Psychoanalyzing the World's Conflicts (II)

As I began by noting, the history of psychoanalysis has been one not just of great clinical insights but also of wider cultural applications as well. That is clearly evident in the later Freud and in many of his successors, as Eli Zaretsky, inter alia, has demonstrated.

One contemporary American scholar who has applied analytic theory to socioeconomic and political issues in a number of books is David Levine, retired from the University of Colorado where he taught economics and political economy. He has also trained at the Colorado Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, and has applied such insights in a variety of books on economic, political, and social topics, including his most recent, Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World: Embedded Meaning in Politics and Social Conflict (Routledge, 2017), 144pp. (Levine is also co-author of a book forthcoming next year that looks fascinating in light of contemporary conflicts on university campuses.)

This is a slender, subtle, and suggestive book that raises a number of psychoanalytic ideas, primarily drawn from the well-known analyst D.W. Winnicott and the larger British and object relations schools, and then seeks to apply them to contemporary sociopolitical problems, including "fake news." The justification for doing so comes relatively late in the book when Levine argues that "psychoanalytic ideas and methods become important to the extent that it becomes important to understand the special suffering that people inflict on themselves and their special attachment to it" (93). Commendably, however, Levine recognizes the limitations of this approach, knowing that merely gaining insight into why someone does something is not, in itself, usually going to be a significant force for broader social change.

The merit of this book is that Levine writes with a light touch, and commendably refuses to turn psychoanalysis into an ideological club with which to attack problems, or to force all issues to fit a pre-existing frame. At the same time, though, his arguments are sometimes attenuated by an unhelpful degree of abstraction, though some of this is remedied in the last few chapters of the book in particular, the usefulness of which quickly becomes very obvious in an age of rising nationalism, "fake news," Donald Trump, and constant protest and outrage at perceived slights to people grouped together via "identity politics."

Levine begins from the insight that "training in and development of psychoanalytic habits of mind...offers a measure of protection against the impulse to externalize responsibility for what originates inside and enhances sensitivity to the presence of that impulse in others" (10). In other words part of the value of psychoanalytic training (as Fred Busch has also argued) is that it offers not just a 'what,' that is, access to the 'contents' of something called the 'unconscious mind,' but that it offers insights into the 'how' of the mind, how it works.


Too often our minds work by concealing certain operative assumptions that may in fact be imprisoning us without our realizing it, forcing us to continue thinking and acting in ways based on unexamined habit. Levine thus rightly argues that what we may well need to give up is a certain history, a certain view of our history that doesn't merely narrate the past, but do so in a way that prevents new options from being brought to the fore in the present: "psychic change only has meaning, then, where our history is not also our destiny" (16). Adding to this, a little later on he notes that the only kind of change that will last and prove to be valuable is "change that moves us from a closed to an open system" (30). Both Eastern Christians viewing our history, and many Muslims theirs (and both viewing the Crusades), will surely find this an important challenge to undertake.

Levine's second chapter unpacks some of the central insights of the object relations school including the mind's rather "primitive" inclination to see everything as having a cause for which someone can be held responsible: "nothing is an accident; nothing simply happens" (20). He also draws on the widely discussed experience we all have, which was given a name by Christopher Bollas: the "unthought known" as developed by him in such works as The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (Columbia UP, 1989), recently re-released in a 30th-anniversary edition.

From Winnicott in particular Levine draws the important insight that many people find their identities in groups--whether political parties, churches, nationalist or racist movements, or many other such clubs--but that in doing so they sacrifice part of, and sometimes all of, their true self for a false one. They may well be doing so precisely to avoid contact with parts of their true self that are disturbed and disturbing. The group identity is clean, idealized, and often totalized, whereas their own personal identity may be rough, disorderly, and fragmentary. These latter aspects result in what Levine calls "ambivalence about the self," a good deal of which may be founded on early childhood experiences of guilt and shame.

Levine's eighth ("Hate in Groups and the Struggle for Individual Identity") and tenth ("Truth in Politics") chapters are perhaps the most pertinent in 2017. The insights driving both are derived in part from Freud's insights into the connection between "Mourning and Melancholia," noting that an unwillingness or inability to complete the former is almost always bound up with outbreaks of the latter, which are in turn often bound up with anger, lashing out, and blaming others. (In my estimation, as I've argued elsewhere, this is very much what we see in ISIS propaganda--anger based on incomplete mourning of a lost empire.) The capacity to mourn adequately carries with it the promise of being able to renew one's separate identity afterwards instead of becoming fused with and stuck on the dead or lost object. There is, as I just suggested, much wisdom here in thinking of those who have not mourned for past losses, whether in the Crusades or elsewhere.

The tenth chapter notes that a key problem with much current political rhetoric is that it makes sweeping and unsubstantiated claims alleging that "survival is at stake" (cf. in this regard Rod Dreher) and does so via expansive and abstract "apocalyptic rhetoric." Such tactics project onto others "an extreme form of the bad object that must be controlled or destroyed rather than treated as a partner in the reasoning process" (130). The chapter very briefly mentions a few examples in connection with the 2016 elections in these United States, but overall it is far too short and under-developed, missing a very considerable opportunity here.

Levine's book could, in fact, have been strengthened, in my view, by greater engagement with the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, especially his two books Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, discussed here, and Unforbidden Pleasures: Rethinking Authority, Power, and Vitality, which I discussed at some length here.

Overall, the merit of Levine's newest work, Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World: Embedded Meaning in Politics and Social Conflict comes in raising issues and suggesting useful lines of analytic theory for further exploration without heavy-handedly bludgeoning his point, and readers, to death. That is no small thing. It does, after all, take greater self-discipline to write a short book of useful questions than a very long book of useless answers.

Concluded. 

Notes on Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis, Eastern Christianity, and Today's European Refugee Crisis

More than twenty years ago now when I was studying psychology and thinking of training as a psychoanalyst, I came across the name of Julia Kristeva, but never read much beyond a few sentences in some textbook or other purporting to describe briefly who she was and what she was on about.

More recently, however, I have had a chance to dive into her works more deeply as part of some on-going research I'm doing on the uses and abuses of memory in Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic contexts and inter-relations. So consider this a brief note for those who may be interested in learning more about Kristeva.

Kristeva's book In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith shows some familiarity with the Christian East as Kristeva recounts part of her early adolescence in which she tried to see if she could will herself to faith, which she found strangely attractive after spending some time contemplating a Byzantine icon of the Mother of God. (Her interest in Byzantium, perhaps motivated by or connected to her birth in Bulgaria, has generated Murder in Byzantium: A Novel, which I have not read yet.) She describes herself as not successful in trying to have faith, but it didn't leave her bitter or hostile but instead genuinely open to learning what she can about both the particular teachings of Christianity, as well as to the whole phenomenon of faith.

The rest of In the Beginning Was Love is a rather anemic and staccato series of reflections on faith, including two chapters that move systematically through each line of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. She shows herself far more open to the idea of faith, and far less convinced that it simply fulfills some kind of infantile neurosis--a position usually attributed to Freud, though I would also note here that I found a copy of Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis and Faith, Dialogues with the Reverand Oskar Pfister in a wonderful used bookstore in Indianapolis over Christmas, and I have been very impressed with the correspondence, most of which is from Freud's side as many of Pfister's letters have been lost. Freud's tone is consistently extremely gracious and kind, and he here evidences a sincere openness to trying to see faith as something more than a wish fulfillment or neurosis. He is unfailingly polite and modest, and recognizes the hermeneutic limits of psychoanalysis when it comes to metaphysical and theological questions. In fact, I detect in this book something approximating an inchoate desire on the part of Freud to have faith as Pfister has it. (How much faith Pfister himself had remains open to debate. He seems nothing if not an early proponent of what the contemporary sociologist Christian Smith has memorably called moralistic therapeutic deism, which perhaps explain's Freud's attraction to him and subsequent friendship with him.)

Kristeva's other book, which I have just begun, will be of obvious interest to Eastern Christians and our perpetual problem of ethno-nationalism or phyletism: Nations Without Nationalism (Columbia University Press, 1993).

It is striking to me, reading this book in 2016 with the on-going European refugee crisis, just how much relevance it still has after it was first published in French in 1990, and translated into English three years later. She asks such questions as "Will France be able to welcome without too many clashes the flow from the other side of the Mediterranean?" Little did she know a quarter-century ago how that flow would become a flood today into Germany, France, and elsewhere.

She notes, in 1990, the increasing mania then of "discovering one's origins" and then using the founding mythologies of my group or nation as a source not only of personal identity, but also of a collective ideology with which to exclude if not destroy others who are not pure laine, who become objects of hatred that may well be little more than a projection of my internal self-loathing.

Like In the Beginning Was Love, Nations Without Nationalism is clearly an essai in that form which French writers use so well but many others find frustrating: not as a finished product tightly wrapped up, but as a somewhat discursive and almost playful place in which the author seeks essayer disparate ideas. Thus after only a few brusque paragraphs contemplating French immigration and struggles, she moves on to consider how America has historically handled questions of immigration and identity; how the United Kingdom did; and how the ancient Greeks did. She then returns to France, noting that "Nowhere is one more a foreigner than in France." Looking towards the year 2000, she predicts that "the matter of Arabian immigration in France" will remain the most pressing problem--a prescient argument indeed seen from today's perspective!

Then, curiously, she suddenly lurches to considering the life and work of St. Paul, noting how his writings challenged the ancient ideas of nation and kinship, giving Christians and the world a new definition: "there is neither Jew nor Greek for all are one in Christ Jesus." Though Christians, as she recognizes, have often failed to live up to this vision of a universal community transcending all our particularities, nonetheless we must "bow, in passing, to Paul's psychological and political sensitivity."

Returning again to France, she sounds what seems an appropriate call for France--and perforce the rest of Europe--to assume a greater confidence in its own ways of life, and a greater willingness to defend those ways of life in the face of Arab-Muslim immigration and the latter's very different cultural mores. How little that call seems to have been heeded in the intervening quarter-century! In this regard she wants a return to what she sees as the ideals of the Revolution: the creation of a pact among sovereign individuals freed from other attachments, including the hateful shackles of nationalistic identity in which I am at war with all those who are not part of my family, clan, and nation. She seems to suggest that such a pact, such an ideal from the Revolution, has commendable Christian origins--though, of course, many Christians, pre-eminently Catholics in France and Western Europe--saw the revolution as nothing more or other than "demonic," as Joseph de Maistre unsparingly put it.

After a brief foray into ancient Jewish laws about foreigners, she then considers--as many others have, perhaps especially Paschalis Kitromilides, not least in his essay "The Legacy of the French Revolution: Orthodoxy and Nationalism" in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 5, Eastern Christianity--the pivotal role played by the French revolution in developing theories of nationalism and the "sovereignty" of the nation-state, theories which have, as I've demonstrated elsewhere, proved to be so pivotal in the rise of not just the modern nation-states of, e.g., Greece, Romania, and Russia, but the concomitant rise in their Orthodox national churches as well.

If time allows, I hope also to read Kristeva's Hannah Arendt. Arendt's famous studies of the banality of evil, and of The Origins of Totalitarianism retain important explanatory power for Eastern Christians--especially in Russia--still struggling to find ways of dealing with the communist past. 

Orthodoxy and Nationalism

I drew attention to this collection edited by Lucian Leustean, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe, when it was published last year, and it has since then sat accusingly on my desk. I've picked it up several times and started it over the last few months, but always some interruption or other took me away from it. Only this week had a chance to devote some time to it.

Let me say straightaway that anybody with any interest in the vexed question of Orthodoxy and nationalism--as well as the wider religio-political history of southeastern Europe over the last 150 years--cannot be without this book. The introductory chapter, which cogently sets forth an overview of forms and causes of nationalism and various scholarly theories and treatments of it, is itself worth the price of the book.

After that, the book devotes chapters to Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and the role of the Ecumenical Patriarch in the sunset of the Ottoman Empire and its millet system. The details unearthed considerably complicate conventional portraits about ethno-phyletism, the role of the French Revolution, and much else besides. This is a deeply fascinating book that has been smoothly edited.

Sainthood and Race

Eastern Christians, perhaps more than their Western brethren in some ways, struggle, as is commonplace, with questions of ethnicity, nationalism, and related problems. Do those struggles extend even to the dead and long departed? I'm not entirely convinced that they do insofar as a figure such as Francis of Assisi or Seraphim of Sarov or Mary of Egypt have long transcended Umbrian or Russian or Egyptian categories to achieve global devotion. But a new book raises intriguing questions about race and saints: Molly Bassett and Vincent Lloyd, eds. Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh (Routledge, 29014), 232pp.

Eastern Christians will be especially interested in ch.7 which treats Coptic realities. About this book the publisher tells us:

In popular imagination, saints exhibit the best characteristics of humanity, universally recognizable but condensed and embodied in an individual. Recent scholarship has asked an array of questions concerning the historical and social contexts of sainthood, and opened new approaches to its study. What happens when the category of sainthood is interrogated and inflected by the problematic category of race?

Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh explores this complicated relationship by examining two distinct characteristics of the saint’s body: the historicized, marked flesh and the universal, holy flesh. The essays in this volume comment on this tension between particularity and universality by combining both theoretical and ethnographic studies of saints and race across a wide range of subjects within the humanities. Additionally, the book’s group of emerging and established religion scholars enhances this discussion of sainthood and race by integrating topics such as gender, community, and colonialism across a variety of historical, geographical, and religious contexts. This volume raises provocative questions for scholars and students interested in the intersection of religion and race today.

Nationalism in the 19th Century

Nobody who has any interest in or understanding of Christianity in the East can avoid for very long the sorry task of contending with ethno-nationalism in its various forms. I have a paper coming out later this year in Pro Ecclesia on the ecclesiological problems created by nationalism as it emerges in post-revolutionary France and then spreads to various places under French influence (the Levant, Syria), to Russia (through Joseph de Maistre's long ambassadorship there), and then especially to newly created nation-states emerging in the sunset of the Ottoman Empire in southern Europe and the Balkans. I am keen therefore to read this newly published book under Lucian Leustean's editorship, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe (Fordham UP, 2014), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Nation-building processes in the Orthodox commonwealth brought together political institutions and religious communities in their shared aims of achieving national sovereignty. Chronicling how the churches of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia acquired independence from the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's decline, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe examines the role of Orthodox churches in the construction of national identities. Drawing on archival material available after the fall of communism in southeastern Europe and Russia, as well as material published in Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Russian,Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe analyzes the challenges posed by nationalism to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the ways in which Orthodox churches engaged in the nationalist ideology.

The History of Nationalism

As we all know, ethno-phyletism and nationalism have long been besetting problems among Eastern Christians,  leading, notably, to their condemnation at the council in Constantinople in 1872.

Continuing their welcome series of "handbooks," Oxford University Press just last month published John Breuilly, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford UP, 2013), 800pp.

With chapters on nationalism and religion, nationalism in Eastern Europe, nationalism in the Middle East, and Arab nationalism, inter alia, there is much in here to interest the scholar of Eastern Christianity in all its varied cultural contexts.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism comprises thirty six essays by an international team of leading scholars, providing a global coverage of the history of nationalism in its different aspects - ideas, sentiments, politics. Every chapter takes the form of an interpretative essay which, by a combination of thematic focus, comparison, and regional perspective enables the reader to understand nationalism as a distinct and global historical subject.

The book covers the emergence of nationalist ideas, sentiments, and cultural movements before the formation of a world of nation-states as well as nationalist politics before and after the era of the nation-state, with chapters covering Europe, the Middle East, North-East Asia, South Asia, South-East Asia, and the Americas. Essays on everday national sentiment and race ideas in fascism are accompanied by chapters on nationalist movements opposed to existing nation-states, nationalism and international relations, and the role of external intervention into nationalist disputes within states. In addition, the book looks at the major challenges to nationalism: international socialism, religion, pan-nationalism, and globalization, before a final section considering how historians have approached the subject of nationalism.

Taken separately, the chapters in this Handbook will deepen understanding of nationalism in particular times and places; taken together they will enable the reader to see nationalism as a distinct subject in modern world history.

The editor writes an interesting article on the OUP blog telling us more of the genesis of this welcome collection. You may read that here.

Nationalisms in Greece and Turkey

Anyone who knows anything about Eastern Christianity knows the role played by, and the problems of, ethno-nationalism. A welcome new book, in what seems to be a scholarly trend of re-evaluating the sunset of the Ottoman Empire, looks at the role of nationalism among Greek Orthodox Christians as well as Muslims: Benjamin C. Fortna et al, eds., State-Nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey: Orthodox and Muslims, 1830-1945 (Routledge, 2012), 258pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Tracing the emergence of minorities and their institutions from the late nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War, this book provides a comparative study of government policies and ideologies of two states towards minority populations living within their borders.

Making extensive use of new archival material, this volume transcends the tendency to compare the Greek-Orthodox in Turkey and the Muslims in Greece separately and, through a comparison of the policies of the host states and the operation of the political, religious and social institutions of minorities, demonstrates common patterns and discrepancies between the two countries that have previously received little attention.

A collaboration between Greek and Turkish scholars with broad ranging research interests, this book benefits from an international and balanced perspective, and will be an indispensable aid to students and scholars alike.

The publisher also gives us the contents:

Introduction: The Ottoman Empire and After Benjamin Fortna 1. Elites and the Formation of National Identity: The Case of the Greek Orthodox Millet, Mid-19th Century to 1922 Dimitris Kamouzis 2. Millet Legacies in a National Environment: Political Elites and Muslim Communities in Greece, 1830s-1923 Stefanos Katsikas 3. Nationalist Infiltrations in Ottoman Thrace, ca. 1870-1912: The Case of the Kaza of Gumuljina Paris Konortas 4. A Minority in a State of Flux: Greek Self-Administration and Educastion in Post-lausanne Istanbul, ca. 1923-1930 Dimitris Kamouzis 5. The Politics of Turkey Towards the Ecumenical Patriarchate: The Single-Party Era (1923-1945) Elcin Macar 6. A Minority in a State of Hostage: The Muslims of Greece, 1923-1941Stefanos Katsikas 7. The Ankara Agreement of 1930 and the Minorities: Reconciliation, Normalization or Instrumentalization? Samim Akgonul 8. “Tax Me to the End of my Life!”: Anatomy of an Anti-Minority Tax Legislation, 1942-43 Ayhan Aktar Conclusion

Visions of Community

Ashgate has just put into my hands a very hefty tome, a collection of articles--most in English but a few in German--edited by Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, and Richard Payne: Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1100 (Ashgate, 2012), 575pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

This volume looks at 'visions of community' in a comparative perspective, from Late Antiquity to the dawning of the age of crusades. It addresses the question of why and how distinctive new political cultures developed after the disintegration of the Roman World, and to what degree their differences had already emerged in the first post-Roman centuries. The Latin West, Orthodox Byzantium and its Slavic periphery, and the Islamic world each retained different parts of the Graeco-Roman heritage, while introducing new elements. For instance, ethnicity became a legitimizing element of rulership in the West, remained a structural element of the imperial periphery in Byzantium, and contributed to the inner dynamic of Islamic states without becoming a resource of political integration. Similarly, the political role of religion also differed between the emerging post-Roman worlds. It is surprising that little systematic research has been done in these fields so far. The 32 contributions of the volume explore this new line of research and look at different aspects of the process, with leading western Medievalists, Byzantinists and Islamicists covering a wide range of pertinent topics. At a closer look, some of the apparent differences between the West and the Islamic world seem less distinctive, and the inner variety of all post-Roman societies becomes more marked. At the same time, new variations in the discourse of community and the practice of power emerge. Anybody interested in the development of the post-Roman Mediterranean, but also in the relationship between the Islamic World and the West, will gain new insights from these studies on the political role of ethnicity and religion in the post-Roman Mediterranean.

In perusing the table of contents, I see numerous articles that will be of interest to scholars interested in Eastern Christian realities and the often vexatious questions of "ethnicity" that dog many Eastern Churches:

• Bernhard Palme, "Political Identity versus Religious Distinction? The Case of Egypt in the Later Roman Empire," which begins post-Chalcedon
• Bas ter Haar Romeny, "Ethnicity, Ethnogenesis, and the Identity of Syriac Orthodox Christians"
• Lynn Jones, "Truth and Lies, Ceremonial and Art: Issues of Nationality in Medieval Armenia"
• Hartmut Leppin, "Roman Identity in a Border Region: Evagrius and the Defense of the Roman Empire"
• George Hatke, "Holy Land and Sacred History: a View from early Ethiopia"
• Ralph-Johannes Lilie, "Zur Stellung von ethnischen und religiösen Minderheiten in Byzanz: Armenier, Muslime und Paulikianer"
• John Haldon and Hugh Kennedy, "Regional Identities and Military Power: Byzantium and Islam ca. 600-750. 
• Alexander Beihammer, "Strategies of Identification and Distinction in the Byzantine Discourse on the Seljuk Turks"

Ethno-Phyletism and Nationalism

Nationalism and ethno-phyletism are, of course, besetting sins among Eastern Christians of all traditions. (For a very useful recent theological analysis, see Peter Galadza's article, "The Structure of the Eastern Churches: Bonded with Human Blood or Baptismal Water" in Pro Ecclesia 17 [2008]: 373-86.) But for all Christians the question is raised as to how we are to regard our earthly loyalties in view of the fact that, as St. Paul says, we have here no lasting city. Can a Christian be patriotic at all? Is patriotism different from nationalism?

The great Catholic moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre began some time ago to explore these questions not in theological terms but in philosophical ones in his "Is Patriotism a Virtue?" in: R. Beiner, ed., Theorizing Citizenship (State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 209-228; and in his really crucial article "Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats" in Verene Bell and Laurence Lerner, eds., On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt U Press, 1088) where we read this very acid comment:

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf… [I]it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.

Now we have a number of new books out that are attempting to ask and answer some of these questions theologically:

Dorian Llywelyn, Toward a Catholic Theology of Nationality (Lexington, 2010), 342pp.


Next year in Logos, we will feature reviews of Llywelyn and the Barker volume below by Andrew Bennett, an Eastern Catholic scholar whose doctoral dissertation several years ago examined different nationalist movements, of two new publications treating various aspects of nationalism.

Philip W. Barker, Religious Nationalism in Modern Europe: If God Be For Us (Routledge, 2008), 210pp. 

The Barker volume looks at nationalism primarily in Western Europe, but does have a chapter on nationalism in Orthodox Greece that deserves attention.