What follows are some loose speculations about the recent re-emergence of mass movements and the appeal of the ideologies that organize them. Before proceeding, I should say that my purpose is not to speak to the ethical rightness or wrongness of these movements, and what I will put forward regarding those who participate in groups that are organized according to left-wing ideologies can in many cases be applied equally to those who adhere to and protest on behalf of right-wing causes. It is, I think, safe to assume that the motives for participating in such movements are almost as numerous as the participants.
Some who are in streets protesting on behalf of these causes may be moved to act by a highly developed sense of conscience together with a realistic assessment of social conditions. Realistic perception, ethical thinking, and the kind of sophisticated instrumental reasoning that is necessary for coming up with measures to transform an unjust social reality are the products of a very high level of emotional, intellectual and moral maturity. Whereas a developed sense of conscience is the result of a highly integrated, depersonified superego that fosters ethical reasoning that is based upon abstract principles, the capacity for a sober assessment of social conditions is the result of advanced ego integration in which archaic fantasies are prevented from excessively mediating one’s perception of the social reality. Full ego integration also requires that aggressively-charged component drives are libidinally bound, which prevents these drives from undermining higher-order rational judgment or transforming it into a perverse instrument on behalf of ‘lower’ pregenital drives. A figure like Martin Luther King Jr. exemplifies this combination of depersonified superego and highly advanced ego integration. Moreover, it is difficult to see how King’s activism could in any way be viewed as a regression to group thinking or involving a loss of his individuality.
There are others, however, for whom the psychological value of participation in group movements must be understood to be independent of any genuine ethical dimension or clear-eyed perception of social realities. In these cases, we should expect to find that archaic fantasies severely distort the individual’s perceptions of self and social reality and that they are unable to articulate the cogent ethical principles that motivate their activism. In these cases, whatever ethical legitimacy their activism and its underlying ideology might have is accidental to the role that it plays in the gratification of primitive psychological drives in which sophisticated conceptions of justice and equality play no part. Additionally, their participation in mass movements or in mob behavior exhibits the loss of individuality and the “massive regression” to group thinking that Wilfred Bion has describes in ‘Experience in Groups.”
This propensity for the detachment of basic psychological needs from ethical concerns can help us to explain why it is that political movements such as the French Revolution, which began, we might say, as a perfectly legitimate moral stand against injustice and inequality, can often devolve into a violent reign of terror. The powerful instinctual drives that are satisfied by these mass movements ultimately override whatever ethical considerations that may have apparently served as its original impetus. Insofar as poorly-integrated individuals do attempt to provide a rationale for their group activism by appeal to an ideological superstructure, this ideology is likely the result of a process of secondary elaboration in which irrational impulses are justified after the fact. Reasons are marshalled in the service of the gratification of primitive component drives, and these reasons stand or fall not according to rigorous standards of evaluation but according to whether they provide an adequate façade behind which aggressive drives find occasion for gratification in and through the group.[1]
The patient of a colleague, “Sam,” would appear to fit this profile of someone who is susceptible to this regression from individual to group thinking.[2] Sam, a young white woman, is deeply inhibited in intimate relations, attempts to establish relationships with partners who are unavailable for emotional connection, is promiscuous but does not enjoy sex, engages in periodic self-mutilation, and has attempted suicide years prior to entering therapy. She is profoundly anxious and depressed. Archaic aggressive fantasies, which stem from early disturbances in her relationship with her deeply narcissistic mother, unconsciously mediate her relations with authority figures. Furthermore, she exhibits all of the features of a what Winnicott called the false self in which she feels that she must “act happy all the time.” She seems to have deep fears that her emotional needs will overpower intimate partners, and so she withdraws from intimacy altogether. She idealizes her therapist in order to sustain the therapeutic relationship and to protect the therapist from overpowering feelings of envy and oral aggression.
What follows is an exchange between Sam and her therapist concerning her participation in mass protests:
A: I did end up going out to a protest, on Thursday… or Wednesday. I’m not sure which day. But anyway, I went out to protest and had some bad interactions with police. So I’ve been recovering from that.
N: Bad interactions.
A: Yeah so… I was riding toward Bridgeport and I got stopped by the cops. First they told me I couldn’t go through, that the whole area was blocked off, and then they searched my bag. When they saw my Black Lives Matter sign they seemed angry. The cop said, you can’t go through here because people like you are starting fires. And I was like, I’m just trying to go home, how am I going to start a fire with just a water bottle?
N: What was happening for you inside, when you were standing there with the cop and he said, “people like you are starting fires?”
A: It felt horrible. Believe me, I’ve interacted with cops before, and it has never been like this. I guess I’m used to the police treating me a certain kind of way because I’m a white woman… this was different. It was aggressive. They accused me of lying because when they asked what was in my bag I just said a water bottle, I didn’t mention the sign… I was like, how could I cause damage with just a cardboard sign. They felt like a gang. Like they weren’t trying to help or redirect me, I asked which way I should go, and the cop just shrugged, like, I don’t care. And it was the third time I had been stopped within a few blocks.
N: The first two times you made it through?
A: No, the first time they stopped me and said I had to go south to 35th. And then I got stopped again and they sent me back north. I told them I had just been sent this way by your friends and they said they didn’t care, so I had to turn around. I was getting more and more pissed. And then I was riding along 30th place or whatever because it wasn’t closed, then I saw the cruiser pull up and block off the street right in front of me and that’s when they searched my bag. I said I had ordered food on my way home, which I had. I had to call the restaurant and say, I’m really sorry you aren’t going to get paid for the food you made because the fucking cops in your neighborhood wouldn’t let me through. They said they would arrest me if I went through. I was kind of scared. The cop said he was going to arrest me just when I was going to the other side of the street to turn my bike around. I said, “You told me to go this way!”
N: You were a little defiant with them.
A: In the past, being like that has been okay, or even worked out in my favor. This felt like… they were like cornered animals. Like they were scared and they could attack.
N: That sounds really frightening.
A: Well, I learned to stay out of Bridgeport, first of all. I knew it was a racist neighborhood where a lot of cops live, but I know anarchists who live there too, and Black and Latino people too… I heard later that there were white guys with bats walking around wanting to beat up protestors.
N: What a disorienting experience.
A: After all that I still made it home before curfew. And since then, I’ve just been recovering. So now I know to stay away from cops and to stay out of Bridgeport.
N: You said a couple times that it took a while to recover.
A: Well, when I got home I cried all night and I cut. I ended up staying up until 5 trying to calm down. I eventually was able to zone out with movies and eventually I fell asleep. I did make a post on social media about what happened, and a bunch of friends texted me and said it was fucked up and asked me how I was doing. I told them I was fine and not to worry about me, that worse things had happened to other people. But it did feel good to have people reach out like that.
Sam’s involvement with the Black Lives Matter movement provides the opportunity for the development of a compromise formation that satisfies conflicting psychic demands: namely, the demand for affirmation and emotional connection on the one hand, and the demand for maintaining a defensive insularity and protective distance on the other. A compromise formation such as this would appear to have an important function for someone who presents deep inhibitions in personal relations that follow from fears that her emotional needs will overpower her intimate partners and friends. Evidence for the existence of a compromise formation of this kind can be found in Sam’s comment about “bad confrontation” with the police on her way to a BLM protest, in which the police redirected her away from the protest and searched her bag:
“I [made] a post on social media about [my negative encounter with the police], and a bunch of friends texted me and said it was fucked up and asked me how I was doing. I told them I was fine and not to worry about me, that worse things had happened to other people. But it did feel good to have people reach out like that.”
The elements of the compromise formation can be articulated in the following way: Sam says, “Don’t worry about me,” since this might open the door to the expression of Sam’s rage, which is so powerful that it might destroy the other. At the same time, “it felt good to have people reach out” because Sam nevertheless needs affirmation, warmth and regard from her peers.
I want to examine more closely the mechanisms at work in this compromise formation, because I think they can help us to understand the contemporary appeal of mass movements and the ideologies that underlie them, specifically those which fall under the rubric of what is often called ‘identity politics.’ Not only does Sam’s activism and her relationship with the political group provide the opportunity for a kind of contact with others that is sufficiently remote from the intimacies of her own inner life, this kind of political community also seems to render possible a representational displacement of suffering from her own individual ‘body,’ with its own unique family history and personality, to the deindividualized ‘body’ of the group. A consequence of such a substitution is that one’s suffering is no longer personal, it is collective, it is distributed equally among those who share the group identity or, as is Sam’s case, who fight and suffer on its behalf.[3]
At the same time that one’s suffering is displaced from the individual to the group, so also is the responsibility for remediating it. This is a gesture of profound helplessness. Confronted with an impasse from which she cannot remove herself, the patient has given up the impossible effort to overcome the mental disturbance by her own means. The defenses that have been mobilized against these disturbances have proven hopelessly inadequate to the task. The displacement of the responsibility for managing and ultimately for overcoming this suffering represents a last-ditch effort to find a cure. It is, in this sense, a final appeal for help in the face of a profoundly desperate situation.[4]
Before saying something more about Sam’s propensity for group regression, I’d like to say something about some of those with whom she is protesting, namely, representatives from a black community who believe that police regularly target blacks because of the color of their skin. To the degree that Lives Matter attempts to bring attention to particular cases of suffering, such as the violent murder of George Floyd, this is because the particular case is felt to exemplify a kind of suffering that is generalized within the body of the group. Very often, this suffering does result from a form of violence that has been perpetrated widely against a historically marginalized group. In these cases, identification with the deindividualized group not only provides an important defense against traumatic suffering that fortifies the individual’s fragile ego against further disintegration, it also provides for the reinforcement of an important sense of shared identity among these historically marginalized and terrorized groups. Something like this can be detected in the ways in which black activists often speak of “black bodies” as sites of racist violence. The body is depersonalized in order to defend against the deeply intimate and personal nature of one’s traumas, and to link the violence that has been endured immediately to that of others within the group.
In cases such as this, Bion’s claim that “the belief that a group exists as distinct from an aggregate of individuals is an essential part of […] a massive regression to psychotic mechanisms […] as typical of the earliest phases of mental life” (Experience in Groups, pg. 141-2) would appear to be incorrect. Though it is hard to deny that this kind of group thinking does indicate the existence of a “massive regression,” it seems that this regression does not always occur on the side of the individual who identifies with the group. Or, if we insist upon understanding the loss of individuality that is consistent with group thinking to always indicate a massive regression, then this regression would seem to be one that has been inherited. I do not mean this phylogenetically, in the sense in which one inherits the genes for an endogenously produced psychological disease. What I mean to say is that, by virtue of the symbolic value of black skin color for the racist other, the black individual has been born into a world in which his skin color compels him to play a specific role for the other. This role to which he has been confined by the color of his skin unites him with other black people who are equally compelled to play this role because of their skin color, thus cementing the “regression” from individual to group identity.
Irrespective of the quality of one’s early family life, which psychoanalysis believes to be the primary in the etiology of psychopathology, one is born into a “regressive” situation by virtue of having been, drawing upon the thought of Melanie Klein, marked out as a receptacle for the bad objects of others whom one has yet to encounter. This regression has been, in essence, imposed by the other, often having been historically reinforced by the power of legal authority. It is, in this sense, a socially inherited regression. The black-skinned person has been effectively disallowed from becoming an individual due to the manner in which projective identification has been inscribed within the social milieu, effectively limiting him to the identification that has been projected upon him because of his skin color. Black identity, if such a thing really exists, thus arises downstream of a massive socially reified regression, which must have first occured on the side of racists and the social world that they have created. It should be stated here that historically marginalized groups such as the black community are not the only objects of these negative projections . Clearly, we are now seeing a reversal by which white individuals are likewise being compelled to play these specific roles for the other. In like manner, the individuality of the white person is minimized in favor of the symbolic value of what is often called ‘whiteness.’ The latter functions as a container for bad objects no less than ‘blackness’ functioned in this way at earlier moments in American history.
This appears to be what the Belgo-Austrian writer Jean Amery has in mind when, in his book At the Mind’s Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, he offers an explanation of his identification with the Jewish people. Amery describes the moment at which he realized that he was a part of this group despite sharing almost nothing with them in terms of religious or cultural commitments. When reading a newspaper in a Vienna coffeehouse studying the Nuremberg Laws, which enacted in law the degraded status of the Semitic race, he states that “a new dimension [was given] to what I had already known earlier, but which at the time was of no great consequence to me, namely, that I was a Jew” (Amery, 85). In the course of the final chapter, Amery writes at length about his non-existent relationship with Jewish culture and religion, saying, “After reading the Nuremburg Laws I was no more Jewish than I was a half an hour before. My features had not become more Mediterranean-Semitic, my frame of reference had not suddenly been filled by magic power with Hebrew allusions, the Christmas tree [that I loved] had not wondrously transformed itself into the seven-armed candelabra” (ibid.). Later in the chapter, Amery seems to speak quite directly to this question of whether his identification with the group represents a form of pathology:
Am I perhaps mentally ill and am I not suffering from an incurable ailment? The question is merely rhetorical. I have long since provided myself with a fully conclusive answer. I know that what oppresses me is no neurosis, but rather precisely reflected reality. Those were no hallucinations when I heard the Germans call for the Jews to “die like a dog!” and, in passing, heard how people said that there really must be something suspicious about the Jews, because otherwise they would hardly be treated so severely. “The are being arrested, so they must have done something,” said a proper social-democratic worker’s wife in Vienna. “How horrible, what they are doing with the Jews, mais enfin…?” speculated a humane and patriotic minded man in Brussels. I am forced to conclude that I am not deranged and was not deranged, but rather that the madness is on the part of the historical occurrence. The others are the madmen, and I am left standing around helpless among them.” (Amery, 96)[5]
The case of Amery stands out as an obvious instance in which identification with the group is not made on the basis of a need to gratify some regressive intrapsychic need. It should be obvious that same applies for those within the black community who have endured racist violence.
We should, nevertheless, bear in mind that the identification with the group together with the displacement of suffering from individual to the deindividualized body of the group can enable the transformation of radically personal traumas that are too intimate to be confronted, which one has suffered in the context of those who are closest—parents, siblings, friends, neighbors—into traumas that are believed to have been perpetrated by some other deindividualized group, or even by ‘society’ itself. A defense such as this may equally supply an explanation for why an individual from a minority may find racism around every corner–why, that is, there might be a tendency to see racism where it may not exist. This tendency for offloading radically individual suffering onto the group in order to relieve the weight of this suffering from one’s own fragile ego can thus be found in minority individuals as often as those who enjoy racial privilege. (Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, beautifully portrays the complexities of what I have described here.)
We have to wonder whether relatively privileged individuals like Sam don’t indeed envy these historically marginalized communities for their ability to collectivize their suffering on the basis of their belonging to a such a group. A psychological maneuver such as this, whereby suffering is symbolically displaced from individual to identity group, allows the individual to evade the particular, personal character of his or her own suffering.
[1] Kohut: “Group cohesion is brought about and maintained not only by an ego ideal held in common by members of the group, but also by their shared subject-bound grandiosity, i.e., by a shared grandiose self. Indeed there are groups which are characterized by the fact that they are held together by this latter bond—crudely stated, by their shared ambitions rather than their shared ideals.” (“Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage” p. 398)
[2] Kohut: Schitzoid personalities consist in “a breakup of the nuclear narcissistic structures (the development of an overt or latent psychosis) [has an] ever present pathognominic potentiality, which is however prevented by the patient’s avoidance (through emotional distancing) of regression-provoking narcissistic injuries.” (“Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage” p. 370)
[3] This displacement also appears under the triangular oedipal constellation. The attempt is made to shift the conflict from narcissistic to oedipal because within the oedipal conflict the objects have achieved a high enough level of representational cohesion to create the appearance of clear obstructions to one’s oedipal strivings. This corresponds with the transformation within object relations between the part and the whole object. One strives to achieve representational coherence and cohesion in order to render clear the problematic with which one is confronted, by projecting this problematic into the outside world where it can be combatted and overcome (or at least this is the hope). This is what Kohut calls “oedipal dramatizing,” which represents, what he calls “a remedial stimulant, [the intensity of which] is used by the psyche to counteract the tendency toward the breakup of the self—just as the small child may attempt to use self-inflicted pain (head-banging) in order to retain a sense of aliveness and cohesion. Patients whose manifest psychopathology serves this defensive function will react to the analyst’s interpretations concerning the object-instinctual aspects of their behavior with the fear of losing the stimulation which prevents their fragmentation; an they will respond with an intensification of oedipal dramatizing so long as the analyst does not address himself to the defect of the self” (Kohut, “Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” 371). One attempts to reinforce the cohesion of the self by borrowing it from the loved parent. At the same time, one’s hatred is directed toward the other parent. This functions to direct powerful feelings of aggression outward, and thus preserve what little cohesion of the self that one already possesses.
[4] Group as container for suffering which cannot be contained by the ego. Failure of original self-object (mother) to contain one’s suffering.
[5] Also notable are the following quotes from Jean Amery: “I am not traumatized, but rather my spiritual and psychic condition corresponds completely to my reality. The consciousness of my being a Holocaust Jew is not an ideology. It may be compared to the class consciousness that Marx tried to review to the proletarians of the nineteenth century. I experienced in my existence and exemplify through it a historical reality of my epoch, and since I experienced it more deeply than most other Jews, I can also shed more light on it. That is not to my credit and not because I am so wise, but only because of the chance of fate.” (Amery, 99) “[Mine] is a social unrest, not a metaphysical one. It is not Being that oppresses me, or Nothingness, or God, or the Absence of God, only society. For it and only it caused the disturbance in my existential balance, which I am trying to oppose with an upright gait. It and only it robbed me of my trust in the world.” (Amery, 100)
Allen Thomas Jones Ph.D 