| Ideology and Metaphor: Analysis of Collective Dreaming Richard A. Koenigsberg |
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| At this moment in the history of the United States, it's clear that we are living within a collective phantasy. Pundits endlessly "criticize" the ideas and words of Donald Trump: to no avail. They mistakenly assume that statements made by human beings contain or reflect rational content. Freud has not yet been discovered. The unconscious remains unknown, or rather, people remain entirely unconscious--because they do not understand that politic rhetoric does not correspond to "reality," but rather reflects fantasies shared by a leader and his followers. How to uncover the shared fantasies that define political culture? How to awaken from the Nightmare? | ||||
I. Ideology and Metaphor Political ideas articulate psychological meanings. How to decipher the latent content of political rhetoric and texts? My method consists of identifying recurring images and figures of speech in the rhetoric and texts of political leaders--to reveal the phantasies that the political ideology seeks to express. An ideology is comparable to a dream—that many people are having at once. The psychological study of ideology focuses—not on the idiosyncrasies of individuals—but upon how shared desires, anxieties and conflicts give rise to collective representations. My method grows out of my research on Nazism, which began with Hitler’s Ideology (1975). Identifying recurring images and metaphors in Hitler’s rhetoric, I concluded that Nazi ideology externalized a coherent phantasy: the idea that the German nation was a real body (politic) suffering from a potentially fatal disease. The Final Solution grew out of Hitler’s phantasy or perception of reality. Hitler and the Nazis sought to eliminate Jews—imagined to be the source of Germany’s disease—in order to prevent the death of the body politic. Hitler conveyed this phantasy to his closest colleagues, and eventually to the German people. A sufficient number of Germans embraced and enacted this phantasy—the source of the history the Nazis created. II. Embodiment Phantasy refers to an intermediate mental state between body and mind. Impulses and desires give rise to mental corollaries. Thomas Ogden states that phantasy “never loses its connection to the body.” Phantasy content is traceable to thoughts and feelings about the “workings and contents of one’s own body in relationship to the workings and contents of the body of the other.” If ideologies articulate phantasies and phantasies derive from the body, it follows that ideologies are bound to—not separate from—our bodies. How may we understand the relationship between body, phantasy and mental operations in the case of ideology? Textual metaphors, I suggest, convey the presence of the body and allow phantasies about the body to enter social reality. By virtue of embodied metaphors, the body with its phantasies makes its way into discourse. As dreams reveal the unconscious phantasies of individuals, so ideologies reveal phantasies shared by members of a group. To analyze an ideology is to interpret a collective dream. |
