NATIONS ARE BODIES
Richard Koenigsberg
  1. Perception of political units grows out of the experience and perception of one’s own body. The body is externalized into political units. Fantasies about the body are projected into the nation. The body politic becomes a double of the self; substitute for the self. Nations are experienced as if fused with the self. We defend nations so desperately because they are experienced as extensions of our own bodies.
  2. Metaphorical language conveys the bodily meaning of an abstract idea (which, however, we don’t experience as an abstract idea, rather as a concrete reality).
  3. Metaphorical language in political rhetoric contains and reveals bodily fantasies. Metaphors originate in the body and fantasies about the body. Metaphors convey bodily experience.
  4. Modell: “Primary metaphors are derived from bodily sensations and projected outward.” Seth Low: “Metaphor is the earliest vehicle ordering bodily sensations and actions.” Metaphors reveal unconscious fantasies associated with the body. Bodily experiences and fantasies are projected into politics units (and are the source of war and genocide).
  5. The "body politic" is a symbol of the self, of Hitler's body, of our own bodies, HEIR TO THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY.
  6. Countries are symbols or mental representations, not real entities. As mental representations, they are not separate from, but are tied to bodily processes.
  7. The mental representations of a "nation" is a symbol of the body, which means nations, like bodies, are often "falling apart;" or in danger of being penetrated or destroyed by alien organisms. 
  8. Analysis of metaphors appearing in texts constitutes the methodology for perceiving how unconscious phantasies (about the body) are externalized into political and cultural symbols. 
  9. Analysis of metaphorical language reveals bodily symbolism. To study bodily metaphors (in political texts or rhetoric) is understand the "transformational equation" (Howard F. Stein) whereby bodily fantasies are transformed into symbol systems.