College instructors may receive a free copy of this extraordinary book for use in teaching & research. Simply respond to this email or write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com saying you will ask your library to order Developmental Time, Cultural Space (provide your name and the name of your college or university when you respond). We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book that is identical to the hard copy, including the front & back cover. Pages:   262 pages Publisher:   Library of Social Science Author:   Howard F. Stein Date of Publication:   May 14, 2013 List Price Paperback:   $39.99 ISBN-13:    978-0915042050 List Price Hardbound:   $49.95 ISBN-13:   978-0-915042067 “Truly remarkable—an enduring contribution.”   —Prof. John Connor, California State University, Sacramento “Howard Stein has one of the finest minds engaged in the study of culture in our time. He has the capacity to see straight through to the meaning of things, and to understand it and express it with precision—a quality people used to refer to as genius. This wide ranging book is a feast.”   —Howard S. Schwartz, Oakland University, author of Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay “Howard Stein is one of the world’s most original thinkers in the human sciences.”   —Robert Endleman, Ph.D., author of Psyche and Society About the Author: Howard F. Stein is Professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. He is the author of 26 books and over 250 published papers and chapters.

Excitement is building for Howard Stein’s Developmental Time, Cultural Space, with orders and requests pouring in from throughout the world.

Stein's concept of psychogeography sets a new path for social theory—showing how the body is the source of cognition and ideology.

In this copy of the Library of Social Science Newsletter, we present an essay by Richard Koenigsberg discussing the implications of Stein’s idea.

We want you to be with us on the ground floor as this concept grows, develops and flourishes.

To receive your personal copy of this ground-breaking book, simply respond to this email or write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com indicating that you will request that your library order a copy.

We will be pleased to send you the complete electronic version of the book—that is identical to the physical version.

Best regards,

Orion Anderson

Orion Anderson
Managing Editor | Library of Social Science
Telephone: (718) 393-1104
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oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com

The Nation as a Gigantic Body

Sigmund Freud (1930): “Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego feeling, therefore, is only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive, indeed all-embracing feeling which corresponds to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.” Rudolf Hess: “Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler.”

Nationalism is the expansion of the ego to create a gigantic, omnipotent self: “O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.” Identification with the nation: We all do it (there’s nothing to it). We equate our own ego with the entire country, thus conferring upon ourselves an “omnipotent ego, a colossal body.”(Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985).

We call nations “bodies politic” because they symbolize our own body—inflated to constitute a gigantic, omnipotent vessel for the self. We become these bodies, escaping our small, vulnerable body to unite with one that seems invulnerable and immortal (“the individual may die, but the nation must live”).

We bind our selves to our country— experiencing national events as if what is happening “inside the country” is going on inside our selves. In spite of John Lennon’s suggestion, we find it nearly impossible to “imagine there’s no country.” We believe that we are that other body.

Our nation surrounds and comforts us. We equate ourselves with the life of this entity that seems greater and more significant than our own life. Separation seems inconceivable.

Nations as Immortal Bodies

In “Revolution from the Right: Fascism” (1986), Roger Griffin writes about the “myth of the nation as an organic entity,” providing an example from the Italian Nationalist Association (which merged with the Fascists in 1923):

The fundamental thesis of Nationalism is that various societies existing on the earth are true organisms endowed with a life which far transcends that of individuals and which is sustained for centuries and millennia.

The Italian nation does not only contain the 36 million Italians alive now, but all the hundreds of millions of Italians who will live in future centuries, and who are conceived as components of a single whole. Each generation and every individual is but a transient and infinitesimal part of the nation, the cell of the national organism. Just as cells are born, live and die, while the organism remains the same, so individuals are born, live and die while the nation continues to live out its millennial existence.

Nations are conceived as if immortal bodies that will “live on.” Each citizen is imagined as a cell of this eternal body. As our nation lives on, so do we. We escape our mortal bodies by identifying with a body politic that might live forever. One’s nation is a double of the self: an alternative body which, unlike one’s own, seems not to be subject to death and decay.

The Nation as a Container

According to Mark Johnson (The Body in the Mind, 1990): “Of all our kinesthetic experiences, the container is perhaps the most basic, giving rise to a bounded inner space that is differentiated from what is outside. This distinction comes to shape the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’.”

Our bodies are containers, and so are nations. We are contained within our own body and imagine that we are contained within our country. Our own nation—and its citizens—are conceived as “me;” everything and everyone else is considered “not me.”

For some, the survival of this larger body—with which one identifies and in which one is contained—is considered more significant than the survival of one’s own body. Hitler famously declared: “You are nothing, your nation is everything.”

Hitler waged war as a “life and death struggle” to save Germany. Believing that Jewish-Bolshevik bacteria were creeping into the nation, he was preoccupied with “protecting Germany’s rear” against the possibility of attack from Russia (Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology, 1975). Nazism revolved around the struggle to destroy pathogenic bacteria that had infiltrated the body politic—or that threatened to do so. Hitler waged war against the source of the nation’s disease. The “disease within the body of the people” was Hitler’s disease.

Do Nations Possess an Immune System?

In “Toward an Anthropology of Immunity: The Body as Nation State” (1990), Emily Martin observes that physicians usually explain the immune system by describing the body’s reaction to pathogenic microorganisms as analogous to an “imperiled nation continuously at war to quell alien invaders.” Bodies are depicted—like nations—as having “sharply defined borders in space, which are constantly besieged and threatened.”

Martin suggests that when physicians describe the immune system, they are borrowing from cultural discourse—using the language of warfare to explain the immune system. Like a nation at war, the body is depicted as seeking out and destroying enemies identified as alien or foreign or nonself.

Instead of saying that we use the language of warfare to describe the immune system, wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to suggest that the discourse of warfare grows out of our conception of nations as actual bodies that have borders—and which seek to repel human being identified as alien or foreign or notself.

The Dream of National Unity

The central fantasy governing the life of countries is the dream of national unity: desire or hope that citizens will come together to form a single body. The fundamental idea of totalitarianism, according to Claude Lefort (1986), is that of “the people as one:” the nation as a single body within which each of its citizens unites with each and every other citizen. The Beatles: “I am the Walrus”: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”

“What is at stake,” Lefort says, is always the “integrity of the body—averting the threat of intrusion by alien elements.” The campaign against the enemy is feverish. “Fever is good, it is a signal within society that there is some evil to combat.” Nations come alive when an enemy looms.

The body politic heats up to repel the invader or to destroy “enemies within.” One may describe this national reaction as inflammation, or hysteria, or paranoia. In any case, the body is energized: excitement builds as the country mobilizes to destroy its enemies.