependency, at the same time as losing all the reference points that would allow the victim to find her- or himself even in this massively regressed, infantile, world. The key, as the CIA manual puts it, is ‘loss of autonomy’. ‘This structure’, writes Bollas, ‘is part of the unconscious knowledge of the West.’
Far from raising the world to heights of civilisation, the ruling powers of the new century seem to be spending a lot of energy trying to turn both citizen and enemy into children.
Wandering the streets of Paris in 1885, Freud was dismayed by the ‘people’ (he took none of the pleasure of the flâneur of Walter Benjamin). Writing to his fiancée’s sister, he described them as a ‘different species’, as ‘uncanny’, knowing the meaning of neither ‘fear nor shame’: ‘the women no less than the men crowding round nudities as much as they do round corpses in the Morgue’. It would not be until the year after the war, in 1919, that he would formulate his theory of the uncanny as something repressed that returns to haunt us, that is, as something provoking disquiet because it is a piece of ourselves. But, even as he takes his distance in this letter of 1885, he is already recognising that the people have access to a truth about the civilisation, from which he excludes them, and to which he believes himself to belong. If the ‘people’ are shameless and fearless – ‘utterly different’ as he continues in his letter to Minna Bernays – it is because their vulnerability, their place outside privilege, at once gives them licence and increases their vision. ‘Too helpless, too exposed to behave like us’; in their ‘lack of moderation’ they are compensating for being ‘a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sicknesses and evils of social institutions’. In this early letter, the people lose all moderation because they have nothing to lose, no illusions to maintain – in this they are way ahead of the disillusioned citizens of war-torn Europe of 1914. Why on earth should the people believe in the benign powers of social institutions? (They do not have to be told that the state monopolises tobacco and salt.)
The people expose the evils of social institutions, the injustice of culture (what he refers to elsewhere as ‘our present-day white Christian culture’). That is why they are so loose and licensed – they strip the façade. In doing so, they reveal unconscious desires that, however shameless (indeed because they are so shameless), implicate us each and every one. In Mass Psychology, as discussed at more length in Chapter 3, he describes the mass as laying bare ‘the unconscious foundation that is the same for everyone’. Go back to those nudities and corpses in the morgue from the letter of 1885: ‘the women no less than the men crowd round nudities as much as they do round corpses in the Morgue’. It is uncannily resonant of the images of grinning soldiers crowding round the abjectly sexualised inmates of Abu Ghraib. These images are pornographic, as has been pointed out, but in a very specific form. In extremis, they trade on the unconscious association of sex and death. You do not have to accept Freud’s vision of the mob, since that is after all what it is, a vision in which we can recognise all the stereotypes of bourgeois fear, to notice that he has run a line from perversion to truth. Civilisation is unjust (in The Future of an Illusion of 1927, he will state that a culture that fails to satisfy so many of its participants will not, and does not deserve to, survive); our most venerated social institutions are evil; be wary of pointing the finger at the individual who disgraces us, since we are all of us perverts in our dreams.
‘Well may the citizen of the world of whom I have spoken’, Freud writes in ‘The Disillusionment of the War’, ‘stand helpless in a world that has grown strange to him.’ But, he adds, ‘there is something to be said in criticism of his disappointment’ – ‘It is not justified, since it consists in the destruction of an illusion.’ At this unexpected turning point of his essay – Freud was nothing if not a great dramatist in his writing – we discover that what he means by ‘disillusionment’ is not quite what we have been led to expect. It is not the disappointment, say, of a gravely let-down man, but something far closer to ‘disabuse’. Our mistake, it turns out, was to have believed in the first place. In this context, war, at the very moment when the state is doing its utmost to subdue the critical judgement of citizens, might be a rare opportunity. Like ‘the people’, who of course need no such prompting or crisis, we can now see things, see human beings, as they really are. ‘In reality, our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen as high as we believed.’ This is not, finally, a narcissistic lament (‘how have we fallen’ or ‘this does not represent the America that I know’ to cite Bush’s more recent phrase); it is something at once more modest and more devastating. ‘White Christian culture’ should stop kidding itself.
Much follows from this. There is no such thing, Freud states, as ‘ “eradicating” evil’ (‘eradicating’ is in scare quotes). Bush and Blair could perhaps take note. Travelling through Yugoslavia in 1936 and 1937, Freud’s contemporary, Rebecca West, also found herself contemplating the question of evil. In Slav culture, she suggests, we are confronted with the ‘seeming paradox of a fierce campaign against evil with a tolerance of its nature’. ‘We cannot’, she muses, understand this in the West, ‘where we assume that sincere hostility to sin must be accompanied by a reluctance to contemplate it and a desire to annihilate it’. For Freud, on the other hand, the impulses that constitute the ‘deepest essence’ of human nature are ‘neither good nor bad’ in themselves. He will condemn actions but never the drives from which they stem. It is a central tenet of psychoanalysis that if we can tolerate what is most disorienting – disillusioning – about our own unconscious, we are less likely to act on it, less inclined to strike out in a desperate attempt to assign the horrors of the world to someone, or somewhere, else. It is not, therefore, the impulse that is dangerous, but the ruthlessness of our attempts to be rid of it. This might be one reason why illegally occupying armies, who can neither settle nor face their own conscience, become so brutalised – it is their own discomfort they are trying to erase. For historian Richard Overy, this is the lesson of Abu Ghraib, which confronts us with ‘the standard behaviour of troops under pressure, fighting a war whose purpose is hard for them to understand’. In the case of Iraq, the brutality requires a further explanation: ‘The chief culprit is Bush’s war on terror […] the division in the Bush/Blair view of the Middle East into putative “democrats” or terrorists has created a climate of fear.’ The soldiers are the victims of the government’s projections: ‘Ultimate responsibility lies at the top.’
If it is the ideal that is dangerous, it follows that we need to be more wary of collective identifications (no ‘saving ideals’). ‘What psychoanalysis seeks’, writes Moustapha Safouan – the Paris-based Egyptian psychoanalyst and translator of The Interpretation of Dreams and of Hegel’s Phenomenology into Arabic – is to ‘reduce identifications to the minimum requisite for the exercise of our responsibilities.’ Keep the proper distance. In setting this as the goal, analysis does not aim to ‘shelter [the patient] from passions, but from joining in those collective passions in which the intelligence of human groupings normally founders’.
Freud knew that the fierceness with which a group builds and defends its identity was the central question of modern times. But unlike the leaders of our ‘present-day white Christian culture’, he also knew that no group is safe from the dangers of conviction, and that a nation that frees itself from doubt and refuses to question its own motives can place the whole world in peril.