Attacking the Shadow through Iraq
Year:
2002 Using the I-Rack to Put Western Civilization to the Question (Part #1)
As discussed elsewhere with respect to the unrecognized logic of America's 'War on Terra', a problem of pronunciation signals a problem of comprehension. In the case of 'terror', this confusion is signalled by the title of the UN Environment Programmes's INFOTERRA information system. Indeed, in most English and American dialects there is no distinction in the pronunciation between "Terror" and "Terra". Similarly, in most American dialects, in the pronunciation of 'Iraq', there is no distinction between "raq" and "rack". The unconscious implications of this are explored below.
Two linked approaches are used here. One approach is to consider the possibility that America is effectively undertaking a massive attack on its own shadow -- through Iraq. The second is to consider the way in which the identity of western civilization is being put on a form of 'rack' -- the 'I-rack'.
Attacking the Shadow
Shadow: Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists have extensively explored the 'shadow' and the pathology associated with the tendency of people to attack their own shadow. The archetypal scapegoat or shadow, present in everyone, is that part of the psyche normally the focus of blame or attack when the individual feels it necessary to vindicate himself or justify his own behaviour. It is not normally recognized as part of the self and thus the blame or attack is usually received by someone else who has sparked off the disquieting view of the shadow.
The shadow has its collective dimension, as noted by Michael Daniels (The Shadow in Transpersonal Psychology, 2000):
According to Jung, there is another important dimension to the shadow - its collective manifestations. Jung is referring here to the darkness that may be found as an undercurrent in all human groups, whether families, tribes, organisations, movements or large civilisations, as well as in human nature generally. For example, in the same way that the personal shadow is the dark complement of an individual's persona, a culture's dominant zeitgeist will cast its own dark, antithetical, collective shadow. At the universal level, the shining light of our self-professed and sometimes expressed humanity is complemented and counterbalanced by a very dark side to human nature. We rightly react in horror and disgust at the brutality and inhumanity of the Holocaust, or of Rwanda and Kosovo. But the real horror is that we are all capable of such atrocities - especially, it seems, if we are male. It is very much a case of "There, but for the grace of God, go I". Or, as Jung (1958) puts it: "we are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals ... None of us stands outside humanity's ... collective shadow." (p. 96) [more]
Psychosynthesis, for example, aims, by psychoanalysis, to assist in acknowledgement of this lower aspect of man's nature and thus create inner harmony. Such acknowledgement takes courage but results in integrating the shadow in a constructive manner, leading first to humility and humanness and eventually to new insight and expanded horizons. It is postulated that the inability to accept that the "enemy" is in fact one's own lower nature is the cause of all bias, discrimination and conflict. Acknowledgement of the collective shadow might well prevent nationalistic or racialistic over-reactions to atrocities and barbarism which effectively are merely responding in kind. By accepting that everyone, as a human being, holds in himself collective responsibility for every development may well be the key to the next stage in human evolution.
From the perspective of Neuro-Linguistic Programming: 'Change comes from 'widening the aperture' of the person's map of the world or by finding and transforming the obstacles to the light -- not by attacking the shadow' [more]. But curiously it is in fantasy gaming and role playing that the phrase 'attacking the shadow' is now most widely recognized in modern culture -- thanks in part to works such as The Lord of the Rings and the challenge of its 'Dark Riders' [The "Dark Riders" of Social Change, 2002].
Estranged fatherhood: The American poet, Robert Bly, for example, has written on how many men have fought their fathers -- a dark "shadowy" father -- to overcome them. He also writes of men who have tried to rise above their fathers, flying high, transcending, leaving them below. Bly said, with respect to US involvement in the Vietnam war (Iron John, 1990, p. 95),
"The older men in the American military establishment and government did betray the younger men in Vietnam, lying about the nature of the war, remaining in safe places themselves, after having asked the young men to be warriors and then in effect sending them out to be ordinary murderers." (at p.95)
The pattern of folly sustaining this has been explored by Barbara Tuchman (The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, 1984), In his book, People of the Lie (1983), M Scott Peck notes with respect to Vietnam, where he served in the Army Medical Corps:
I used to ask the troops on their way to battle in Vietnam what they knew about the war and its relationship to Vietnamese history. The enlisted men knew nothing. Ninety percent of the junior officers knew nothing. What little the senior officers did know was generally solely what they had been taught in the highly biased programs of their military schools. It was astounding. At least 95 percent of the men going off to risk their very lives did not even have the slightest knowledge of what the war was about...The fact of the matter is that as a nation we did not even know why we were waging the war.
As Bly develops his argument, U.S. fathers fail to give their sons what they need to be men. Young men need initiation into adulthood, to be welcomed among the fathers of the world, or they rage and sulk alone through life. In the special mythology of the U.S., says Bly, all you need to do to become an American man is reject your father. In situation comedies, in popular media, fathers are portrayed as weak and ridiculous. In this atmosphere it is little wonder that older men lack the confidence, or even the knowledge needed, to be more generous. Over past decades it has been the phenomenon of the counter-culture (whether through long hair, alternative philosophies and states of consciousness), its male adherents acted out their rejection of the Fathers and everything they stood for. But driving that rejection was the grief of shattered illusions.
Bly has spent the last few years talking about this problem to groups of men. He offers them traditional initiatory solutions. The meetings are part poetry reading, part spiritual retreat, part group therapy. That his book has become a number-one best seller in the United States suggests he has indeed tapped a deep well of unspoken pain. Since 1974, Bly has organized an annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father to consider a wide variety of mythological, poetic and other traditions. The aim is to create an environment in which participants are able to move toward an understanding between men and women, young and old, and people of diverse cultures, ethnic backgrounds, mythological and ritual traditions.
The question is whether the frustration at the 'deep well of unspoken pain' he addresses has now been collectively projected by American culture onto Iraq as a concrete focus for the shadowy attributes of 'terror'. Has the Iraq crisis, focused on Saddam Hussein, been evoked and set up by a complex cultural dynamic as a kind of 'father' who has to be rejected and overcome for American culture to be able to be able to come into some new form of maturity. Certainly the relationship of George Bush Sr to Saddam Hussein has created a pattern on which many have commented as a motivating factor for George W Bush.
Tilting at windmills: It is useful to look at a famous contemporary commentary on the Spanish Conquistadores invasion of the 'New World', as developed by Miguel de Cervantes [1547-1616]. His political allegories were readily understood by Spaniards notably through the actions of Don Quixote against windmills -- that gave rise to the much-used phrase "tilting at windmills". The phrase originates with an incident when Don Quixote sees windmills and tries to convince his companion Sancho Panza that they are evil giants and that he must do battle with them. Don Quixote battles enemy knights and soldiers, sorcerers, and giants. His only problem is that he often gets things wrong, mistaking strangers for enemies, falling off his horse, and being beaten senseless by mule-drivers. He blames every setback on the magic of an evil enchanter he believes to be his nemesis. Everywhere he goes, Don Quixote sees the everyday as the legendary: he confuses inns for castles, windmills for giants, and prostitutes for princesses:
Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth. (Don Quixote, Chapter VIII: Of the good fortune which the valiant Don Quixote had in the terrible and undreamt-of adventure of the windmills)
Confused by modern media, there is every possibility that Iraq has become a focus for the modern military-industrial complex -- in their desperate search for oil, rather than for the gold of the Conquistadores. Might Iraqi oil rigs have unconscious resonances to Spanish windmills? Don Quixote, of course, did not lack courage but was bested by forces which he did not understand and he was completely powerless to defeat. A Castilian Spaniard of that day would have identified with Don Quixote, because in spite of his own efforts, his life was getting worse for reasons he did not understand. He was simply too far removed from the economic and political centers of power in Spain.
Believing that outside forces are capriciously controlling one's experience can indeed lead to a desire for revenge, to the constant need to 'avenge' the arbitrary and fickle vicissitudes of life. Research (Stuckless, 1998) has found that the stronger the vengeful feelings people have, the less comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful their experience of life. McCullough et al (2001) corroborate these findings, noting that vengefulness is positively correlated with: being less forgiving; greater rumination about the offense; higher negative affectivity; and lower life satisfaction.
Robert Johnson (Transformation: understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness, 1993), uses Don Quixote to illustrate the first of three stages of personal growth to achieve maturity and wholeness. Using three quintessential figures from classical literature -- Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust -- he presents three levels of development that are to be achieved to experience the self-realized state of completion and harmony. Each is Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust at various stages of a life. They represent levels of consciousness that live inside us, vying for dominance, one winning one moment, another the next.
- Don Quixote is the innocent child in us all, unaware of life's pain -- a poignant reference to US governments indifference to developing countries at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg, 2002).
- Shakespeare's Hamlet represents conscious imperfection, a man divided between the opposing forces within himself and full of despair in the face of the tragic nature of life. This is the state of the modern Western person -- aware of shortcomings, anxious over what to do, neurotic and incomplete. As a result, modern Western culture has historically dismantled the more natural societies it has encountered, leaving entire populations stranded in the purgatory of this second level of consciousness.
- The third state, conscious perfection -- the state of the fully integrated person -- is represented by Goethe's Faust. His is an awareness that has been gained by struggling with and working through the second level of consciousness -- a journey that is both painful and dangerous and of particular pertinence to our contemporary culture. It is Faust who, through his own inner work, restores to wholeness the life he had torn apart to achieve the ecstatic, visionary, enlightened consciousness of which we are all capable. [more]
Sa'id Asgharzadeh (Tose'eh, Iran, 6 October 2001) compares the WTC twin towers to the windmills attacked by Don Quixote, of which he notes two variants in literature -- that of Cervantes he compares to bin Laden seeking to stop the Renaissance and restore medieval chivalry, with Sancho (his companion) on a donkey like Mullah Omar encouraging Don Quixote to pursue his dreams and illusions. He argues that Graham Greene's modern Don Quixote, like George Bush, is to be addressed as his excellency, pursues the path to absolute good and is in a constant struggle against evil, but is thwarted in his aims by his fantasies and illusions. His Sancho is a bankrupt capitalist -- in this case Tony Blair. For the commentator:
"Both are examples of the tragedy of human life. Both are prepared to sacrifice themselves for humanity, have companions, and insist on pursuing their chosen paths though they realize they are the object of universal ridicule....We should wait and see if the countries of the region and the world face a fate shaped by emotions or thought. If a choice is inevitable, do people prefer a tragic or a comical ending?"
External vs Internal terrorism: In a relatively rare analysis of the New York terrorist attacks, a Brazilian psychoanalyst, Norberto Keppe (founder of the personal development methodology Analytical Trilogy) states [in an interview with Richard Jones]:
Well, when we notice terrorism outside ourselves, we need to see that in a certain way, that terrorism also exists inside as well, in this case, inside the nation that sees the terrorism only outside itself. So we cannot say that certain nations are dangerous and others not. Because the question of terrorism is not a question of this or that nation. It's a universal question. So if a nation sees terrorism coming only from outside, and not from inside as well, it is actually in more danger than the one who is willing to look at its own internal terrorism and take care of it in a more careful way. So it is very dangerous to see the problem only on the outside. This brings up the question of psychological projection, which is a process where the person sees the problems that he has, in the other person. So a nation that sees the problem outside, becomes a very dangerous nation to itself, because it doesn't see that the problems are actually inside itself.
For Andrew Samuels (Machiavelli and Shadow Politics, 1994):
A more evolved attitude toward politics (one that goes with shadow energies and not against them) is something to work on in the office or consulting room, just as we work on more evolved attitudes to spirituality, sexuality and aggression. Analysts (and patients, too?) might begin to work out models that enable us to refer to a person's level of political development, to a political drive, to a political level of the psyche. In clinical practice, such models would enable us to generate new readings of personal and collective political imagery. We may even find that there is a politics of imagery. [more]
John Schlapobersky (1993) comments on how Andrew Samuels' book Political Psyche (1994) brings political questions to bear on depth psychology; and psychological questions to bear on the political world. As the two areas of discourse engage one another through the book, he acknowledges "the discovery of a two-way process ... as the original intent to illumine the political turned into a searching exploration of the clinical." [more]
Attacking others: As a strategy such attack is envisaged when the feeling of being overpowered or ashamed is converted into destructive aggression or attempts to make others feel humiliated or shamed. This is the person who tries to avoid their own sense of inadequacy by shifting that feeling to the other person -- trying to invoke in another the shame they can't bear to feel about themselves. It is the essence of scapegoating [more; more] -- a dimension neglected with respect to Iraq.
On 'internal terrorism' Norberto Keppe (see above) states:
Well, this question of terrorism, this terror of terrorism, shows to the people the terror they have of their own internal terrorism. And explaining this in the pathological sense ... the individual has inside himself ideas of destruction, ideas of self-destruction, and it becomes very dangerous for him because by thinking that he is a victim of external terrorism, of external destruction, he forgets to see that he also has this not exactly tendency, but that he has this attitude of destroying himself.... So what I'm saying is that absolutely no individual who has maturity will try to solve a problem through a fight, or through a war. There is a Chinese saying, that says when you see two people talking, two people discussing, watch for the one who loses his cool and physically attacks. That is the one who has lost his reason. So if a country declares war on another because of terrorism, it is because it puts itself on the same plane, on the same level as the other one. An inferior level. A level with no reason. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason that justifies a war. [more]
In exploring shame, psychoanalyst James M. Shultz (Shame, 1996) notes:
Is it surprising that there are many defenses against shame? Donald Nathanson, the psychiatrist who has written most comprehensively about shame, has grouped the defenses against it into four areas. These areas are withdrawal, avoidance (which can take many different forms), attacking others, and attacking the self. There isn't time to go into these here, but let me just say that if you read his descriptions of defenses against shame you can see in slightly different language, practically all of what psychoanalysts have called the ego defense mechanisms. They are the ways we protect the integrity of our individual point of view and conscious functioning. It makes sense that our psychological defenses against overwhelming anxiety and threats of castration or disintegration would also protect us from overwhelming shame and threats of dismemberment or dissolution. Here's a thought: if you're about to be castrated you are afraid, but if you're already castrated you're ashamed.
Many have compared the World Trade Center disaster to a symbolic castration of American culture [more; more; more]
Methodology: Jerome Bernstein is one of the few psychoanalysts to apply his insights to the nature of the cultural challenge of terrorism [September 11th: Piercing Our Unconscious, 2001]. In an earlier book [Power and Politics: The Psychology of Soviet-American Partnership, 1989], he makes the case for underlying archetypal dynamics that prevented a political solution between the two superpowers during the Cold War, and which were responsible ultimately for the collapse of the Cold War (not a U.S. victory over the Soviet Union, as the U.S. subsequently claimed). Bernstein states:
Indeed, one of the first symptoms of powerful underlying archetypal dynamics determining political possibility in international conflict is the very intractability of the problem. In other words, if, despite best efforts over a protracted period of time, political resolution is not possible, the likely cause is the presence of prevailing archetypal dynamics of which the proponents are unaware. In this regard, it would be instructive to consider the observations of the pre-eminent historical authority on the Cold War, Harvard University professor John Lewis Gaddis, in an article entitled, International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War.. He raises a critically important question:
The end of the Cold War...was of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming. None actually did so...and that fact ought to raise questions about the methods we have developed for trying to understand world politics.
And, again, on page 18, he [Gaddis] asserts:
What is immediately obvious...[is] that very few of our theoretical approaches to the study of international relations came anywhere close to forecasting any of these developments. One might as well have relied upon stargazers, readers of entrails, and other "pre-scientific" methods for all the good our "scientific" methods did; clearly our theories were not up to the task of anticipating the most significant event in world politics since the end of World War II....(See Journal of International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3, Winter 1992/93, pp.5-58. Italics those of Dr. Gaddis.)
Bernstein indicates that by the year 2000, no one in the political science community had taken up the challenge formulated by Gaddis. the response had been : 'total silence from the very individuals and groups who should be most concerned' [more]
