It all begins with a phantasy externalized into reality. The leader articulates the fantasy, allowing it to be shared by members of a society. This fantasy transforms into a political ideology, which becomes the foundation for political action. If you don't know the fantasy that gives rise to the sound and fury, then your "history books" are in vain!

___________________________________________________________________________

In the first pages of Mein Kampf, Hitler declared that Austria must "return to the great German Motherland." The separation of Austria and Germany, he said, "does not seem conceivable." The desire for political re-unification was the “elemental cry of the German-Austrian people for union with the German mother country." 
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture

CLICK HERE FOR ORDERING INFORMATION.

Symbiosis and Separation lays the foundation for a psychoanalytic theory of politics by showing how objects in the external world symbolize infantile objects and fantasies. Fantasies of omnipotence are replaced by the dream of being bound in a symbiotic tie to one nation. 

Koenigsberg develops a psychoanalytic theory of nationalism. Separation from the mother is experienced as mutilation of one’s body—the loss of self. One binds to one’s country to recover a part of the body experienced as lost. Nationalism seeks restoration of bodily wholeness (“Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler”). The body politic symbolizes the dual-unity of self and Other contained within a single object. Koenigsberg illuminates our ambivalent attachment to cultural objects, which simultaneously enhance and diminish the self.

Table of Contents

1. The Dual Nature of the Human Ego
2. The Conversation Process as a Response to Separation
3. The Denial of Separateness
4. Internalization
5. The Struggle for Separateness
6. The Fantasy of Merger as a Source of Anxiety
7. Conflict and Ambivalence Surrounding Separation-Individuation
8. The Transitional Object and the Struggle to Separate
9. Culture as a Transitional Object
10. The Bodily Roots of the Symbol
11. The Bodily Roots of Culture
12. Repression

Reviews

I have read Symbiosis and Separation with great interest and have found it to offer a very thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the interplay of unconscious phantasy and cultural phenomena.—Thomas Ogden, M.D., author of The Matrix of the Mind

I read Symbiosis and Separation with a good deal of excitement. Much of my clinical work confirms his insights and theories. His findings have much in common with my own, but he carries them very creatively into the social science field. I was very impressed by this fascinating book.—Frances Tustin, author of Autism and Childhood Psychosis

Richard Koenigsberg