[lit-ideas] Re: Awakening from the Nightmare of History
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 10:53:23 -0400
Some thoughtful questions here. I do agree that war either serves some sort of
mythological, symbolic function, some acting out of a collective psychic wound,
or it just proves that humanity has neither rhyme nor reason for its behavior.
We simply love war, love blood. The sheer pointlessness of WWI would argue in
favor of the latter. The mind bending techniques that were used in WWI by the
British to convince men to go to their deaths in fighting for their country are
now used by jihadists to convince people to be suicide bombers in support of
their cause. I tend to think that the ability to send animals to their deaths
in vast numbers (cows, sheep, pigs) is the same mentality that sends men to
their deaths with equal impunity. (No plug for PETA here, just an observation.)
----- Original Message -----
From: Orion Anderson
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 8/4/2005 12:36:29 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Awakening from the Nightmare of History
Coming Soon: Listserv on the "Psychological Interpretation of Ideology, Culture
and History." For further information contact Orion Anderson at
libraryofsocialscience@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
AWAKENING FROM THE NIGHTMARE OF HISTORY:
Psychological Interpretation of War and Genocide
Richard Koenigsberg
A character in James Joyce?s novel Ulysses said that ?history is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.? We might do well to take literally the idea
of ?history as a nightmare.? In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud provided a
method for analyzing the dreams of individuals. I have developed a method for
analyzing collective dreaming. I interpret elements of culture as
manifestations of shared fantasy--as if a dream that many people are having at
the same time. The psychological interpretation of culture revolves around
delineating the nature and shape of those desires, conflicts and fantasies that
give rise to and are articulated through ideologies and social institutions.
The complete paper by Richard A. Koenigsberg is available for the first time as
an on-line publication.
To read: AWAKENING FROM THE NIGHTMARE OF HISTORY: Psychological Interpretation
of War and Genocide
PLEASE CLICK HERE or visit:
http://home.earthlink.net/~libraryofsocialscience/awakening.htm
NATIONS AND THE FANTASY OF IMMORTALITY
The idea of omnipotent bodies politic is a dream that people experience while
they are awake. Nations constitute a shared fantasy of immortality. The dream
of the nation may at times seem to be a benign, beautiful dream, fantasy of
oneness with one?s beloved country. However, this dream transmogrifies into a
nightmare at the moment when people begin to doubt the omnipotence of their
nation.
Wars come into being in order to demonstrate--test the proposition--that one?s
nation is all-powerful. Nations bring forth or manifest power through their
capacity to kill and bring about death, that is, as a result of their
willingness to sacrifice the lives of human beings. As long as there are people
who are in the process of ?dying for the country,? we are persuaded that
nations are real.
Other related posts:
