Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

5 Nationalism, Group Narcissism, and the Problem of the Self

5 Nationalism, Group Narcissism, and the Problem of the Self Nationalism has been a major aspect of—and a major contributor to— interethnic conflict. There is a vicious circle between nationalism and organized warfare, each feeding on and augmenting the other. Each nation has it flag, its anthem, its military and police uniforms, and other distinct political and psychological symbols. Citizens of each nation are raised from early childhood on their nation’s cultural heritage, including its heroic historical myths and legends, and grow up feeling that their nation is special, unique, and superior to all others. With organized human warfare dating back some 13,000 years (Mansfield 1982), one nation’s victory is its neighbor’s defeat, one nation’s pride its neighbor’s shame. The twentieth-century institutions of the League of Nations and the United Nations were created after two horrific world wars in which tens of millions of people were killed and hundreds of millions traumatized. The conflicting nationalisms of the Israeli Jews and of the Palestinian Arabs play a key role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Understanding the psychology of nationalism is therefore a prerequisite for understanding this tragic conflict. The Territorial Imperative or the Human Imperative? Nationalism and organized warfare are human phenomena. Other mammal species may form small groups that stake out and defend a 87 common territory, and may be in conflict with one another, but they do not have the tools, weapons, language, consciousness, and large-group structure of the human species that make organized warfare possible. In the mid-1960s several studies were published which purported to explain why human beings form nations that keep waging war. In The Territorial Imperative, an expatriate American writer, with the help of his wife’s pretty drawings, explained that the possession of a defined territory is a basic need of all territorial species, including most mammals and, of course, humans (Ardrey 1966). The Territorial Imperative became popular with young people who thought that it explained much of what troubled them about their world. Ardrey’s revolutionary “discovery” was a popularization of the scienti fic work of two prominent biologists—the Austrian ethologists Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1903–1989) and his Dutch colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988). Lorenz, who had sympathized with the Nazis, called aggression “the so-called evil” (Lorenz 1963, 1966). Tinbergen was an anti-Nazi, but had worked in close association with Lorenz. Studying animal behavior, Lorenz and Tinbergen had shown that intraspecies aggression was common and natural in many species, and Ardrey capitalized on their work. A few years later, an American anthropologist countered Ardrey’s “territorial imperative” with a book entitled The Human Imperative, in which he argued that the most basic human needs were not aggression and the possession of territory but self-actualization, forming emotional and social bonds, helping others and receiving their help, giving and taking (Alland 1972). At the same time that Ardrey popularized the ethologists’ discoveries in his Territorial Imperative, a psychoanalyst from Central Europe made an important contribution to the study of human behavior in general and of human aggression in particular. This was the Germanborn Erik Homburger Erikson (1902–1994), the father of identity theory. Erikson, who became a Christian in his later years, had a Danish Jewish mother but never knew his biological father. In 1966 Erikson addressed the Royal Society of London about the pseudospecies mentality that characterized large human groups (Erikson 1966). At Konrad Lorenz’s suggestion, Erikson coined the term pseudospeciation for the process through which large groups that are part of the human species develop a sense of themselves as being a species unto themselves—the human species—and of other groups as subhuman or inhuman. Erikson de- fined pseudospeciation as follows: 88 Nationalism, Group Narcissism, and the Problem of the Self The term denotes the fact that while man is obviously one species, he appears and continues on the scene split up into groups (from tribes to nations, from castes to classes, from religions to ideologies) which provide their members with a firm sense of distinct and superior identity—and immortality. This demands, however, that each group must invent for itself a place and a moment in the very center of the universe where and when an especially provident deity caused it to be created superior to all others, the mere mortals. (Erikson 1968; 1969, p. 431...