Skya discusses Hozumi Yatsuka’s (1860-1912) concept of godo seizon (literally, fused or amalgamated existence): the merging of individuals who fuse together to create “society.” Kakehi Katsuhiko (1872-1961) stated that individuals had to “totally submerge the self into the collective.”

The concept of symbiosis, currently devalued within the psychoanalytic community, is perhaps the single most significant concept for understanding and interpreting political experience. Symbiosis is not an "infantile phase of development." Rather, the desire or fantasy of symbiosis is the ground of our existence. People seek fusion with society or with the "symbolic order." 

So profound is the tendency toward fusion that we are barely aware of it. We take it for granted that we are fused with our own society. We hardly are aware of our union with culture and the symbolic order (The Matrix approaches this understanding).

Skya observes that according to Japanese ideology, the individual should "enter into the mystical body of the emperor once one’s own individuality is abandoned.” Skya hypothesizes that the goal of Japanese ideology—and many other totalitarian movements—is the “total assimilation of the individual into a collective body.”

Well, this tendency is toward assimilation of the individual into the collective body is present...not only in totalitarianism...but in nearly every society defined by nationalism.

At this very moment, within the next hour, you will seek to fuse with Donald Trump and with stories about the coronavirus. You will "plug into" the mass media, which now is at your fingertips, words or images on your computer.

Indeed, you will not be able to say to decide--as the words and images appear on your computer--if what you are seeing is outside or inside.

If I suggest that you are not obligated to fuse with the words and images emanating from "society," you will feel that I am e renegade; man without a country. How dare I imagine that it is possible to escape from the mother (country?). How dare i contradict Lacan's totalitarian insistence that one is are "no other than the other."

The impulse (to deny the possibility of separation from society) was the basis of Nazism. "The Jew" was imagined by Hitler as a human being who refused to fuse with German society. Refusal to fuse was conceived as criminality, punishable by death.

The image below--produced by Western civilization--conveys an idea that is not unique to the West. In Japan too, sovereignty was defined in terms of the fantasy that many bodies come together to merge or fuse with the body of the sovereign (or Emperor)—to create one mystical body, society or the nation.

Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan.