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POLITICAL IDEOLGY AND SHARED FANTASY
THE DREAM OF THE BODY POLITIC
MAKING CONSCIOUS THE UNCONSCIOUS IN SOCIAL REALITY
There is an astonishing bifurcation between the inner world and the outer world. Psychologists are so willing to critique the inner world—to attempt to control and modify it—whereas events in the political world somehow are considered “real” or “external reality”—impervious to psychological analysis. The core of the problem is why no one wants to “go there:” to apply psychological analysis to politics and political history: to pretend it’s not a disease or pathology, or at the least a real problem.
Human beings reveal their internal psychic life by virtue of the fantasies they project
into reality. Political and cultural forms exist in order to permit certain fantasies to be projected into the world. Fantasies are shared and played out in relationship to the external world. Freud studied the dreams of individuals; I’m studying the collective dreams of societies. What happens in a society is the consequence of collective dreaming--shared fantasies that are acted out.
My technique of analyzing public documents. How can one perceive body symbolism in political documents. Politics is, essentially, fantasies about the body projected into external reality.
Freud studied individual dreaming. I’m studying collective dreaming. I’m looking at aspects of "external reality," ideologies, etc. as if manifest content of a dream that many people are having at once. Social "reality" is a shared dream that one can interpret.
My method is the content analysis of the writings and speeches of individuals who have defined a particular culture's dreams. By studying the belief-systems of a culture, you can uncover the fantasy or dream or latent content of the culture's ideas.
What I'm doing is "making conscious the unconscious on the stage of world history." In waging war, committing genocide, human beings are manifesting certain fundamental predispositions or fantasies. To "interpret" the historical manifestations of mass-destructiveness, therefore, is to reveal the latent fantasies that are the source of these manifestations. To "awaken from the nightmare of history," "make conscious the unconscious on the level of historical reality" is to reveal the shared fantasies or unconscious complexes that are the source of collective destructiveness.
By studying collective psychopathologies such as war or genocide, we study manifestations of the human neurosis. We study the shared fantasies, dreams; nightmares of the human race that have been projected outward into the political or historical process.
To "make conscious the unconscious" is to reveal the shared fantasies that are the source of collective psychopathology. Where Freud interpreted the dreams of individuals, now we move toward interpreting the dreams of societies—toward revealing collective psychopathologies that are manifest and revealed as culture.
Core unconscious fantasies are revealed through their projection onto cultural objects. History is the acting out of the shared unconscious fantasies. The role of Richard Koenigsberg in history is to make these fantasies conscious. To make these fantasies conscious is to permit human beings to perceive their own natures--as this nature has been projected into the historical process. We can witness inner life by virtue of the nature of the fantasies that are externalized and acted out in culture and history.
One of my most important ideas is analysis of metaphor as the basis of politics—the disease metaphor as the source of genocide: the body and how it gets externalized into political units. My main contribution to humanity will be to show how bodily fantasies are projected into nations, creating war and genocide.
The body politic is a double of the self (the King's second body): Both genocide (purification) and war (sacrifice) follow from this dream of preserving an immortal body with which human beings have become identified. Both war and genocide derive from bodily fantasies. Political ideology is a projection of bodily experience.
One of my main themes is how bodily fantasies create politics, culture and history: Nationalism as the relocation of the self: from body to body politic (we need the connection to this omnipotent body so desperately). Killing and dying occur in order to express faith in the reality of these omnipotent bodies. War and genocide are blood sacrifices made in the name of these gods, testifying to their existence, creating their reality.
The idea of the existence of immortal bodies is the foundation of culture: Bodies politic, bodies of work, monuments, etc.: the projection of human bodies into (dead) things. Sacrificial acts create these dead bodies. Metaphors, bodily images reveal the bodily fantasies.
The dream of the body politic is the dream of eternal fusion with an immortal object. Identification with the idea of cultural objects or entities is the fundamental illusion. Suffering = eternal fusion to the omnipotent object: that which "keeps on going on though you die." Attachment to the illusion of culture is painful: It keeps you from attaching to your own life; embracing and cathecting your own life.
You hate and want to kill the same object to which you wish to sacrifice your life. You hate this object because it oppresses you; takes you away from your self. But you can't separate from it because you've identified with it so completely; have devoted your life to it. Therefore you split off your hatred and project it onto the "enemy." The enemy is your own group: the object you love and to which you are attached. The enemy is your own group and you want to kill it off.
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