Political Freud: A History

Like capitalism, racism, and anti-Semitism, the problem of war has spawned a substantial body of political Freudian reflection. The main reason for this has been that twentieth-century wars have been “total wars,” which blurred the boundaries between battlegrounds and home fronts and forced governments to motivate the masses to lay down their lives. This required a new spirit of war that might be likened to the new spirit of capitalism discussed in chapter 1. In participating in these wars, and in seeking to understand them psychoanalytically, something like a theory not just of war but of the twentieth-century subject emerged.

Developed in the aftermath of World War I, the Freudian idea of the ego was displaced in a second historic encounter between psychoanalysis and war centered on World War II. This encounter drew on explorations of early childhood, and especially of the role of the mother in development, which had begun in the 1920s. These investigations produced a new tendency in psychoanalysis—object relations—that became central to the social-democratic welfare state. When Britain went to war against Nazi Germany, object relations theorists like Melanie Klein helped reconstruct an ancestral justification of war, which to some extent served as a new spirit of war. The earliest relation to the mother, they argued, laid the basis for ethical responsibility: in other words, soldiers fought to protect those who were close to them and vulnerable, especially women and children. In emphasizing the role of the mother, object relations theorists were deepening the Freudian idea of the ego by making explicit its basis in primary family relations and its relation to gender. At the same time, they minimized or ignored the role of the ego as the site of reason and self-reflection, thereby paving the way for today’s psychoanalysis, which replaced the concept of the ego with the concept of the self, as in such terms as self-image or self-esteem.

The evolution of a political Freudian tradition centered on war can therefore be situated in the context of the shift from the classical Cartesian or Kantian view of the rational, independent, “bounded” ego—which stands at the cusp of the modern world—to today’s view that the ego is formed through recognition, object relations, and language. At the center of this shift, as Butler’s work suggests, is the place of vulnerability in our conception of the human subject. For Freud, as we shall see, vulnerability was ontological and genetic in the sense that it arises from our prolonged infancy and is constitutive of human development. For Butler, by contrast, vulnerability has become normative, in the sense that its recognition constitutes the central ethical imperative of political life. This difference has an important consequence. Freud’s aim in exposing what he termed our “preference for the active role” was to strengthen the ego, not unveil its illusions of self-mastery. By the time we get to Butler, however, the point of drawing on psychoanalysis is to dispel the very idea of an individual ego and to bring to light instead the underlying network of unconscious relations and dependencies, which are seen as constituting our humanity. In moving from the ego to the self, from autonomy to recognition, and from an ontological to a normative approach to vulnerability, have we advanced or weakened our understanding of war, of politics, and of the human psyche? That is the question this chapter poses.

The nineteenth century gave an answer to this question, namely, that in dying one does not lose one’s life but rather sacrifices it for one’s nation. This answer connected modern nationalism to an older warrior ethic ultimately rooted in sacrificial religions. Sacrifice lends dignity to peoples, nations, or causes, unifies the past and present under a common sign, and makes a claim on future generations. Identifying soldiers’ deaths as a series of meaningful and consecrated events gives the nation its incomparable reality.¹ Sacrifice also channels male heroism, drawing on ritual, race, tribalism, and the idea of a national founding. During World War I the warrior ethic, romantic nationalism, and the ideals of martyrdom and self-sacrifice began to come into question.

After an initial burst of enthusiasm, World War I turned out to be a matter of mass, insensate violence rather than heroism and sacrifice. The unprecedented scale of catastrophe, the defensive stalemate symbolized by the trenches, the new landscape of mines and no-man’sland, the fear of being buried alive, the deafening sound and vibration, the insidiousness of gas, the disappearance of the distinction between night and day, identification with the enemy, and the narrowing of consciousness all upended nineteenth-century expectations. The new Freudian mind picture, which included such notions as resistance, defenses, cathexis (i.e., Besetzung or occupation), trauma (wound), repression, and Zwangsneurose (stalemate) seemed more pertinent than the search for glory and honor. Shell shock, then, provided the first occasion for the encounter between psychoanalysis and war.

Within a year of the outbreak of war, hundreds of thousands of cases appeared on both sides. Although originally explained as an impairment of the nervous system resulting from an explosion, psychiatrists increasingly turned toward psychological explanations, especially after the symptoms of shell shock were successfully removed by hypnosis. Even then the persistence of the older warrior ethic revealed itself in such diagnoses as “greed neurosis” and “pension-struggle neurosis,” which suggested malingering. Psychoanalysis cast the matter in a different light. Ernst Simmel, a young German student of Freud’s, wrote: “It is not only the bloody war which leaves such devastating traces…it is also the difficult conflict in which the personality finds itself…. Whatever in a person’s experience is too powerful or horrible for his conscious mind to grasp and work through filters down to the unconscious levels of his psyche. There it lies like a mine, waiting to explode.”²

What distinguished the new approach was the observation that shell shock was precipitated by the unnerving experience of passive waiting, rather than by the fear of death per se. By 1916 the psychiatrists’ favored explanation for shell shock became the enforced “passivity” of the trenches. According to one chaplain, a “high degree of nervous tension is commonest among men who have…to remain inactive while being shelled. For the man with ordinary self-control this soon become a matter of listening with strained attention for each approaching shell, and speculating how near it will explode…. An hour or two…is more than most men can stand.”³ The British War Office also concluded that the primary cause of shell shock was “prolonged danger in a static position.” Such explanations seemed vindicated when the incidence of shell shock plummeted after the German offensives of 1918.⁴

Analysts developed the link between passivity or passive suffering and shell shock by noting a second characteristic of shell shock, namely repetition. Far from repressing their battlefield experiences, as Freudians would have expected, the victims of shell shock repeated them in dreams, symptoms, and anxiety attacks. How could the repetition of a painful experience be explained? Freud had already addressed this problem. In the clinical situation, he argued, patients feared being in a passive, vulnerable position. They expressed their “resistance” to analysis by refusing to remember their experiences; instead they repeated them. To illustrate this point, he described his grandson’s behavior when his mother left him. The child invented a game in which he alternately hid and produced a ball, saying da/fort, here/gone. “At the outset,” Freud wrote, his grandson “was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was…he took on an active part.”⁵ By analogy, shell shock appeared as a misguided attempt to master the experience of passively waiting in the trenches by repeating the experience of being bombed.

The observation of shell shock in war, along with resistance in the consulting room, led Freud to a revised theory (or “mythology,” as he called it) of the instincts, namely the conflict between life and death, or between order and disorder, or between an open, homeostatic system and entropy. Shell shock also led Freud to formulate his theory of the ego. Infused with the life instincts, the ego is a binding force, but it is also subject to the conservative or regressive pull of the instincts toward lesser organization and ultimately toward death. Sexuality, which Freud formerly thought of as a disruptive force, he now thought of it as part of the life instincts or eros and therefore aimed at cohesion and binding. Critical to Freud’s emerging theory of the ego is the transition from instinctual life to something like reason, insight, or subjectivity, which he would later call Geistigkeit, the product of sublimation or “instinctual renunciation.” In light of the rebellion against passivity evident in both the shell shock outbreak and in his own therapeutic work, Freud began to speak of the ego’s “preference for the active role”—in both sexes. But in no sense did Freud valorize passive wishes, rather, he sought to bring them into consciousness or the ego.

As the war was ending, psychoanalysis increasingly became an ego psychology. This was shown by Freud’s famous formula, where id was there shall be ego. But this was no longer the Cartesian or transcendental ego, which was reason supposedly emancipated from the instincts. Rather the Freudian ego was the precipitate of inclinations, drives, love objects, and identifications. Its task was not to gain access to “clear and direct ideas,” as in Descartes, but rather to mediate between different and conflicting instinctually driven demands, including cravings emanating from the id, self-criticisms coming from the superego, and competing representations of the social world. Freud now rejected his own prewar view that the basic conflict in the mind was between consciousness and the repressed unconscious. That view implied that the repressed was “afraid to be discovered.”⁶ But the fact of repetition, evident in shell shock and in analytic work, suggested that the repressed was continuously trying to break through to consciousness. Since it was the ego that prevented it from doing so, a great deal of psychoanalysis thenceforth was directed at analyzing the ego’s defenses rather than interpreting unconscious wishes directly.

Freud’s emerging theory of the ego was accompanied by a comprehensive transformation in the understanding of gender, one that psychoanalysis both reflected and advanced. Because of its emphasis on the defensive denial of vulnerability, the analytic understanding of shell shock brought with it a new picture of manhood, one that reflected the decline of the warrior ethic. Garfield Powell, a British army diarist incensed by antiwar talk during the Somme offensive, exclaimed: “Shellshock! Do they know what it means? Men become like weak children, crying and waving their arms madly, clinging to the nearest man and praying not to be left alone.”⁷ Captain McKechnie, in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, pleaded: “Why isn’t one a beastly girl and privileged to shriek.” In a fictionalized treatment of a historic episode, the novelist Pat Barker reconstructed the English doctor W. H. R. Rivers’s reflections as he began to apply analytic methods to shell shock patients:

In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war, and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, [Rivers] was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing. They had been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men. And yet he himself was a product of the same system…. In advising his young patients to abandon the attempt at repression and to let themselves feel the pity and terror their war experience inevitably evoked, he was excavating the ground he stood on.⁸

Rivers treated the British poet Siegfried Sassoon for shell shock. Sassoon, wounded, deranged, later recalled Rivers walking into his hospital room: “Without a word he sat down by the bed; and his smile was benediction enough for all I’d been through. ‘Oh Rivers, I’ve had such a funny time since I saw you last!’ I exclaimed. And I understood that this is what I had been waiting for.”⁹

The new awareness of male vulnerability was accompanied by a transformation in women’s relations to men, especially their sexual relations. When Vera Brittain began nursing at the front in 1915, she had “never looked upon the nude body of an adult male.” But “from the constant handling of their lean, muscular bodies,” she not only found herself at home with physical love, but also was led “to think of the male of the species not as some barbaric, destructive creature who could not control his most violent instincts but as a hurt, pathetic, vulnerable, patient, childlike victim of circumstances far beyond his control.”¹⁰ The older identification of men with the warrior ethic persisted, as in Virginia Woolf’s 1938 claim that the cause of war lay in men’s desire for “other people’s fields and goods,” their insistence on making “frontiers and flags, battleships and poison gas,” and their willingness to “offer up their own lives and their children’s lives.”¹¹ But for most other women, a new awareness of male vulnerability fostered interpersonal tenderness and responsiveness. The result was a conflict between the prewar suffragist mothers who had spoken regularly of the “sex war” and called marriage “legalized prostitution,” and the postwar, jazz age, Freudian-influenced flappers who, the New York Times noted, could “take a man’s view as her mother never could.”¹² In short, a tendency toward reconciliation between the sexes began to emerge, based on each sex’s awareness of its own and the other sex’s vulnerabilities.

After the war, young men and women turned against the earlier honor code and the aristocratic society on which it had rested. Thomas Mann, reading a 1921 newspaper review of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, wrote in his diary that the book signaled the “end of Romanticism.”¹³ By this Mann meant to signal the role that romantic ideas of the warrior self and heroic sacrifice could play in bringing reactionary, ultimately fascist forces to power in Germany. In the hope of finding an alternative to romanticism, he turned to Freud’s account of the fragile contingent ego, which stood in a force field “of destructive torrents and explosions,” both internal and external.¹⁴ Even the still distant United States felt the force of the wartime revelations. In 1895 Oliver Wendell Holmes, a member of the Civil War generation, could still tell the Harvard graduating class that only in war could men pursue “the divine folly of honor.”¹⁵ In 1929 Ernest Hemingway wrote that words like honor and glory had become obscene.¹⁶

Postwar social democracy developed as the alternative to the older, honor-based aristocratic societies for three related reasons. It recognized and accepted human vulnerability, it recognized the new, more egalitarian, relations between men and women, and it sought to integrate the lower classes into an organic conception of democracy. Postwar European psychoanalytic culture was overwhelmingly social democratic in this sense. The first postwar psychoanalytic convention, held in Communist Budapest in 1918, passed a resolution urging analytic societies to prepare for “mass,” i.e., publically financed, therapy. Freud explained: “the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery…the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis.”¹⁷ During the twenties and thirties most European analytic societies offered large numbers of low-cost analyses aimed at workers and their families. Analytic institutes offered public lectures targeted at the working classes, while the term applied analysis emerged to describe analytic work in nursery schools, child guidance clinics, teenage consultations, and social work. “Red Vienna,” which donated a building to the analytic society, was especially supportive of what Elizabeth Danto called “Freud’s free clinics.”¹⁸

Postwar social democracy and reform was also infused with antiwar sentiment. The League of Nations was founded in 1919 with great hopes, and its covenant included such reforms as compulsory arbitration for international disputes, sanctions, and arms reduction. Maternalist feminists like Jane Addams and Helene Stöcker turned support for motherhood toward the antiwar cause. Nonviolence emerged to supplement civil disobedience as a serious philosophy on the left. Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism was revived, as was his belief that it was the “masses of men” who were truly responsible for the crimes of the era and not their ostensible leaders, whom he compared to “the brooms fixed in front of the locomotive to clear the snow from the rails,” meaning that the politicians called out empty moral slogans and casus belli in order to divert the masses from their own destructive passions. Time magazine made Gandhi their Man of the Year in 1930. In 1933 students began signing the “Oxford Pledge,” which announced that under no circumstances would they support the “government in any war it may conduct.”¹⁹

Prodded by the League of Nations, Freud and Albert Einstein exchanged letters over the question of war. In 1932 Freud asked Einstein, “How long shall we have to wait before the rest of mankind become pacifists too?” adding, “whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.”²⁰ If we unpack this statement, we can understand Freud’s thinking concerning war. As the product of the nineteenth-century classical education, Freud took “civilization” to mean political order and justice; Rome was the paradigmatic case. But by “civilization” he also meant, psychoanalytically, eros or the work of binding. Viewed psychoanalytically, vulnerability is the core of the human situation; the ego is important because it is the only part of the mind that can shed light into the darkness of the depths. In a 1926 work, Freud evoked the “biological factor” that underlay the dangers faced by the ego and the reasons for conflict in the mind:

the long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence. Its intrauterine existence seems to be short in comparison with that of most animals, and it is sent into the world in a less finished state. As a result, the influence of the real external world upon it is intensified and an early differentiation between the ego and the id is promoted. Moreover, the dangers of the external world have a greater importance for it, so that the value of the object which can alone protect it against them and take the place of its former intra-uterine life is enormously enhanced. The biological factor, then, establishes the earliest situations of danger and creates the need to be loved which will accompany the child through the rest of its life.²¹

The decline of the warrior ethic opened the problem of motivating a democratic citizenry for war. During World War II this problem was solved for Britain and the United States in the most efficient manner, namely through an attack from the outside. For the British, the 1939–40 German bombing of London, one observer wrote, was experienced as “a natural disaster, which fosters a single spirit of unity binding the whole people together.”²³ Similarly, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a day “that will live in infamy,” in Franklin Roosevelt’s famous phrase, had such a powerful effect that in the year 2000, a full year before 9/11, the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, directed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, was already ruminating on “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” that could motivate Americans for military action in the Middle East as they had been motivated for action in the Far East and Europe earlier.²⁴

Important as an attack from the outside was in motivating British and American support for World War II, there was also a new basis for national solidarity, namely social democracy. Underlying social democracy was a powerful new sense of the early mother-infant relationship, exemplified by the terms homeland and motherland. During the First World War, Freud called the mother’s body “the former Heim of all human beings,” adding “whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,’ we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body.”²⁵ In the United States, James Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) ends with a young mother breast-feeding a starving vagrant, a symbol for nurturance, peace, and security. In turning toward the mother, psychoanalysis was both reflecting and advancing the maternalist iconography of social-democratic nationhood. This iconography shaped America and Britain’s participation in World War II.

In building the welfare state, some believed that an entire nation could share a common project, as during the New Deal, or even that international relations could be solidaristic, as Popular Front Bolsheviks urged. For most people, however, as Robert Westbrook has shown, such universal ideals were too thin to justify the sacrifice of young men and women in war. In 1942 Norman Rockwell, asked by the Saturday Evening Post to illustrate what Rockwell regarded as Roosevelt’s highfalutin rhetoric of the “four freedoms,” intuited that modern citizenship rested on immediate, particularistic, and family-centered loyalties, not on dreams of universal brotherhood. Accordingly, Rockwell sought to render the Four Freedoms “in simple everyday scenes. Freedom of Speech—a New England town meeting. Freedom from Want—a Thanksgiving dinner.” Freedom of religion became an older couple praying at a local church. Freedom from fear became a husband and wife tucking their children in at night. Aiming to express democratic ideals “in terms everybody can understand,” Rockwell created a sense of the modern American nation as rooted in concrete particularistic experiences.²⁶

Psychoanalysis, increasingly cast as a familial and mother-centered ideology in the 1930s and 1940s, spoke to that sense and thus played an important role in World War II. In the U.S., every doctor in the military was taught the basic principles of analysis; psychoanalytic theories of morale and group psychology informed estimations of the effects of civilian bombing; psychoanalytic theories of culture were used to design the occupations of Germany and Japan.²⁷ However, the fullest development of the psychoanalytic theory of the ego or, as it now appeared, subject occurred in Britain. There the stronger communal, class-conscious background, the passionate—Bloomsbury-inspired—interest in the new middle-class currents of personal life, and the large number of female analysts turned Freud’s conception of the ego as reflecting the defensive denial of vulnerability into a full-fledged theory of the mother-infant relationship. Melanie Klein was the central figure in this transformation.

Klein’s thought rested on the idea that the original basis of human society was matriarchal. After World War I, Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish emigré to England, had returned from the Trobriand Islands claiming he could not locate a single myth of origin in which the father was assigned a role in procreation. In 1924 Robert Briffault’s The Mothers argued that all forms of social organization arose from the need for prolonged maternal care. Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) portrayed the maternal village as the precursor of the paternal town. Based on the excavations of Minoan-Mycenean civilization in Crete, Jane Harrison reinterpreted Greek tragedies as reflecting the conflict between earth mother goddesses and patriarchal, militarized invaders, symbolized by Zeus. According to Harrison the “archpatriarchal bourgeois” (Zeus) imposed the heterosexual family on a matriarchal, chthonic, woman-centered order.²⁸

With this matricentric paradigm in her background, Klein rethought psychoanalysis so that the psyche was understood to arise from, and never lose the connection to, the mother. This resulted in key differences from Freud. For Freud the main problem was strengthening the ego so as to give the individual freedom from impulses, from social pressures, and from impersonal representations of internalized authority. For Klein the problem was to forge and sustain personal relations, beginning with the relation to the mother. For both thinkers, the individual struggled to achieve goodness, but for Freud the struggle was Kantian and moral, whereas for Klein it was concrete and relational. For Freud, the internal world was dominated by the duty to respect universal norms; for Klein, it was dominated by responsibility to particular others to whom one had incurred obligations resulting from specific relations and circumstances. For Freud, the moral core of the person was formed in conflicts deriving from the “laws” that constitute our humanity, such as the incest taboo; for Klein, the core conflicts reflected frustrations in obtaining basic needs, such as milk or attention, from immediate others and in the context of real or imagined rivals or enemies. British analysts used this Kleinian or “relational” perspective to develop a “feminine” alternative to Freud—an ethic of care instead of an ethic of justice. Largely, although not entirely, encompassing women, the Kleinian circle elaborated a new, mother-daughter, mother-son, and sister-sister discourse that influenced Britain’s self-understanding during World War II.

In this letter Riviere cast Klein in the role of the mother. Thus she asks Klein to instruct, and, in so doing, to protect her children in the face of the emergency. Correspondingly, the most significant male role is not that of the husband or father but that of the son. The key question is whether the son has the capacity to fight for his mother, his sisters, and their children, which is to say, for those who are vulnerable. In her response Klein argued that the son should have learned from his own vulnerability in childhood, that is, from his relation to his mother, to feel responsibility for others. But the English sons are “absent,” “plotting and scheming with the destructive father,” supine in relation to phallic, “hard,” and dangerous males, as the Nazis portrayed themselves. The same weakness that leads to what Klein saw as British men’s unconscious complicity with fascism prevents them from recognizing their responsibilities to women and children. For her, accordingly, the relation to the mother means recognizing vulnerability and dependence. The relation to the mother is the key to ethical responsibility.

Klein’s rethinking of the theory of the ego found expression in the British welfare state, which began to be constructed during the war, on the model of the famous Beveridge Report, which highlighted the mother-child relationship. The precipitating event behind the welfare state was the bombing of the working-class East End of London in 1942. After the bombing, the queen announced her support for socialized medicine, remarking, “The people have suffered so much.”³⁰ The bombing resulted in the evacuation of approximately 3.5 million people to the countryside. Many of the evacuees were children, many of them poor, many separated from their mothers and fathers who remained behind to do war-related work.³¹ The event helped the British to see themselves as a community organized around the need to protect vulnerable children.

This sense of the nation as a child-centered communal project was apparent in the sculptures of Henry Moore. The most celebrated work of art produced during the war, Moore’s Madonna and Child, was unveiled in 1943. The sculpture resulted from the initiative of Reverend Walter Hussey, who wanted to see the Church of England retake its leading role in the arts. Hussey turned to Moore because of Moore’s drawings of individuals and families who had occupied the London tubes, against official orders, during the Blitz. Moore’s drawings symbolized the mingling of public and private in a city under siege, as well as the attempt to care for children in a semicommunal environment. The drawings, Hussey wrote, “possess a spiritual quality and a deep humanity as well as being monumental and suggestive of timelessness.” At the dedication of the sculpture, Hussey told the congregation: “The Holy Child is the centre of the work, and yet the subject speaks of the Incarnation—the fact that the Christ was born of a human mother—and so the Blessed Virgin is conceived as any small child would in essence think of his mother, not as small and frail, but as the one large, secure, solid background to life.”³²

England’s quasi-Christian idea of national unity based on a common relation to the mother also inspired an almost mythic sense of identification with core Western or European values. Whereas during World War I German music had been frowned upon and even banned, during World War II, the allied symbol for victory was the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (V in Morse code). Lunchtime concerts were held at the National Gallery (emptied of paintings), bombs sometimes exploding overhead. During one of the most famous concerts, filmed by the documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, the pianist Myra Hess played Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata followed by Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” In Kenneth Clark’s reminiscence, “in common with half the audience, I was in tears. This is what we had all been waiting for—an assertion of eternal values.”³³

George Orwell’s essay “Socialism and the English Genius,” written in London at the height of the bombardment, was a bit more skeptical about the feeling of familial solidarity, but affirmed it nonetheless. Orwell called Britain

What was needed, Orwell concluded, was a democratic revolution that would “break the grip of the monied class.”³⁴ While a fully democratic revolution was not to be, to some extent Orwell’s hopes were achieved in 1948 when Britain became the first Western country to provide free health care to the entire population, the first based not on the insurance principle, in which entitlement follows contribution, but on the principle of social citizenship, and the first to pay for psychological counseling, thanks to the lobbying of the British analysts.³⁵

In the course of advancing a new spirit of war based on concrete obligations to others, first British psychoanalysis, and then American, was remade as a theory of the mother-infant relationship. However, this object relations theory, as I have suggested, was ambiguous in its implications. On the one hand, by demonstrating the depth at which human beings are connected, it highlighted their struggle to create what Klein called “whole objects” in personal relations, art, and democratic social organization. In that sense it gave psychological depth to social democracy. At the same time, it began to lose the idea that reason or rationality was at the core of the individual, an idea espoused by such thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and Kant and profoundly extended by Freud. In that sense it weakened the ties between psychoanalysis and critical thought, spawning a therapeutic culture, but not one devoted to justice. Klein’s successors, such as D. W. Winnicott, Harry Guntrip, and Ronald Fairbairn, resolved the ambiguity implicit in object relations by reducing the psyche to its intersubjective relations, in other words, to the demand for recognition. The result was a declining importance of the idea of the ego. As Peter Homans has written, “under the impress of…social structural change and augmented by national mourning over the losses inflicted by a terrible war…clinical and theoretical concerns with attachment, loss and the social world of patients” replaced the analysis of the ego.³⁶ The fact that we find ourselves in a wholly different psychoanalytic landscape today is clear in our third case study of the interplay between psychoanalysis and war, Judith Butler’s analysis of the U.S. response to 9/11.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen radical Islamists hijacked four U.S. airplanes and used three of them to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The immediate response of people throughout the world was one of sympathy and identification with the United States, exemplified by the famous Le Monde headline, “We are all Americans.” The Bush administration, however, used the opportunity to pursue a misguided war in Iraq, which turned much of the world against the U.S. After the attacks, the U.S. began to use torture against suspected terrorists, and Americans became accustomed to living in a heightened atmosphere of fear. Barack Obama gained the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 largely by promising to reverse the Bush policies, but on the fundamentals he perpetuated them. What, if anything, has psychoanalysis to teach us about this event?

For an answer, I propose to examine the arguments made by the philosopher Judith Butler in her 2003 book Precarious Life. Written in almost immediate “response to conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression” that followed 9/11, Butler’s book evokes a period when “US boundaries were breached [and] an unbearable vulnerability was exposed.” Why, Butler asked, did vulnerability lead to military action and aggression, rather than to the higher level of global communication that seemed possible in the immediate aftermath of the attack? As we shall see, Butler’s answer reflects the interweaving of contemporary psychoanalysis with poststructuralism, feminism, and phenomenology, especially the view that the ego is formed through recognition, object relations, and language. In addition, I will draw on recent work by the historian John Dower, which compares the American response to Pearl Harbor with the response to September 11.

There were other parallels to be drawn between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Both attacks had been foreseen for years, but the warnings were ignored not only because of an underestimation of the enemy’s intelligence and will but also because a defensive psychological barrier had been erected by Americans to distance themselves from the possibility of enemy attacks. Before and during World War II, American understandings of Japan were blinded by racism. Likewise, before and after 9/11, Americans could not or were not willing to understand “Islamo-fascist” anger. In fact, beneath the barrier, there were many similarities between America and its attackers. During World War II, Japan was as racist as the United States. And in the era of 9/11 both the American leaders and the terrorists were caught up in quasi-religious modes of thought. Thus, the top-secret Pentagon reports to President Bush during the invasion of Iraq were headlined by biblical quotations, while Al Qaeda embraced the conviction that lethal shock tactics could undermine the spirit and will of the enemy, mirroring the rationale for the U.S. bombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II as well as for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.³⁷

There were also important differences between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Pearl Harbor fell upon a nation in which strong ties still existed among its people. These ties were considerably weakened by 2001. The disputed election the year before the attacks provided a kind of X-ray into the American body politic: nodes of disease, murrains of corruption. World War II was waged through universal military service, but the draft was abolished in 1973, after the war in Vietnam. After 9/11, while the code of sacrifice was still honored in principle, the only demand President Bush placed on the country was to “keep shopping.” The country’s historic predisposition to mobilize technological superiority in the service of invulnerability, while present in 1941, had been heightened by 2001 by the new quasi-personalized digital and electronic technology. “The electro-shock of repeated doses of the unreal and the unbelievable,” as Frederic Jameson wrote, prepared the way for a culture of paranoia and victimhood.³⁸ Finally the American sense of being “exceptional,” a term that Tocqueville had coined to indicate that the U.S. was sui generis, had taken on the connotation of “superior” by 1941. By way of contrast, in 2001 the country had gone through several decades of worrying that it was losing its exceptionalness and entering into decline.

Even so, the U.S. response to the attacks was not predetermined. The hijackers chose the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as icons of U.S. power. Yet, many Americans responded by attempting to dereify those iconic objects into the individuals that comprised them. One could see such attempts in the pictures of the “missing” found on public walls in New York for many weeks afterward, the New York Times project of publishing capsule biographies sometimes with pictures of each and every victim, and the attempt to find every shard or bone fragment by which an individual could be identified, even though this prolonged the clean-up process and deferred the achievement of what was called “closure.” In this process the ordinary and the everyday were infused with personal meaning. The shopping emporia and the office suites of the World Trade Center no longer appeared as sites of consumerism and shady high-finance dealing, but as life-worlds suffused with individual aspirations. Equally important was the face-to-face recognition that marked the normally impersonal streets of New York as strangers recognized, with a new level of depth, they inhabited a common world.

Nevertheless, very quickly the human response of sadness and the desire to connect to others was aborted. Ten days after the attack, Bush addressed Congress, saying, “Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” The characteristic expressions of self-righteous victimhood appeared: the constant replaying of images of the towers in flames, the pilgrimages to the site, the wearing of the American flag. Jacques Derrida, in New York several weeks after the attack, remarked: “Not only is it impossible not to speak on this subject, but you feel or are made to feel that it is actually forbidden, that you do not have the right, to begin speaking of anything…without making an always somewhat blind reference to this date.”³⁹

In seeking to understand why the balance of forces led away from intersubjective sadness and deliberation and toward vengeful, blind reaction, Butler stressed the agonizing experience of violated vulnerability, the nakedness the attacks lay bare, the shame of being naked and exposed, and the inability to bear that shame; in other words, the same defensive denial of vulnerability that had animated analytic thought in the previous two wars. However, she also added something new. She saw that if the experience of being violated was not to generate a cycle of retribution and counterretribution, it had to be followed by communication between victim and aggressor. To this end she drew upon the teachings of the phenomenological tradition, and especially on philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s emphasis on face-to-face recognition. According to Levinas, “the approach to the face [is] the most basic mode of responsibility.” Through the injunction to look at the face of the other, Levinas was trying to get at the primary, precognitive core in which human vulnerability shows itself: communication with a particular other. From psychoanalysis we are used to this vulnerability in considering the infant’s relation to the mother, and even the patient’s (nonvisual) relation to the analyst, but Levinas added the awareness of mortality. In his words, the gaze of the other ultimately “is the other before death, looking through and exposing death…. The face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone.”

Since the recognition of vulnerability, for Butler, was an effort to rebuild the intersubjective ties that had been shattered, that recognition entailed the creation of an intersubjective narrative. According to Butler, everyone in the United States remembers where they were and what they were doing when they learned that the planes hit the towers. But everyone begins the story of that day by invoking a first-person narrative point of view. That narrative is part of a healing process, an attempt to rebuild a shattered world. As Butler writes, “a narrative form emerges to compensate for the enormous narcissistic wound opened up by the public display of our physical vulnerability.” But, she continues, the first-person restoration of narcissism is not sufficient. Also necessary is a process of decentering and reintegration. The goal, Butler argues, is “the ability to narrate ourselves not from the first person alone, but from, say, the position of the third, or to receive an account delivered in the second.” In other words, we need to be able to decenter ourselves from our own ego, and narrate our experience not only personally but also from the point of view of the wounding and wounded other.

In achieving the goal of intersubjectivity, mourning plays a critical part. Through mourning, as Freud argued, we retain our connection to an object that no longer exists, even though this causes us pain. Mourning, then, is intersubjective; it incorporates the dead into our present-day egos and in that way into an ongoing human community. Mourning also is linked to justice, as is suggested by the common Old French root of the words grievance and grief, grever, which means sadness.⁴⁰ To understand 2001, then, Butler’s argument is that we must broaden the circle of mourning, beyond the universal obligations recognized by Freud and beyond the particularistic loyalties described by the object-relational schools. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we have to rethink the community’s economy of grieving if we are to prevent future 9/11s and future wars in Iraq. This rethinking implies transcending the nation-state.

In Butler’s view, “the differential allocation of grievability,” in the sense of its restriction to the nation-state, operates to produce and maintain exclusionary conceptions of “what counts as a livable life and a grievable death.” While American deaths are “consecrated in public obituaries that constitute so many acts of nation-building,” the names, images, and narratives of those whom the U.S. kills are suppressed. Our capacity to mourn beyond the nation is foreclosed by our failure to conceive of Arab lives as lives worth mourning. Guantanamo becomes the purgatorial locus of “unlivable lives.” The result, Butler suggests, is that many, excluded from the circle of grievability, die alone, while the homeland itself suffers “a national melancholia,” the result of “disavowed mourning.” In arguing this point, Butler was relying on the profound way that psychoanalysis was rooted in a global—archaeological and anthropological—perspective that had been lost in the era of the social-democratic nation-state, but she was also calling attention to the importance of mourning.

According to Butler, the unique place that mourning occupies in the building and preservation of intersubjective ties rests on the way it entails a loss of control or the acceptance of vulnerability. Grief, she writes, entails “moments in which one undergoes something outside one’s control and finds that one is beside oneself, not at one with oneself.” In mourning one submits to a transformation that “de-constitutes choice at some level.” Thus mourning disrupts a bounded and protective sense of self as one “accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever.” “When we lose someone we do not always know what it is in that person that has been lost.”⁴¹ We lose not just the person but also our former sense of identity. Grief, therefore “contains the possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am.” It exposes “my unknowingness, the unconscious imprint of my primary sociality.” Butler ends her reflection with a question: What form might “political reflection and deliberation take if we take injurability and aggression as [our] points of departure for political life,” rather than independence and self-mastery. What form would our politics take, in other words, if we began from “an understanding of how easily human life is annulled?”

At the same time, Butler’s insistence that we take “an understanding of how easily human life is annulled” as a point of departure for political life can lead in two different directions. In one scenario, the focus on vulnerability is normative; it moves to the core of ethics and politics. In the other, it is genetic; it explains where we come from, but not who we are. The difference leads to two different political positions. In the first, normative case, our deepening understanding of vulnerability displaces the liberal emphasis on individual rights in favor of a politics of recognition and mutual support. In the second, genetic case it imbues a liberal polity with an awareness of the inherent vulnerability of the subject, but does not displace the preexisting paradigm of individual rights. In my view, the psychoanalytic picture of the mind, which begins in prolonged dependence but culminates in the autonomous ego, tends toward the latter option. It revises the liberal social contract theory, which so often served as a cloak for destructiveness, as it did for Woodrow Wilson, and as it did for Bush, but it does not abandon the core ideal of the liberal tradition, which comes down to us from the Reformation and from the Enlightenment, that the keystone of all progress is the independent, free-thinking individual. In other words, the political Freudian tradition concerning war suggests that we will be in a better position to avert, limit, and ultimately end war if we consider our fellow human beings not only as vulnerable bodies but also as potentially rational coequal participants in creating the binding forces of civilization and resisting the destructive forces, both internal and societal.

In this regard, the words of Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt are worth considering: “From the standpoint of psychic structure…the important development historically has been the strengthening of the ego.” This strengthening has been the result of the radical “break with authority in religion, politics, economics and the family.” This break—“not the productive facilities…established nor [the] commitment to rationality as such”—has been the signal contribution of modern progressive movements.⁴² Freud’s theory of the ego belongs in this tradition. It was formulated during what is often called the general crisis of the twentieth century, marked by the rise of mass propaganda, images, and charismatic father figures, and is centered on the difficulty, above all the internal difficulty, of attaining and preserving individual autonomy or freedom. As such works as Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1940) suggested, the move from communal to individualistic societies was fraught, and humanity was always prone to relapse into infantile dependencies and paranoid fears. Psychoanalysis was important because it caught that transition. The point of its revelations of the depth of human vulnerability was to deepen rationality, independence, and self-mastery, in other words, to strengthen what political theorist Masao Maruyama, writing in Japan amid the crisis that followed World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima, called “the modern ego”—the ego that stands up to injustice or bullying—an effort that runs through the enormous Popular Front literature on family, education, culture, and politics.