The Bliss of Completion

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATION OF WAR

Richard Koenigsberg/Franco Fornari

Psychoanalyst Franco Fornari states that warfare is an institution whereby “death assumes absolute value.” Ideas for which we die have a right to truth because “death becomes a “demonstration process.” Fornari discusses the “mysterious epistemology of war” based on the postulate that “what we die for is true.” If people die in a war, there must be some thing for which they are dying.
The “thing” one dies for holds the group together. Warfare turns nothing into something by virtue of death. The “thing” for which people give their lives in the modern world is the nation. Nations come into being by virtue of the violent deaths of soldiers and civilians.
War as a sacrificial duty, performing destructive functions, has the significance of destruction put into the service of what we love. Warfare revolves around idealization of the leader, the need to sacrifice oneself in the name of an ideal, and the soldier receiving martyrdom—facing death.
By becoming soldiers, men agree to die when their nation asks them to do so. The leader directs the process. But the leader’s significance is based on the fact that he represents the idealized object, the nation.
Nazism was rooted in the symbolic equation, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Germans did not die for Hitler, that is, they died for Hitler only because he was understood to embody the German nation. In the domain of warfare, no one dies for human beings. It is because a leader represents his nation that people are willing to sacrifice their lives.

Fornari asks: “What lies at the heart of the peculiar tendency of man to create certain values to which he feels he must sacrifice himself?” And: “What is the absolute and unconditional something that justifies the establishment of a masochistic sacrificial position?” The masochistic sacrificial position becomes a “supervalue.”
The masochistic-sacrificial position creates the supervalue. Millions of people throughout history have submitted to imaginary entities that became “real” only to the extent that human beings gave their lives for these entities. Violent or sacrificial death became the source of reality.
The enemy is experienced as a “force that destroys our love object.” One’s beloved nation and the enemy of one’s nation constitute a duality. Like “Love and Marriage” (the song by Frank Sinatra), you can’t have one without the other. The love object, one’s nation, comes into being in relationship to an enemy. The creation of enemies gives rise to the nation.
People believe that for a nation to exist and persist—its enemies must be killed. What are enemies? They symbolize a force acting to destroy one’s love object, one’s nation. This force of destruction is mysterious. It becomes real when projected into a concrete object: an enemy.
For Hitler, Jews were imagined as a class of people who—by their very nature—worked toward the destruction of Germany. In actuality, Jews were not hostile to Germany. They would happily have joined Hitler’s movement had they been permitted to do so.
However, Hitler believed Jews were a people incapable of attaching to Germany—or any other state. They were “free-floating:” people at home anywhere and everywhere; incapable of fusing with Germany or any other nation. They symbolized the idea of a people separate and separated from nation-states; unwilling or incapable of fusing with a nation.
Symbolizing the will to separate from the nation-state, Jews spoiled Hitler’s fantasy of a unified nation absolutely devoted to Germany. Jews were conceived as selfish individualists, incapable of abandoning individuality to join a national community.
Historians state that the purpose of the Final Solution was to exclude Jews from the German body politic. In my view, however, the Final Solution had the purpose of compelling Jews to join the German body politic. The Holocaust expressed Germany’s refusal to allow Jews to separate; go their own way.
Jews were transported from everywhere in Europe and the Soviet Union into death camps, thus bringing them back into the fold: the fatal embrace of the German mother-country. Bodies were massed together and crushed in the gas-chambers, thus creating a grotesque form of “oneness.” Fusion unto death.
Then, Jews were incarcerated in ovens. One SS-man explained to a Jew—entering a death camp—what was going to happen to him. The SS-man looked up to the top of the building—drawing the prisoner’s attention to the smoke coming out of the smoke-stack—and explained to the prisoner: “You will go out the chimney.” The bodies of Jews were turned to smoke; becoming air.
“Death to the non-believer” is an Islamic phrase meaning death to those who do not believe in—lack faith—in Allah. To maintain faith, disbelief must be eliminated. The phrase, “Death to the non-believer” applies identically in the Nazi case. Jews were conceived as non-believers; incapable of worshipping Germany. Jews were a people who did not—could not—believe in Germany. Jews symbolized lack of faith. Death to the non-believer.
Fornari states that in warfare, the instinct of self-preservation does not function on the individual level, but rather on the level of the “collective love object.” Men are willing to die for their country; to give up their lives for the sake of the object they worship, one’s nation.
While it is not possible to point to a particular object and say, “This is the nation,” still we think of nations as concrete, substantial entities. In actuality, the term “nation” refers to an abstract idea. Which leads to the fundamental question: “What is the meaning of this abstract idea, a nation?” Why does the idea of the nation attract allegiance and gain power over the hearts and minds of human beings.
The “potlatch” was a festival ceremony practiced by the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. The word means “to give away” or “a gift.” The potlatch served for aspiring nobles to validate their status positions through lavish distribution and ostentatious destruction of resources and property. Giving things away was a source of prestige. Loss as gain.
Fornari theorizes warfare as the “voluntary destruction of previously accumulated reserves of human capital” performed with the intention to “sacrifice a certain number of lives.” Comparing war to potlatch, he describes this institution as a series of acts of “ostentatious destruction” whose aim is to intimidate the rival and, ultimately, “give prestige to the donor.” A nation gains prestige based on its willingness to give away its most precious gift: the bodies of its citizens.
The First World War, 1914-1918, was a war in which soldiers of France, Great Britain, Germany and other nations—got out of trenches and ran toward an opposing trench---where they were gunned down by machine-gun fire or blown to smithereens by artillery shells. This bizarre “strategy” persisted for the entirety of the war.
Fighting in the First World War, Coningsby Dawson, infantryman and author of two books published in 1917, stated that in the “noble indignation of a great ideal,” British soldiers faced a hell that “even the most ingenious of fanatics ever planned or plotted.” Men died “scorched like moths in a furnace, blown to atoms, gassed, tortured.” And again other men stepped forward to take their places “well-knowing what will be their fate.”
Dawson concludes: “Bodies may die but the spirit of England grows greater as each soldier speeds along the way.” How extraordinary to claim that the spirit of England grew in direct proportion to the number of British soldiers that died in battle. The spirit of England was correlated with the deaths of young men. The First World War was a case of “potlatch;” “giving away.” The lives of young men were “gifted” to nation-states.
Fornari links the death of the soldier to the establishment of truth, a relationship growing out of the feeling that surely if people give their lives for an idea, there must be something to it. It’s difficult to conceive that human beings die for ideas possessing no validity. Dead and mangled bodies on the field of battle imply the existence of some “thing” in the name of which the frenzied dying and killing occurred. The carnage of the battlefield testifies to the reality of this “thing.”
Throughout history, warfare has constituted a foundation of human societies. Warfare is a ritual that has established itself as a cultural form in diverse societies. Yet people don’t ordinarily think of war as a ritual. It has been conceived as a “rational” institution whose purpose is to achieve specific objectives. Warfare is imagined as necessary for “self-defense,” waged to obtain territory or for economic gain, or undertaken simply for the sake of “conquest.” We rarely think of warfare as a religious institution.
In terms of a theory of warfare encompassing diverse wars—historians don’t go there, shying away from developing a general theory. They are trained to focus on each war as discrete events with unique causes and courses of action.
It is possible, however, to develop a theory of warfare much as Darwin developed a theory of evolution by natural selection; one explaining a wide range of cases. Each species evolves in a unique way. Yet according to the theory of evolution by natural selection, there is a fundamental principle governing the process. I propose a “Law of Sacrifice.”
Studying 20^th century warfare, one simultaneously is studying nationalism. Nations and war go together like a horse and carriage. The relationship between nationalism and war is deeply embedded in society and within our psyches.
John Lennon composed a song imploring us to “imagine there’s no country,” suggesting that if it were possible to imagine that countries did not exist, it also might be possible to imagine that war does not have to exist: “Nothing to kill and die for.”
Lennon’s idea has merit. Most modern wars were fought in the name of and for the sake of nations. If the idea of “the nation” faded into non-existence, perhaps the idea of waging war would fade into non-existence. I made a slip-of-the-tongue presenting a paper writing, “Dying for the county” instead of “dying for the country.” The beloved county of my birth, Essex County, New Jersey, is substantial. Yet dying for a county has a ring of absurdity. It is only for countries that people die and kill.
This single word makes all the difference. Academics spend extraordinary amounts of energy “deconstructing” each and every idea or concept. But “countries” reign supreme as absolutes. Indeed, we don’t think of nations as ideas or concepts. We understand these words to refer to solid, substantial entities.
Peter Berger wrote about “of course” statements, which refer to ideas that most members of a given society share and agree upon or take for granted. These ideas seem self-evident; part of the natural order of things. They permeate our minds so deeply that we rarely interrogate them. You may insist, “Of course nations exist. Nations are real.” But I doubt you can show me a nation—or explain what a nation actually is.
Saying this, you may experience anger and feel like screaming out to me. “How could the world go on being without nations?” “How dare you suggest that nations do not exist?”
I suffer with the idea that nations might not possess substantial existence. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.