Hezbollah: Lebanon’s identified patient?

Abstract

In this article, I interpret Hezbollah’s birth and role in Lebanon’s sociopolitical life from a group and family psychoanalytic perspective. In particular, I examine whether Hezbollah, as one of Lebanon’s “children,” can be seen as the “designated patient” and “symptom” of its large family, nation-state “incestual” dynamics and complicated separation and individuation process. As a designated patient, Hezbollah performs the double-sided function of gluing its fragmented nation-state together while carrying the weight of being its breaking force. In this logic, Hezbollah’s paradoxical role in the Lebanese nation-state family would be similar to that of a “scapegoat/Messiah,” who carries both the family’s incestual dynamics and internal tensions and its hope for a solid and cohesive nation-state identity. To build a cohesive nation-state identity, Hezbollah’s ideology acts as a prosthesis for Lebanon’s narcissistic fragility, which replenishes the narcissistic hemorrhage of its perforated bodily and psychic envelopes. I also reflect on whether a national mediation process informed by a group psychoanalytic approach could help Lebanon constitute a more functional ego-nation-state and thus renounce the need for a designated patient. Hezbollah would be better capable of giving up its pathological ideological position.

Keywords:

• Hezbollah
• ideology
• idol
• group “incestual” dynamics
• identified patient
• scapegoat/Messiah

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hana Salaam Abdel-Malek

Hana Salaam Abdel-Malek has a doctorate in psychology. She is a psychoanalyst and member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society in France and the International Psychoanalytical Association in London. Her interests include applying her knowledge to international dialogue, conflict transformation, and peace-making. In July 2009, Dr. Salaam Abdel-Malek was nominated runner-up for the Tyson Prize for her article “Depression: The rebellion of the real self” during the IPA/IPSO Congress in Chicago. Her publications are: “Conception ‘in vitro’: A composite framework in psychotherapy with a couple” in the Journal of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, “Birth of a nation-state: A battle for boundaries or dialogue” and “A group psychoanalytic approach to international mediation” in the Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, and “Parents’ paradoxicality and adolescents’ self-engendering fantasy” in the British Journal of Psychotherapy.