Psychoanalysis and War: The Superego and Projective Identification

War tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace among men after it is over. It cuts all the common bonds between the contending peoples, and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come.

—Freud to Einstein, "Why War?"

The problem of warfare which includes genocide, and its most recent manifestation, international terrorism, brings into focus the need to understand how the individual is placed in the social and the social in the individual. Psychoanalytic theories of superego aggression, splitting, projection, and projective identification may be useful in helping us to understand the psychic links involved. It seems vital to me writing in the Middle East in September 2002 that we examine our understanding of what it is we understand about war, including genocide and terrorism.

Some psychoanalysts argue that war is a necessary defence against psychotic anxiety (Fornari xx; Volkan), and Freud himself first advanced the idea that war provided an outlet for repressed impulses. ("Why War?" 197). The problematic of these views is the individual's need to translate internal psychotic anxieties into real external dangers so as to control them. It suggests that culturally warfare and its most recent manifestation, international terrorism and the so-called "war on terrorism," may be a necessary object for internal aggression and not a pathology.

Indeed, Fornari suggests that "war could be seen as an attempt at therapy, carried out by a social institution which, precisely by institutionalizing war, increases to gigantic proportions what is initially an elementary defensive mechanism of the ego in the schizo-paranoid phase" (xvii-xviii). In other words, the history of war might represent the externalization and articulation of shared unconscious fantasies. This idea would suggest that the culture of war, genocide, and international terrorism provides objects of psychic need. If this is so, with what can we replace them? If cultural formations and historical events have their sources in our psychic functioning—that is to say, in our unconscious fears and desires,—and culture itself provides a framework for expressing, articulating, and coming to terms with these fears and desires, then psychoanalysis may help to reveal why war seems to be an inevitable and ineradicable part of human history.

Superego as an Agent of Aggression

In "The Ego and the Id," Freud formulated a seemingly insoluble dilemma in the very essence of the human psyche: the eternal conflict between the dual instincts of eros, the civilizing life instinct, and the indomitable death instinct (thanatos). He also identified some aspects of the death instinct with superego aggression, suggesting that the superego was the agent of the death instinct in its cruel and aggressive need for punishment and that its operative feeling was frequently a punitive hatred, while other aspects of the superego were protective. As we know, Freud thought the source of the superego was the internalization of the castrating Oedipal father. In chapter seven of Civilization and its Discontents, he theorized that when defusion or separation of the dual instincts occurred, aspects of aggression frequently dominated and that it was the purpose of the ego to find objects for eros and/or aggression either in fantasy or reality. The role phantasy plays in projective identification is something to which I shall return.

Other theorists, such as Melanie Klein, trace the beginning of the superego back to early (infant) oral phantasies of self-destruction, which is a direct manifestation of the death instinct. Klein transformed the oedipal drama by making the mother its central figure and thus playing a vital role in object-relations theory, about which I shall say more later in this essay. Although Klein's work relied on the dual instinct theory postulated by Freud, she re-defined the drives by emphasizing the...