REVIEW N° 03 | YEAR 2008 / 1
SECTIONS: ARTICLES
ARTICLE
Freud: on violence
David Benhaim*
A dense, rich, rigorous and deep analysis of Kultur which allows to define the phenomenon of violence in its essence runs through the freudian writings. No need to call upon philosophers nor upon sociologists to analyse the relationship between violence and society or to establish a diagnosis on the state of civilization which is ours. From Totem and taboo to Moses and monotheism passing through Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, Group Psychology and the analysis of the ego, Civilization and its discontents, Why war?, Freud never stops reconsidering the question of man’s violence not only in its social dimension, but in its cultural and anthropological one.
The word violence is not part of the psychoanalytic lexicon. It is a term of the common language which is semantically charged: it has connotations of aggression, excessive use of power, rape. In ordinary language, violence is the brute force someone uses to subject somebody. We call violent any action which someone exerts over somebody against his will to subject or dominate him. In his answer to Einstein, in 1933, who affirms as a fact with which we have to reckon that law and might inevitably go hand to hand (Why war ? , p.200), Freud uses the term violence in preference to that of might: « But may I replace the word “might ” by the balder and harsher word “violence”? » (Why war? p.70).
Freud always asserted the idea of an antagonism between Kultur and instinctual life; in his intellectual concerns, it goes back up as far as Letters to Fliess. In a manuscript of May 31st, 1897, he wrote him that incest is antisocial – civilization consists in his progressive renunciation (The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, p.252). He always supported without retracting that neurosis is a symptom of Kultur. In his article, Civilized sexual morality and modern nervous illness, he writes: I must insist upon the view that neuroses, whatever their extent and wherever they occur, always succeed in frustrating the purposes of civilization, and in that way actually perform the work of the suppressed mental forces that are hostile to civilization (p.202-203). If we take a look at his last writings, we can note that a work as Civilization and its discontents rests on the idea that the destiny of the individual and that of the community are inseparable, each one being played through the other one. Writings on war will be illustrating this idea.
In 1915, in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, Freud called to mind the collapse of an illusion caused by war. The illusion which collapses is that of the belief in the idea of progress in morals, politeness, ethics, all in all in the relationship between men.
He questions the ideals of culture from the point of view of psychic economy; he will speak later of discontent reacting in this way to the fact of the collapse of the ideals of the western man and the web of European Community […]Disenchantment is inflicted by culture, as Laurence Kahn underlines it (Faire parler le destin, p.191). This discontent will not die down, but will be growing until achieving a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism (Moses and the monotheism, p. 54).
In 1921, in Group Psychology and analysis of the ego, work forerunner at the same time of the investigation of an internal psychic « groupality» and what will become the psychoanalytic approach of group, Freud maintains that the social does not dissociate itself from the individual to constitute a separate layer of the psyche. It is constituting of the psyche. The opposition between the individual psychology and the social psychology is questionned: In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent ; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the word, is at the same time social psychology as well (p.69). The social psychology starts from the individual and asks about what takes place in its psyche when he is immersed in a mass, which types of forces this crowd is going to make weigh on its psychic functioning, and which modifications this one will be constrained to operate in front of the pressure of those forces (Laval Guy, Bourreaux ordinaires p.24). Freud develops at the same time a reflection on the nature of the mass, the formation of groups and the leader. In his analysis of hypnosis, it provides some essential elements of reflection. Hypnotic relation is a mass relation with two members. The structure of the mass is complex; hypnosis holds back an element which it isolates: the behaviour of the individual to the leader (p.115). Comparing hypnosis with the loving state, Freud writes: there is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist as towards the loved object. There is the same sapping of the subject’s own initiative ; no one can doubt that the hypnotist has stepped into the place of the ego ideal (p.114) This last proposition takes back the expression which sums up the loving state: the object has been put in the place of the ego ideal (p.113). The hypnotist is the sole object, and no attention is paid to any but him, he adds. The hypnotic relation is the unlimited devotion of someone in love, but with sexual satisfaction excluded (p.115). What the hypnotist asserts and asks is lived dreamlike by the hypnotized. It is important to underline, first, that the mass situations do not define themselves so much by the number of persons who appear in them than by fact of being crontroled by the ideal’s function (Scarfone Dominique, Oublier Freud? p.173); then, that inhibited sexual impulses manage to create very lasting ties between human beings as much as they are not capable of complete satisfaction, contrary to the uninhibited sexual impulses which, through discharge, extinguish when they are satisfied. To last, they must be mixed with inhibited elements, that is to say, purely affectionate components. This analysis allows Freud to explain at the same time the tie which joins the individuals in the mass and the one which joins them with the leader; a mass or a primary group of this kind, it concludes,is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego (p.116). What Freud is speaking about to us is the dissolution of the individual in the mass which will occur in the years of the rise of Nazism, a true massification of the individual who disappears as such, through this identification to the leader, erected as an ideal. It will be a totalitarian massification.
I recalled above the preference granted by Freud in Why war? to the term of violence which it substitutes for that of might. Why this substitution? I would think that Freud has in mind the violence of the impulses: impulse attacks from inside. This violence is as much that of the sexual as that of the impulse of aggression or destruction which will continually worry him, after the war of 1914 and the turn of 1920. In the myth of the primal horde dominated by the powerful father, in Totem and taboo, the incest, the murder and the cannibalism appear as fundamental wishes which emerge from the impulse. This violence is not exerted solely against other people, but against oneself, if one remembers that every civilization must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct (Freud, The future of an illusion, p.7).
I won’t finish this quick analysis on violence without considering a keywork: Civilization and its discontents. In this work, we find the same idea: the inseparable tie between the individual and the community. The question of the relationship of right and violence recalled in Why war? concerns mainly the adjustment of mutual relations of men (Civilization and its discontents, p.89). It is one of two purposes which caracterizes Kultur, the other being the protection of men against nature, which presupposes the domination of the forces of nature. Analysing characteristic traits of a culture in Civilisation and its discontents, Freud writes: perhaps we may begin by explaining that the element of civilization enters on the scene with the first attempt to regulate these social relationships […] which affect a person as neighbour, as a source of help, as another person’s sexual object, as a member of a family and of a State (p.95). The future of an illusion had already underlined that of these two purposes, it is the last which causes the deepest and the most bitter dissatisfaction faced with the slowness of its “progress”, while the domination of nature experiences constant progress. In Why war? Freud maintains, in a terse way to my mind, that the cohesion of the community depends on two factors: the pressure of violence and emotional ties, communal feelings – identifications – between the members of the community. If one of the factors is lacking, the other one can possibly maintain the community. Group Psychology and analisis of the ego and Civilization and its discontents shed light on mechanisms at work by analysing the constitution of a community. What does Freud understand by community? The union of a majority of weak individuals which come together against the strongest individual, making prevail their violence against his. Human life in common, affirms Freud, is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals (p.95). This collective violence of which the community claims the monopoly against the individual who would like to or could attack it, is what we call right. The power of this community, Freud goes on, is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force’. He adds: This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization (p.95). The essence of this replacement consists in the restriction of the possibilities of satisfaction of the members of the community, while the power of the separate individual, in the state of nature, was limitless.
Violence in society is the theme of the articles which compose this second part. The first one of Anna and Roberto Losso proposes to us dense and rich theoretical reflexions in their contents. After having defined violence, they set it forth in a transgenerational perspective: the families create myths whose objective is, as they underline it, to make a story of suffered abuses. “Condemned to transmit” all that could not be worked through, these families delegate to the following generations a mission: “to carry out impossible demands, which are really the demands of the mythical characters, remaining so attached to invisible loyalties. ” It is a matter of transpsychic transmission which is carried out through the subjects. The elements which are transmitted are rough, dumb elements, which are not modified from one generation to the other. Insofar as they are imposed on the new generation like a mandate to achieve a mission in conformity with the family myths, they constitute a transgenerational family violence that the authors describe as “active”. Nicholas Abraham, Maria Torok, Alberto Eiguer, Yolanda Gampel highlighted these contents and forged the conceptual tools which make it possible to identify and to analyze them. But there exists another form of transgenerational family violence that Anna and Robert Losso describe as “passive” and which is characterized by the absence of models. They highlight a quality of the transmission that one of them called trophic and which takes its origin in the family group as intergenerational transmission. It is a structuring transmission. An essential characteristic of the contemporary society, according to the authors, would be the deficit of the trophic transmission. An example particularly striking is the culture of the instantaneous, the perishable, the transient – what the sociologist Bauman calls « liquidity » – , whose result is that imitation prevails as a model over identification. This confronts us with a crisis of the transmission. The Losso take up concepts such as state of exception of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, metasocial guarantors of Touraine, individual producer or consumer of Judith Revel and Toni Negri to analyze social violence and to highlight the complex and difficult processes of subjectivation in our globalized society. What happens when one does not arrive to make a story? The splitted and not thought contents, write the authors, may take the shape of body marks, which we called body reminiscences; this will make that traumatic violence suffered and not worked through by the other generations appear through psychosomatic affections. Without developing what the authors understand by body reminiscences, I will retain the concept of unconscious body and the idea that affections transmitted by transpsychic way can be constituted like registers in the body. In these cases, there has no more mental memory, but a body memory; the experience is acted out in the body as Gaddini says. The paper ends with the narrative of the case of the family C. which illustrates all this reflexion on violence.
The second paper, Society without limits: families and subjects borderlines of Graciela Consoli, Susana Guerchicoff, Ezequiel Jaroslavsky, Irma Morosini, Maria Gabriela Ruiz, gives us the picture of a society without links where individuals and families are afflicted with evils which seem to consume them. To characterize them, the authors use the sociologist Bauman and his concept of “liquidity”: we live on “liquid” times. This contrasts with what Bowlby calls figures of attachment, those which can bring us constancy, stability and confidence. Such is the paradox on which the authors build their reflexion. What emerges from the pathological point of view is the pathology of the borders, the borderlines, which are one of the biggest challenges of the contemporary clinic. The authors set forth their reflexion from the point of view of the ties and the transgenerational. The borderline patient unsettles the analyst with his symptoms and his requests. Fragility of the networks of links, deficit of symbolization, facility to actig out, characterize also the family members. From the perspective of the experience of the ties, the authors highlight symptoms like the regression of psychic functioning or the difficulty of being different, which they consider as the result of the intensification of the transsubjective processes. These considerations match up with the freudian phenomenon of the masses and the individual’s massification. Let us add the question of unconscious alliances in their pathological side such as Kaës analyses them. The deficit in the psychic constitution and in narcissism, of which the borderlines are a paradigmatic example, make them prone to dissubjectification processes. This leads them to analyze the process of subjectivation which consists in becoming a peculiar subject, without forgetting however that the subject is held in and by ties which support him and in which he is inserted. Follows a fine analysis of how violence arises when identity is threatened. I will finish with two quotations related with our time and that seem to me to translate a reality we often face in our work with our patients; these quotations reflect work against the current we do in our offices. The first one: The risk of our time is to offer a character of immediacy to the pleasure, which can paralyse the long term projects. It is the sign of the greatest violence. The second one: We face up the following paradox: we have a big space of freedom, result of the expanse of the offer of the market, but in parallel we can observe an impoverishment of the internal world, thought, learning from experience, which complicates the exercise of the capacity of understanding applied to a complex, heterogeneous reality, but so confused for lack of identificatory marks.
I shall neither sum up nor analyse the third paper whose title is: The bomb that exploded me continues to blow up my family of Hanni Shalvi Mann. It would lead me to write a new article as comment, in the style of talmudic commentaries. I shall take back only some of the ideas which remained in my mind after its reading. We can set this paper, as the precedents, in the perspective of the links and in that of the transgenerational. His background is that of the numerous terrorist attacks whose victims are the Israeli civilians, children as adults. The title expresses a sort of fantasy where the dead becomes the witness of what happens after his death. From the beginning, the author defines clearly the subject of his article: the study of the unique unconscious processes that take place in families and couples who experienced loss from terror attacks. She stresses the character unique of these unconscious processes. But what are they and what is unique in them? She worked during numerous years with families victims of these attacks, what brings her to the conclusion that latent and overt aggression were the main emotional components that endangered the family members as individuals and as a family unit by accumulating continuous destructive energy in new, various, and different emotional patterns.
She takes up the explanation of Freud who considers aggression to be an attempt of the subject to control a traumatic situation, by transforming the passive role, which he must have played in the course of traumatic event, into active role: aggression is consequently the answer to traumatism. Psychoanalysis considers that the impact of traumatic events in the psyche can be treated only by the working through a deeper knowledge and its peculiar signification for the subject, what will allow its integration in his conscience existence. Traumatism, says the author, affects and disturbs the core of individual identity and is able to harm the capacity of symbolization of the individual. Since the survivor will never be able to restore the pretraumatic state, mourning is part of therapeutic process, to what is added the mourning of the loved member. The need to face up the range of the human destructiveness makes the task of therapy very difficult. The bomb is a material artefact, but once it explodes, it becomes a metaphorical bomb, “fireball”, as the author calls it, whose destructive and lethal energy seeks a lodging in a family member who will be his container. To contain an extreme aggression means endanger intrapsychic equilibrium and ties which tie up us to others. Consequently it is as though the family members “played” to get rid of this “fireball”, by throwing it to one another. To be the container of this ball is something unbearable. The more the aggression intensifies, the more the risk of breaking the primary defensive organizations, what can arouse pathological reactions as psychotic decompensation, suicide, divorce, and that, even in the families who have never suffered emotional disturbances. The remainder of the paper describes the therapeutic process with these families and the stages which must be followed. Finally the narrative of the case illustrates the theoretical developments exposed before.
Bibliography
Freud Sigmund (1908 [1973), ‘Civilized’ sexual morality and modern nervous illness, Standard Edition Vol IX, London, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of psychoanalysis.
(1915 [1973]), Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, Standard Edition, Vol. XIV, London, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of psychoanalysis.
(1921 [1973]) Group psychology and the analisis of the Ego, Standard Edition, Vol.XVIII, London, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of psychoanalysis.(1927 [1973]) The future of an illusion, Standard Edition, Vol.XXI, London, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of psychoanalysis.
(1930 [1973]) Civilization and its discontents, Standard Edition, Vol XXI, London, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of psychoanalysis.
(1933 [1973]) Why war ?, Standard Edition, Vol.XXII, London, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of psychoanalysis.
(1939 [1973]) Moses and monotheism : three essays, Vol.XXIII, London, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of psychoanalysis.
(1985 [1887-1904]) The complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachussets, and London, England.
Kahn L. (2005), Faire parler le destin, Paris, Klincksieck.
Laval Guy (2002), Bourreaux ordinaires, Psychanalyse du meurtre totalitaire, Paris, Épîtres, P.U.F.
Scarfone, Dominique (1999), Oublier Freud? , Montréal, Les Éditions du Boréal.
*David Benhaïm
900 Rockland App 309
Outremont, Québec, H2V3A2
Canada