| Recent U.S. "policy" on immigration...is based on a fantasy of the nation as a real body that can be "invaded." Believing in this fantasy so deeply, we lack the imagination to recognized that we are immersed--living within--a fantasy. Dreaming the same dream, the bizarre fantasy (that the nation is an actual body) becomes normality; the essence of "reality." Dreaming a dream together. WAKE UP. |
Psychoanalysis of Racism,
Revolution and Nationalism
is now available as an eBook, identical to the best-selling paperback ($24.95) and hardbound ($34.95). CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION ON ORDERING. |
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Nationalism relocates one's self and body into a larger entity—the body politic.
"Because territory is imagined in corporeal terms, the state seeks to secure its borders—its orifices and entry points—from infiltration and penetration (Mark Neocleous)."
Like human bodies, nations are imagined to have boundaries delineating self from not self, defending against alien entities seeking to penetrate and contaminate the body politic.
Immigrants may be conceived or experienced as invaders—creeping through porous boundaries—threatening to destroy a vulnerable self. National policy grows out of a psychosomatic fantasy.
The self's struggle is projected into the world. The personal becomes the political. Reality becomes the place in which a fantasy is enacted. National life becomes a collective dream, or nightmare.
Immigrants experienced as if foreign bodies within one's own body elicit hysteria or paranoia, a collective national response.
Boundaries must be firmed up—a wall erected to protect the vulnerable self: to defend against sexual assault and eliminate the danger of parasitic entities entering the national body, draining its resources, consuming its substance. |