THE WAR FANTASY

[pynchonoid]

from the PSYART list:


       William Du Bois wrote about the "unexamined,
pathological,
subconscious motivations" of George Bush. The War on
Evil, he believes,
needs to be examined for the "pathological strategy
that it is."

       In order to understand what is occurring now, 
it is necessary to
go beyond an analysis of this contemporary leader. We
must distance
ourselves a bit and examine the current "war on evil"
from the
perspective of the fundamental structures of Western
civilization.

       Just as patients acts out unconscious
fantasies, so do nations and
cultures. This is the "repetition compulsion," the
tendency for
self-destructive actions to recur or repeat
themselves. In order to
ameliorate collective destruction and
self-destruction, one must lay
bare the underlying "machinery" that generates
behavior, the nature,
structure and meaning of fantasies and beliefs that
are the source of
historical action.

      To act out a personal fantasy, a national leader
such as a
President must plug in to broader, cultural fantasies.
The societal
structure provides the vehicle for expressing and
acting upon the
personal fantasy. A critique of war is futile if it
focuses simply a
single individual, or a single nation. It is necessary
to reveal the
logic or underlying structure of thought that is the
source of war-the
war fantasy.

       Freud wrote CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS.
If one is capable of
experiencing discontent in relationship to
civilization, then there
exists a subject aware that he or she is separate and
distinct from the
discourse of civilization. Thus, one may experience
war as pathological
even while knowing it is "normative."

       There is not a radical distinction between a
movie, work of
literature and various forms of reality. Each is the
product or
consequence of human imagination. Shared desires,
needs and fantasies
are externalized or projected, giving rise to cultural
forms  Societal
narratives constitute materializations or
concretizations of human
thought. The fantasy provides the seed. The social
institution is the
articulation or construction that grows out of the
seed. The shape of
the tree is determined by the nature of the seed. We
perceive the tree,
but forget or deny the seed out of which the tree
grew.

       For subjective fantasy to be transformed into
cultural narrative
and action, it must be consistent with what already is
imagined to be
real. When we begin to doubt the reality of that which
is real, to
experience it as unreal, this means that the grand
narrative that
articulates the fantasy has begun to disintegrate.

       The President can initiate and execute a war
because there are a
sufficient number of persons who resonate with
fantasies about good and
evil, oppression and liberation, and the idea that
there are powerful
"enemies" whose existence pose a mortal threat to the
nation.

       What is the nature and structure of the "war
fantasy" that has
played such a dominant role in the history of
civilizations? Why do
human beings believe that it is imperative to kill and
die in the name
of entities called "nations?"


Best regards,

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph. D.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo
http://search.yahoo.com