From the perverse pact to universal conflicts

Abstract

We psychoanalysts – as split subjects – are not immune to charismatic leaders who preach violence against selected targets depicted as the cause of all evils. Freud, in Group psychology and the analysis of the ego, alerted us against such leaders, who can manipulate by transforming us into an uncritical mass. This would be the social equivalent of the perverse pact in repressive desublimation between the superego and the id at the expense of the ego: the latter is put to sleep, and the superego exhorts the id to do violence and regress. Socially, these perverse pacts often take place with the superego represented by charismatic leaders who foster identification with themselves, put the egos of their audiences to sleep through manipulation and thus address an amorphous mass that they can direct towards violence and destruction. An event in which such a phenomenon apparently occurred will be discussed to show how urgent it is to revisit psychoanalytic writings on these matters in order to withstand the temptation to be herded by manipulative leaders. This will certainly protect psychoanalysis and allow for its transmission. It is up to us to exercise the critical analysis that psychoanalytic tools equip us for so that we can detect such summons to perverse pacts and denounce them.

Keywords:

• perversion
• group psychology
• charismatic leaders
• social conflicts
• scapegoating

Notes

The traumatic core of reality in Lacan's theoretical framework.

According to Benjamin (6), it is possible to unshackle those who were made victims and prisoners in the past through a libertarian action in the present. This is so because his vision of history does not see it as being composed of an empty and homogeneous time, but instead it implies in a vantage-point from where similarities between the historical present and past events can be seen. This present and this past together configurate a complex unity, a constellation pregnant with tensions. Thinking can transform such a constellation into a conjuncture or monad by blasting asunder historical continuism and rescuing a past of injustices. A historical materialist, according to Benjamin, ‘can recognize in this monad a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’.

On Islamo-fascism, Zizek writes: “But I think we should give to this term a strict Marxist meaning. Islamo-fascism means fascism as a desperate strategy in the defence of capitalism” (1:158)

As to the concept of terrorism, Derrida (7) calls attention to its confused, abusive and ideologically instrumented use. This caused movements that were later recognized as libertarian and also those which aimed at the foundation or renewal of a nation-state to be called terrorists. According to Derrida, what is today called international terrorism has no political endeavour whatsoever and is based on “movements of savage violence which use mass destruction, are uncontrollable etc.” (7:11). Derrida further emphazises that the word ‘terrorism’ originated in the terror caused by the French revolution, which founded human rights. Thus, a double meaning for this word has been present since its origin: the ideological, with the founding of human rights through the use of violent means – this violence often being forgotten when the reference is to the human rights that it has founded – and the face of uncontrollable violence and destruction, originated by its very inception.

Anamorphosis is an image distorted in such a way that it can only be recognized from a certain angle. It is usually seen as meaningless, but from a specific angle it acquires a recognizable form. In The Ambassadors, there are two emissaries at the court of Henry VIII, among everything that represents learning in the Renaissance. An elongated stain at the bottom of the picture can be recognized as a skull when viewed from the side. This stain is not a part of the field of the rest of the painting, but it changes its meaning: as a reminder of death, it stains the worldly accomplishments depicted with a sense of vanity (8).

Trauma awakened some members of the audience while the majority, as if hypnotized by the speaker, abandoned all their critical analysis. Trauma (12) would awaken us from the sleep of consciousness so as to respond to our responsibility for others, to testify for those who were victimized by genocide and crime and could not speak on their own name, and to transmit this awakening to those near us and those who would come after us.

It is reported that upon their arrival in New York, where they were warmly received, Freud would have jokingly said to Jung that their hosts did not know they were bringing them ‘the plague’.