Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema wrote:
> I read this draft paper twice. It's very good but will be better still when
> Stein deals with an important ambiguity. It is a conventional one, but is all
> the more detrimental for its conventionality. It revolves around the question
> of how to see the normative, non-terrorist god. There seem to be two
> competing views in the paper, which rest on confusion about what it means for
> a belief in a masculine and paternal deity to flourish in a population.
>
> On the one hand Stein raises the key question --
>
> "The thought that there might be a root affinity between the theme of a son's
> love to his divine father and the underlying theme of the letter [Mohammed
> Atta's disquieting spiritual instructions to his fellow murderers], feels
> quite unpleasant. Do these motifs of religious devotion and intimate
> communion, and of using 'God' to inflict mass killing and destruction spring
> from the same psychic source?"
>
> The answer, of course, is a resounding yes, and that is just the key to
> making sense out of the realities September 11 has forced onto our attention.
> The feminine masochist believer snuggling up to the warm, tender
> compassionate father-god, and the masculine sadistic believer winning the
> angry god's favor by acting as the divine fist smiting the evil are
> underlying aspects of the same mass-psycyological process.
>
> Unfortunately, Stein, if I understand her right, flinches some of the time.
> For example, I find this sentimental piety, referring to Karen Armstrong --
>
> "The shocking absence of compassion in evildoing feels too discontinuous with
> what we have achieved as a culture in terms of our Western ideals and values
> of humanism, morality, and compassion (it is by its lack of compassion that
> religious evil, or what may be called coercive fundamentalism, distinguishes
> itself from religious thinking, since all religious preach compassion.)"
>
> I should emphasize that Armstrong's history of fundamentalism is good reading
> and most informative, but it is on just this point that her superficial
> psychological understanding and narrow historiographical approach leave her
> basic argument altogether misleading. Stein seems to follow Armstrong into
> the liberal judaeochristian (and the more marginal liberal Islamic) illusion
> that
> "coercive fundamentalism" (good phrase) is an aberrant departure from a more
> humane norm. Armstrong goes completely wrong on this point. While it is true
> that "all religions preach compassion," it is equally true that they have
> preached its opposite. Armstrong tries to account for the irruption of
> fundamentalism across the world as a crisis of modernization, a material and
> cultural development that made it impossible for people to believe naïvely in
> judaism, christianity or islam without a sharp division between natural and
> supernatural. She thinks that this modern fracturing of the personality
> leaves "spiritual" needs unfulfilled and, when people are otherwise in
> extremis permits them expression most clearly in violent aggression that
> seeks an intimate submission to god.
>
> Actually, Armstrong's mistake lies in her failure to recognize that
> patriarchal monotheism, the belief in a masculine and paternal deity, is, in
> and of itself, the key cultural expression of modernity. It is part of the
> split she nostalgically decries. To be sure, patriarchal monotheism has
> ancient roots, but it is crucial to recognize that it became mass ideology,
> gradually supplanted paganism, only as broader and broader strata of humanity
> became involved in social relations necessitating market relationships and
> literacy. And this happened much more recently than most educated people
> imagine -- christianity only fully supplanted paganism in rural France, for
> example, by the end of the nineteenth century. It happened earlier in the
> earlier industrialized areas of western Europe like England and the
> Rhineland. The same process is still going on among populations in New York
> City that I work with whose origins are in Latin America. What Weber called
> the Entzauberung der Welt was, and is, a process by which magical thinking
> restricted the focus of its cathexes to a decreasing number of imagined
> objects, finally limited to god-the-father. Protestantism carries this father
> than Catholicism, whose god is less fully monotheistic.
>
> Armstrong is an academic and, like many academics, forms her impressions
> based on reading the great spiritual texts. What she misses is that most
> premodern people weren't literate and had fairly little to do with those
> texts. Illiteracy -- or more accurately participation in a culture based on
> oral communication -- (See Ong's ORALITY AND LITERACY and Lerro's FROM EARTH
> SPIRITS TO SKY-GODS) meant that until historically recent times, most people
> had little psychological capacity to participate in patriarchal monotheism,
> because their experiences of reality were so incompatible with it.
>
> In fact, patriarchal monotheism, resting on literacy, money relations, a more
> intensely father-dominant family structure with intensified feminine
> submission, and a sado-masochistic character structure organized on resulting
> lines of gender, is the essence of modernization, and coercive fundamentalism
> is just as consistent and continuous with it as the liberal religion of
> loving-kndness and compassion most of us would prefer.
>
> The notion that "religion" -- meaning patriarchal monotheism -- is
> fundamentally supportive and compassionate is an illusion rather like the
> illusion that children are asexual that Freud had to combat in conventional
> Viennese circles when he first advanced his theory. Both are bourgeois
> sentimentalities that serve a defensive purpose and both serve only to
> obfuscate.
>
> Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
>
> For one thing it is unfortunate to overlook the systematic failures of
> Western judaeo-christian "compassion" in the colonial world, all the more
> because these give a partial basis in reality to rationalize Islamic
> terrorism against Europe and the United States. However, it is much more
> psychodynamically important to
>
> Robert Maxwell Young wrote:
>
> > 'Evil as Love and as Liberation'
> > by Ruth Stein, Ph.D.
> > at PsycheMatters web site:
> > http://psychematters.com/papers/stein.htm
> >
> > Paper presented to the "Terror and Aftermath: Perspectives on the WTC
> > Tragedy" program, October 29, 2001 at NYU Medical Center. This paper
> > is a draft copy that has been submitted for publication and is
> > available online at Psyche Matters with permission. Do not duplicate
> > without permission.
> >
> > "Š the end of the world was the consequence of the conflict which had
> > broken out between him, Schreber, and Flechsig, Š [the
> > consequence] of the indissoluble bond which had been formed between
> > him and God" (Freud,
> > 1911, p. 39).
> >
> > "It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the problems of
> > social psychology too, should prove soluble on
> > the basis of one single concrete point - man's relation to his
> > father" (Freud, 1913, p. ).
> >
> > Introduction: Concerning the theme of Evil
> >
> > The letter to the hijackers which was found in Mohammed Atta's
> > luggage in the car that had been left in Logan Airport before the
> > World Trade Center Attack (1), is a striking document. A highly
> > revelatory testimony, it may provide us with some understanding
> > regarding how the mind of a suicidal-killer might work. As we and
> > psychoanalysis face an emergence of new kinds of mass-destructive
> > attacks on human beings, any additional knowledge should be sought
> > concerning states of mind that are conducive to such attacks, and in
> > particular we should try to contact the experience of authentically
> > accomplishing a highly religious task of self-sacrifice. We would
> > like to learn more about the psychodynamic issues involved in a
> > decision that caused (and may go on causing) horrible suffering and
> > grief to masses of people; choosing to call this act evil, we would
> > like to inquire what are the themes linked with, and explanatory of,
> > this kind of evil.
> >
> > The theme of "evil" has been very little dealt with in psychoanalysis
> > because of a (justified) wariness of using terms whose provenance is
> > theology, terms which lend themselves to the reification and
> > hypostatization of their designaturm (e.g., seeing evil as a power in
> > nature, Satan, or the devil). Most of us, I believe, would not see
> > "evil" as existing in itself, but rather as a process that has
> > incipient beginnings converging from many sources and is most often
> > gradual, and that in addition requires a close, objectified, judgment
> > about the meaning of a human act. "Evil" may sound too allegorical or
> > too concrete, too
> > essentialist or too objective for psychoanalytic ways of thinking
> > that are oriented toward the study of individual subjectivity. A case
> > in point is Melanie Klein, a profound thinker on destructiveness, who
> > does not use the term "evil" in her writings. She does famously use
> > the term "bad object" to denote a subjective cluster of experience
> > and beliefs created out of certain affects (Klein, 1946, , Stein,
> > 1990) which serves as a carrier and evoker of experiences of
> > frustration, abandonment, or persecution,
> > or the containment of projections of violent affect. The bad object
> > is something that is subjectively (and internally) experienced as
> > "bad", but which objectively may not be bad at all, or, more
> > precisely, may not have intentionally done anything bad to the person
> > who harbors it (i.e., it cannot be judged from the outside as having
> > intended to harm). In contrast to the Kleinian
> > subjectivist notion of the bad object, evil is by definition
> > something blameworthy and bad that has been perpetrated on another
> > person (or on one's own self). In contrast to the subjectivist notion
> > of a "bad object", only an objectified judgment can dub an act as
> > evil; complementary to this view, there is wide-ranging consent among
> > thinkers on the psychology of evil that for the most part, evildoers
> > do not themselves consider their acts as evil (Khan, 1983; Bollas,
> > 1995; Oppenheimer, 1996;
> > Baumeister, 1997; Grand, 2000).
> >
> > It is not surprising, therefore, that very few psychoanalysts have
> > addressed the subject of "evil", and even less -- in fact, next to
> > none -- have written on the conjunction of religiosity and evil.
> > Among the first group, two authors have importantly enlightened us
> > about the subject of evil: Christopher Bollas, and Sue Grand.
> > Christopher Bollas (1995) writes deeply about
> > the serial killer as a "killed self", a child who has been robbed of
> > the continuity of his being by sadistically or masochistically
> > abusive, or murderously abandoning parents, who goes on "living" by
> > transforming other selves into similarly killed ones, thus
> > establishing a companionship of the dead. Bollas also distinguishes
> > between the passionate murderer who is driven by rage,
> > and the murderer who "lacks a logical emotional link to and is
> > [emotionally, not necessarily physically, R.S.] removed from his
> > victim. Bollas mentions Stuart Hampshire (1959), who suggests that
> > Nazi killers worked in a moral vacuum, in which "the genocidal person
> > identifies not with the passionate act of murder, but with the moral
> > vacuum in which killing occurs, a meaningless, horrifying wasteful
> > act" (p. 189). Sue Grand (2000), talks about traumatic experiences,
> > which, on the perpetrator's side, are acts of "rape, incest,
> > childhood beatings" (p. x) that are often done on close family
> > members. The evildoer here is a survivor of unspeakable trauma that
> > has resulted in unformulated, uncommunicable "catastrophic
> > loneliness." Deadness and vacuity have become the defining
> > characteristics of the perpetrator's identity, and evil is "an
> > attempt to answer the riddle of catastrophic loneliness" (p. 5).
> > Grand speaks about a vacuous no-self, remarking that "In perpetrator
> > and bystander there is neither the desire, nor the illusion of
> > "understanding" the no-self; on the contrary, in the
> > perpetrator-bystander-victim relation, "the no-self is in the
> > presence of others who confirm the truth of catastrophic loneliness,
> > even as these others do not know this loneliness" (p. 6). Grand sees
> > evil as providing for some people the only context that makes it
> > "possible to achieve radical contact with another at the pinnacle of
> > loneliness and at the precipice of death" (p. 6). Both authors have
> > given us deeply touching, penetrating studies of evil. However, the
> > phenomenon of evil that is committed specifically in the name of
> > religion has not received attention in psychoanalysis. Evil can be
> > done privately or collectively, for directly obvious self-serving
> > purposes, as well as out of true faith in some ideal. Evil done for
> > idealistic purposes may have some dynamics of its own, part of which
> > I hope to address in this paper.
> >
> > Thinking about evil requires a tremendous effort of the imagination
> > and a willingness to open one's fold to encompass this phenomenon in
> > one's thinking. Getting deeply into what it feels like to have a
> > violently disinhibited, super-humanly entitled, or radically
> > contemptuous and hateful, or utterly despairing, or ecstatically
> > numbed, state of mind without trying to repudiate it and to split it
> > off and yet without completely identifying with it, is no easy task.
> > It may feel alien and disturbing to one's usual self-states; pursued
> > deeply, it becomes frightening. The shocking absence of compassion in
> > evildoing feels too discontinuous with what we have achieved as a
> > culture in terms of our Western ideals and values of humanism,
> > morality, and compassion (it
> > is by its lack of compassion that religious evil, or what may be
> > called coercive fundamentalism, distinguishes itself from religious
> > thinking, since all religions preach compassion [Armstrong, 2001, p.
> > ]). Against the psychoanalytic imperative that nothing human shall
> > remain alien to us, stands the effort to understand something that is
> > meant precisely to annihilate any
> > understanding as well as any physical (or normal) existence. With all
> > these caveats, it nevertheless seems that psychoanalysts need to
> > urgently seek to understand more the phenomenon gathered under this
> > concept and to incorporate it into their vocabulary.(2)
> >
> > Robert Maxwell Young
> > robert at rmy1.demon.co.uk
> > http://www.human-nature.com
> >
> >
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
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> >
> >
> >
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