Dear all,
The question posed in the previous newsletter touches a nerve precisely because it challenges one of our most protected assumptions: that what is widespread and socially sanctioned cannot, by definition, be pathological.
One possible reason psychiatry has hesitated to theorize “collective psychopathology” is that the discipline is historically structured around the individual subject. Diagnostic systems require deviation from a norm. When violence becomes normative–embedded in state policy, national myth, or collective identity–it effectively immunizes itself against psychiatric scrutiny.
To pathologize mass violence would require interrogating the very structures that define normality, legitimacy, and authority.
Psychoanalytic traditions have, at times, come closer to this terrain: Freud’s work on group psychology, Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, and Volkan’s studies of large-group identity. However, these ideas remain marginal compared to biologically oriented, clinically bounded models. Exploring collective pathology would force psychiatry to cross into political, moral, and symbolic domains that modern medicine tends to avoid.
The idea of nations as “sacred objects” is crucial. When the nation is unconsciously experienced as a maternal figure, protective, idealized, fused with identity–violence committed in its name can feel like love, duty, even self-sacrifice. Thus, genocide and war may represent not a failure of attachment, but a catastrophic distortion of it. Love becomes inseparable from destruction.
Perhaps the deepest resistance lies in this implication: that our most revered bonds: belonging, loyalty, love of home can generate the most extreme cruelty. To face that would require not only new clinical concepts, but a collective willingness to mourn illusions about ourselves.
If we are to “awaken from the nightmare of history,” as Richard Koenigsberg writes, psychiatry may need to risk leaving the safety of the consulting room and engage the dangerous intimacy between love, identity, and violence at the level of groups and nations.
Warm regards,
Xuan Binh Kim
