Politics on the Couch: Splitting and Reparation -- Part One
What follows is the fourth section of my new book, Politics on the Couch. Because we live in an interactive world and this election is an interactive process, I am conducting a new experiment - posting sections of the manuscript twice weekly on my blog at HuffingtonPost.com and inviting readers' comments which may be folded into the final print edition.
Splitting and Reparation: Part One
Splitting is a normal process necessary for psychic survival; it enables the infant to keep feelings and images of pain and pleasure, hate and love, danger and safety internally separate. This protects against the experience of chaos and despair. In older children splitting helps them make sense of their world - and to keep anxiety at bay. By the time children are older, they have routinely relocated inner bad feelings in the world at large. After 9/11 the world at large became more terrifying than ever, reinforcing natural splitting phenomena in dramatic fashion: many were so afraid to fly that they required the assurances of President Bush that flying was safe, as well being as a patriotic expression that the terrorists had not won.
But at the same time as Bush was reassuring us to travel and shop he continued to play the splitting card, warning everyone "You are either with us or against us". We willingly supported his split world-view, though some noted that the price of this split was that any opposition to Bush could be called treason. How does this happen, that we need and fear a president - need him to protect us from outside dangers while fearing his wrath inside our patriotic selves should we question his actions?
In infancy, splitting was necessary to help the baby organize his experience and protect his inner world against terror (based on normal but intense feelings of frustration) which threatened to overwhelm him with panic. By making the threats external, the child mobilizes its defenses against them. Extreme opposites had to be kept apart - and 9/11 made the need to split even greater and easier to achieve. For instance, our obvious innocence in the face of the hijackers' willful destructiveness couldn't be contaminated at all by memories of our having dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And if we did happen to remember the thousands of innocent Japanese lives lost or irradiated, we justified our acts as necessary and virtuous in order to rationalize the massive civilian destruction that accompanied our determination to end World War II.
Voters live in a world more split than ever since 9/11. Our internal splits influence how we choose our leaders, as we often are drawn to candidates who are dominated by splitting processes similar to our own. For this reason - to look psychological resonance within each of us - it seems important for voters to examine the different kinds of splitting exhibited by Senators McCain and Obama. To the psychoanalyst part of me, splitting is necessary for self-protection, while repair of deep splits is necessary for emotional growth to occur.
Let's start with McCain who splits his world in ways remarkably similar to George W. Bush. Maintaining a split world-view - that we are good people surrounded by evil - means that we must strategize at the same time as we avoid having to think. This problem - keeping anxiety at bay by denying the humanity of the "enemy" - made it impossible for McCain and others to anticipate the consequences of invading Iraq. He maintains his split vision at all costs, now reminding everyone that the surge has worked - even though he cannot visit Baghdad without massive protection. One reason we evade facing facts about Iraq is to remain internally split: splitting keeps people from feeling helpless because it mobilizes aggression against those experienced as totally bad. we want to ignore negative qualities in ourselves, like our own hates and capacities to inflict harm.
Splitting also supports a kind of emotional delinquency, as splitters evade their psychic realities: men like Senator Larry Craig and Congressman Mark Foley publicly attack homosexuality while remaining privately gay. Bush's delinquency is well known, from his DUI days to his countless signing statements undermining laws passed in Congress. Politicians are famous for splitting past from present, previous actions from current ones. Voters evade having to face their own destructiveness and delinquency by finding themselves drawn to McCain and Bush who express it for them.
McCain splits past from present, straight talk from dissembling, courage from cowardice. On the day (June 12, 2008) the Supreme Court affirmed that the Constitutional right of habeas corpus applies to Guantanamo detainees, McCain said, "I always favored closing of Guantanamo Bay and I still think that we ought to do that." But the next day his need to split reasserted itself, and he went on the attack. He said, "The Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."
One cannot maintain a split between good and evil - really a split between human and sub-human - if detainees are humanized or given the same rights the rest of us enjoy.
McCain's reaction not only reminds us of his stunning capacity to reverse himself, but also that he can split off his own history of having been a prisoner of war. The likelihood that McCain could empathize with current detainees is compromised - and saw the light of day for 72 hours when he joined with Senators Graham and Warner to object to Bush policies at Abu Ghraib. They soon returned to the fold, however, and continued their support of water boarding and the like.
Obama was born with split, something which must have affected the normal process of splitting and repression required by children to manage anxiety. He couldn't separate black from white in the same way that children can who don't have a mixed race background. His split was pre-healed which must have lessened the psychological possibility of his keeping opposites separate - after all, he was made up of opposites. I think that because of this psychic fact, he seeks to bring people together through the process he calls "change".
At a different psychological level, internal cohesion is threatened by family splits. In Obama's case, his father left the family when he was two - leaving behind a split internal world in which parents no longer existed as a coherent unit. Having an internal parental unit helps children feel safer. Obama has written extensively about his experience. I just wanted to add that one searches for a father to heal a different split - a split in the internal world when parents are not together as a coherent couple in the mind of the child. One way to heal such a split was for Obama to become a loving father himself. On Father's Day 2008, Obama said, "If I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my girls; that if I could give them anything, I would give them that rock - that foundation - on which to build their lives." Later in that speech Obama referred to how important it is for children, if at all possible, to grow up having two parents who respect and love each other.
Some voters are passionately drawn to Obama because he not only promises change from divisive Washington politics, but also because he evokes infantile yearnings for an undifferentiated psychic state without splitting - a state in which the destructive effects of the Bush Administration might be faced and overcome. Other voters are passionately drawn to McCain - as they were to Bush before him - because he represents their continuing need the world as split and make sure the bad guys will fight over there so they don't come here. In this scenario the bad remains outside and the good stays inside. To those voters, Obama's willingness to take a different approach, i.e. to use diplomacy, threatens their split world-view and is attacked by splitters as capitulating and defeatist.. Mixing anything bad with the good is terrifying to such voters.
There is an obvious split that Obama's candidacy itself evokes, and is something that the McCain candidacy might exploit - something it can accomplish without much effort: the simple split between white and black. Some voters drawn to splitting for their own internal reasons may refuse ever to vote for an African-American for President, keeping the racial divide as large as possible. The tapes of Reverend Wright encourage splitting and fear, as well as getting voters to forget that Obama is also half-white. Healing of racial unrest continues, but even genuine reparation does not mean that splits become dissolved or irrelevant.
Obama poses another threat to reparation - mainly to supporters of Israel: one New York shop, for example, sells T-shirts that say "Obama equals Hitler". Obama's middle name not only evokes frightening images in some voters of a Muslim President, it also links - especially for Jewish voters - to the many African-Americans who have adopted Muslim names. How dangerous is it for voters already drawn to splitting to think of having a black and Muslim president? Republicans salivate at the prospect of keeping these primitive fears in front of voters.
Part 2 of Splitting and Reparation will be next.
Questions: To the psychoanalyst part of me, splitting is necessary for self-protection, while repair of deep splits is necessary for emotional growth to occur.
What do you notice in yourselves when trying to repair splits?
Do reparative efforts make you feel weak or less safe?
What other reactions do you have to struggles between splitting and repairing?
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Every once in so often someone comes along and gives us a new clear eyed perspective. Justin, you just did that for me. Since reading this the other day I have been seeing this in everything. Splitting vs Reparation. I had never seen before how the twin/obverse goals are so well embodied in social movements. Now I do.
I have been thinking that authoritarian personality types make up a mere 30 per cent of the population, but if they are the root/leadership of the splitter groups, maybe it's a larger group. Or perhaps I am just not seeing this clearly enough yet.
Again, brilliant. Question: can splitting also be healthy? With Obama born of a white-black split, isn't he able to understand the split in others more readily?> Could this be an advantage for him?
Norm
Just brilliant.
This analysis could particularly well apply to the Ronald Reagan - craze following the Viet-Nam War. I have often thought that the US 's basic problem was that it was mostly unable to accept that, yes, it too does terrible things like make wars that kill kill and ruin millions of people all for nothing real. So Reagan comes along and calls the Viet-Nam War a "noble war" and McCain even at this day continues to use Reagan's convenient phrase, and the situation is so bad that if you bring up the fact that McCain wrongly killed and destroyed uncounted numbers of people flying around the skies of the north dropping bombs from his little plane, you are considered to be in bad taste or told you should be ashamed of yourself for saying it.
Marianne Williamson notes in her book on healing America's soul has it that the three biggest unfaced crimes of the country have been against the Native Americans, the Blacks and the Viet-Namese although there is so much more that we have done which we have not faced.
One final thought: It has often seemed to me that the "pathology" you desribe here is perfectly exemplified by Bill O'Reilly and many of the other right-wing talk show hosts.
It is a great post.
In reading yours the end made3 me think about Keith Olbermann as the opposite side of that. Splitting is cultural, political, personal, spiritual etc.
Look at the split between Far right Evangelicals/born again and say mainline Protestants, or Catholics and Atheists for that matter.
Olbermann and O'Reilly show a graphic example. Olbermann set himself up to be the opposite of O'Reilly and has succeeded but in the process has become somewhat one dimensional and the other side of the O'Reilly coin.
Between them it is like a cartoon akin to Bugs and Elmer, or Road Runner and Wily Coyote (is that right, been awhile!)
just my opinion.
We have been conditioned in this country to think more in terms of black and white and less about right and wrong. Black and white are distinctive; right and wrong is debatable. The less courageous find solace in black and white. The bully finds power in black and white. Splitters who find comfort in the rhetoric and actions of a George Bush are seeking comfort in their perception of good. In doing so, it does not require an internal debate about right and wrong, producing inner conflict. Let's keep it simple.
Yes, no shades of gray. I've noticed that more and more in our country. Sometimes it seems like we are going backward past the upheaval of the 60/s & '70's.
People need a bad guy. You see it in all areas.
"A country divided against itself cannot stand ... for anything, or against anything."
If the "Karl Rove Principle" could be summed-up in one sentence, that would be it.
As I see it, though, our real problem is that no genuinely-different candidate has actually emerged. Neither the Republicrats nor the Demoblicans will actually offer one, because they are cut from the same cloth. The powers that back both, and that have presented us with both, don't care who we vote for (or even if we vote) as long as the person-elected is either one of these two. AND, as long as the country remains viciously "divided against itself."
Anyone with an Internet connection can do as much on-line discovery about any of these United States Senators as they wish: the library-of-congress web site is http://tho
Our basic problem is that these people are OLD, and they have spent their entire lives in politics and in Congress. If there's a lobbyist in town, they know him by name and probably knew his grandfather. This is not leadership. This cannot be our nation's future.
hmmm,
it sounds like you are on the other side of the split.
Old vs. Young. (ageism)
Lobbyists = all bad. There are thousands and thousands represented by lobbyists, not all of them are corporate. some are environmental for instance.
That doesn't mean I like the idea and I'd like to see it outlawed but in the meantime I think its important to make a differentiation that not all lobbyists serve corporate interests.
And not ALL politicians are bad. There are some in Washington and in state politics as well that really are attempting to serve. Unfortunately there are also many obstructionists.
I did a lot of research on this election (Dem's only, I admit to partisanship) but I went past what was on the congressional website and looked into their lives, as far back as I could follow them to make a decision on who I believed was the most authentically wanting to serve people... apart from the hype, smears, narratives created by friends and enemies alike.
It was informative and enlightening.
And vey surprising.
And I would love to see a third party.
part 2 I f we take an honest look at these fears of black boogie men coming to get us, we will find
that they are unfounded beliefs. To my knowledge there has never been a time in history where Black America has stood together as a seperate nation of it's own , and declared war against White America.
It's the white americans that have always had their hands on some sort of weapon to use as so called protection, from whips, to guns, to electric tasers. At the same time passing laws, and authoring notions that forbid blacks to do the same. A white man with a gun is a hunter, but a black man with a gun is a menace to society. The failure to properly deal with these types of double standards are at the core of the fear that Americans now feel after 9/11/01. It showed that the boogeyman they had been crucifying for decades in their religious beliefs, in their police departments, in their privacy of their homes, did not really exist. That boogey man that you hung from a tree was a human being who was loved by an Awesome God. Those kids you locked up for 30years for a substance where loved by that same God and so are their families. The Chickens are truely roosting in our lifetime.
This splitting you refer to can be traced all the way through American history. The classification of Africans as three fifths humans is one prime example. If I could ever depend on people to be truthful I would love to conduct a survey to see just how many people still mistake this false analogy as truth.
This campaign has been a peep into the soul of America, and some very disturbing things have been discovered. For Instance, look at the amount of Clinton supporters who say they are going to vote for Mcain as opposed to Obama. These people use every excuse in the book as to why they would do this, but honestly none of the excuses hold any water. If you throw in the fact that Hillary Clinton herself
has accepted her defeat and supports Obama, it really leaves them looking like what they are. The business owners, the well monied people of renown who have made life miserable for countless numbers of African Americans here in this land. Those who would deny a well qualified black person a job or opportunity only because they subscribe to this notion of us v.s them. Even though it has been african americans that have fought and died along with whites in every major conflict America has had.
"This splitting you refer to can be traced all the way through American history."
This splitting has been throughout human history.
Even in Africa one group of Africans sold the other "lesser" group to the slave traders. My brother recently told me a story he had read about a group of people who had not had contact with the outside world. It was somewhere in Northern Europe I believe, and even in this isolated place there was a hierarchy of the dominant and subservient. One group just pretty much told the other group what to do, the other group did it.
It seems we are bifurcated internally and externally.
Fascinating. 2007-2008, the years the non-splitters found their voice. Why were they inarticulate all these decades? Why did they cede everything? Over to you, Justin Frank.
I believe because people functioning at a lower level (i.e. splitters) have more anger at their disposal to bully others. They are also more fanatical in their beliefs. Just the other day, Obama noted people are "mixed" bags, which suggests to me he is a more "developed" person than, say, GWB.
Our society, much less world, desperately needs to learn how to repair splits and relate to others as real human beings. Obama is our best hope in this area. But, in a dangerous world, the question remains, do we need a leader who can "out-sociopath" the other sociopathic leaders? I vote for reconciliation, but not reconciliation with denial of the real dangers out there.
So, Splitters of the World, Unite.
For some in America the dangers have been there all the time.
The Guantanamo camp and the Boumedienne decision are an excellent case in point regarding my own "splitting" on the issue of national security. The seductiveness of McCain's argument, that it's a terrible decision which will release terrorists to hit us again (to cause us to "lose a city" in Newt Gingrich's language) can sound completely reasonable if one simply buys into the argument that many, many cases of mistaken incarceration are okay if it means we are safer. This is the strong, "realistic" view. The humane side of my thinking tells me that if someone like Thomas White, former Secty of the Army, says that at least 300 of those originally incarcerated there should never have been detained in the first place, then we are not only subjecting human beings to terrible injustice, but are probably exacerbating the anti-American feeling that is partly the cause of terrorist blowback. "Healing of the split," I guess, is to achieve something beyond Bush, a realistic approach which guarantees justice to the unfairly detained while setting up a Constitutional system for trials of the authentically dangerous.
And then some of us support him because he is the last best hope for prosecuting the criminals in the Bush administration who violated the Constitution, put us all at greater risk, put our soldiers in harm's way in starting a war for PERSONAL profit against a country that DID NOT attack us (Iraq) and protects, even coddles, the country that DID attack us (Saudi Arabia).
It's that simple.
Bush is a criminal. Obama is a Constitutional scholar.
Do the math.
Obama has said he would investigate but he obviously didn't want to tie up his administration, first term with what would be seen as partisan attacks.
He has not supported censure or impeaqchment so I'm not sure if he will go after them and hold them accountable.
If he wants to work on bipartisan
I for one am not sure they wouldn't do that anyway.
Don't forget Bill Clinton came in wanting to work with consensus. that worked out well.
I'm reading a very good book called "The Paradox of American Democracy" by John Judis, he writes for The Nation. Right now I'm reading the chapters on the Clinton years.
Very eye opening. When Hillary said Vast Right Wing Conspiracy she was not kidding... aside from PNAC which has given us proof enough, throughout his whole time in office there was a group, headed by Grover Norquist called the Wednesday Group. It consisted of many republican operatives and politicians as well as people in business, publishing, from the Rush Limbaugh show, lobbyists and many others. About 50 right wingers more or less that met every Wednesday morning for coffee and bagels and plan strategy on how to bring Clinton down.
Partisan isn't the issue.
CRIMINAL and UNCONSTITUTIONAL are.
If I committed treason like Bush Co. and their Saudi business partners, I'd be in GitMo or Pelican Bay.
The GOP deserves the same fate as the Nazi party at this point:
forced dissolution.
I will do what I can to see it happen.
Great analyis of Obama. "Pre-healed split," as bi-racial child. Half-Jews also straddle two different cultures. Just yesterday, Obama called for Black fathers to step up to the plate; could be, as you say, his way of---const
I think the greatest damage done to this country in the last 20 years is the relentless and daily vilification of liberals and liberalism by Right Wing radio and other pundits. These "splitters" have done everyhing in their power to advance the proposition, Consevative good, Liberal bad. I truly believe theirs has been a propaganda campaign the equal of Hitler's verbal attacks aga Jews and Communists in the 1930's ( without the same consequences, yet).
It is a big challenge for me and many Americans to see the Radical Muslims as "whole" people, real human beings. Particularly, those who have been personally affected by yet another outrageous act of terror. I don't know if it is possible to repair the damage under those circumstances. The biggest challenge we face may very well be how we relate to people---Radical Muslims---who seemed to be filled with unneutralized rage and hatred.
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